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Wake Up, Sleepy Teens! BY TARA ARONSON Copyright 1997 by Parents' Press It's 8 a.m. on Monday morning. Do you know what your teenager is doing? If he's midway through his first period class, chances are your adolescent is sleeping his way through American Literature or Psych 101. "The eyes are open, but the brains are asleep," says Mary Carskadon, director of chronobiology at E.P. Bradley Hospital in Rhode Island and a professor in the psychology and human behavior department at Brown University School of Medicine. "This is not a time of day when teenagers can be reasonably expected to participate in class." Yet many high school bells ring at 7:30 a.m., a time experts say is too early for these night owls. As a result, a good night's sleep is increasingly missing from teenagers' frantic lives, researchers agree. True, mornings have always been a drag for teenagers. Up until 2 or 3 a.m. on weekends, then down like logs until noon or 1 p.m. By the time Monday rolls around, their sleep patterns shift dramatically to meet such early school schedules. When weekday wake-up time rolls around, on average three-and-a half-hours earlier than on weekends, many teens just can't shake the jet lag-like effect in time for first period on Monday. Such erratic sleep patterns have long been considered the result of cultural pressures - you know, it's cool to stay up late chatting with friends or watching the latest episode of "Friends." What teenager ever brags about how early she went to bed? It's biological But now, it is the severity and prevalence of teens' sleep deprivation that is causing a growing concern among researchers, educators and parents. Today, researchers such as Carskadon say the real culprit is a biological tendency toward later waking hours among 13- to 19-year-olds, combined with school and work schedules that are out of sync with teen biological rhythms. "What's different now from, say, five years ago is that at that time, we thought it was entirely psycho-social," Carskadon said. "We've learned in the past couple of years that there's a biological process involved as well." A recent study of 3,120 Rhode Island teenagers conducted by Carskadon and Amy Wolfson, assistant professor of psychology at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., found that 85 percent were chronically sleep-deprived and accumulated a minimum 10-hour sleep deficit during the week. Forty percent went to bed after 11 p.m.; 26 percent said they usually got less than 6.5 hours on school nights. next > how much sleep do teens need?

FPG-iSWOOP PHOTO All rights reserved SLEEP INTERNATIONAL The discussion of adolescent sleep patterns has captured the interest of sleep researchers around the world. Researchers from Rome and Brazil checked in at a 1997 think-tank on adolescent sleep patterns at UCLA. A survey of 6,632 14- to 20-year-olds in Rome found significant changes in sleep patterns as children grew into adolescence. These Italian teens, much like their American counterparts, fell asleep later. Four percent of those excessively tired teens turned to sleeping pills to help them make it through the night. They were also prone to mood swings, traffic accidents, and poor school performance. In Sao Paulo, researcher Miriam Andrade found that the 99 female high school students surveyed (ages 14 to 16) awoke two hours earlier on weekdays than on weekends and that they went to sleep later than the 12 to 13-year-olds similarly surveyed. The greater prevalence of sleep complaints found in the shorter sleepers - whose school day began at 7:1 5 a.m. - "evinces the school day sleep restriction consequences," according to Andrade. Amy Wolfson, assistant professor of psychology at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., says that similar research projects around the world show that teens everywhere seem to have the same night-owl habits. Read a report on the UCLA conference online. (Check out the overview first.)