I realized the teen years had arrived a few weeks ahead of schedule when my running home during lunch hour caused Celeste to complain about being awakened early.
It was barely past the crack of noon. Heavens! What was I thinking?
Judging by her reaction, I halfway expected Child Protective Services would be paying a call, considering my cruel and thoughtless behavior.
Although Celeste doesn’t officially turn 13 until the end of the month–trust me. The teens have arrived.
Household food consumption is up, as is the water bill. Eye rolling has hit a new high, along with exasperated-sounding sighs and grunts that apparently have replaced certain words.
Still, she remains good humored, good natured, and tolerant of her parents, so the metamorphosis is apparently far from complete.
It’s the sleep part I’m finding most fascinating. Especially when I remember the early years as a parent when I would’ve happily traded an appendage or two for a few more hours of sleep.
As I shook her awake one recent morning (after first clearing off the cobwebs and dust), she grumbled, “If I was supposed to pop out of bed, I’d sleep in a toaster.”
Unlike me, a lifelong morning person, my offspring has had night owl tendencies from the start. At 10 p.m., she’s just hitting her stride. At midnight, she shines. For years, she managed a somewhat normal awakening time, albeit with some grumbling, but these days, a life-sized cement sloth would be easier to roust. And likely more chatty.
Recognizing the internet might provide evidence for her need to sleep late, Celeste sent links to a few studies showing the benefits for teens getting more sleep.
The first study, reported on by CBS/AP, showed that delaying a high school’s start time by just 30 minutes enabled students to be prompt, more alert, and in better moods.
According to the article, “Researchers say there’s a reason why even 30 minutes can make a big difference. Teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn–when they typically need to get up for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy, especially since they also tend to have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m.”
A second report, which she found on NPR’s website, provided evidence that teens who sleep later tend to drive safer. While she’s jumping the gun on that argument by three years, the article about the study done by Eastern Virginia Medical School did indicate that the teen car crash rate was a whopping 41 percent higher in Virginia Beach, Va., than in neighboring Chesapeake, where the school day starts 80 minutes later.
The article cited another study, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, that revealed teen car crashes dropped by 16.5 percent after a county-wide school district pushed the school start time back by one hour.
While my daughter’s argument might’ve been intended to do nothing more than quash my nagging, it has me wondering why—if there’s proof that allowing teenagers to sleep later keeps them safer, makes them more tolerable mood wise, and enables them be more open for learning—why aren’t we acting on this information?
Perhaps it isn’t just teenagers who are guilty of being asleep at the wheel.
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Girl, let her sleep. It won’t hurt her. It’s during sleep that her body is doing its thing – repairing itself, growing, recharging. It’s very, very important at her age. Think of her body as a cake baking. Yank her out of her sleep and her body is all jiggly in the middle. Throw out all the parenting books while you’re at it and go with your instincts. Your heading into the rough water now and if she has any sort of mind of her own, she will start using it about now. But that’s what she’s supposed to be doing. It’s natures way of getting her ready for the real world. Don’t fight it too hard.
Schedules are overrated and so is being a morning person. The world runs on a morning schedule but we night owls and young’uns don’t. The world is always attempting to crush us into bending to its morning glory theory of life.
Now the girl needs her sleep. It’s an important time in her development. Soon enough she will be enslaved to the morning world.
Even though my teen years are about 1000 years behind me, I still remember being the last one to bed in our household of 8. I guess I wasn’t a typical teen though because I was always the first one awake in the morning.
Here’s my advice of the day for the parents of teenagers: When renting a cabin for 20 family members for the holidays, never let a teenager sleep on the sofa in the living room. Otherwise when everyone else in the house is awake and having coffee, your teen will still be asleep on the sofa and the rest of the family will be forced to go ahead and sit on the teen’s sleeping body as they sip coffee and discuss the plans for the day.
Funny how now doctors and such are so concerned about how late teenagers should sleep and how much sleep they get. My dad was born in December, 1916. My grandfather and grandmother kept him and his two brothers and two sisters busy with chores and such. No such thing as TV much less a computer to stay up to watch/use. They got up early, did some chores BEFORE they even ate breakfast and went to school and were expected to do well or catch it when they got home. I was born in April, 1951 and not much changed. My two older brothers and I had reasonable chores for the time and TV stations went off after the evening news that started at 11 p.m. Watching that pattern with the “Indian Chief” in the middle of it got boring. And the tone was annoying very quickly.
Maybe rather than let kids sleep later they should have chores to do and pull the plug on the electronics and make life in the evenings boring enough that they get enough sleep on their own.
Who knows, it might just work.
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