Is Text Messaging Contributing To Teenage Sleep Deprivation?
Posted: Friday, May 18, 2007
by Tracy Tresidder
Coaching 4 Teenagers
Most kids go to sleep with their phone plugged in right by their heads. Every ping of an incoming message is a temptation to pick up the phone. They know talking on the phone might wake up their parents, but if they text, it probably won't.
Teens are famously sleep-deprived already, but experts say some are compounding the problem by staying up into the middle of the night to silently type messages to friends on their mobile phones. Teens need on average 9 hours sleep per night, but often only manage 7.5 hours. This leaves them with a sleep debt resulting in poor performance, moodiness and irritability.
With changing biorhythms, teens do naturally stay up later -- but not that late . In addition to needing more sleep, teens experience a "phase shift" during puberty, falling asleep later at night than do younger children. The brain's circadian timing system-- controlled mainly by melatonin--switches on later at night as pubertal development progresses. Later on, in middle-age, the clock appears to shift back, making it hard for parents to stay awake just when their teens are at their most alert.
Like surfing the Internet or watching TV, text- messaging tends to energise teens rather than help them fall asleep .Nearly a quarter of teens in a relationship have communicated with a boyfriend or girlfriend hourly between midnight and 5 a.m. via mobile phone or texting. It is during these hours that new brain cells and neural connections or "wires" which connect the right and left sides of the brain and are critical to intelligence, self-awareness and performance, grow like branches on a tree. Daytime stimulation, in the form of school and social interaction, gets "hard-wired" into the adolescent brain during the latter stages of sleep, including REM sleep.
Cut these sleep stages short and performance suffers the next day. If you want to learn really well and to be really efficient in your learning, the best way to do it is to get a good night's sleep. Get the mobile phones and TV's out of their rooms, turn off the computer and encourage some light reading in bed before going to sleep.
What to do with too much texting
1.Keep phones out of bedrooms. Make an agreement that the phone stays on a charger in the kitchen or away from the bedrooms
2.Turn it off. Switch it off half an hour before bedtime. Putting it on silent is not good enough.
3.Check the bill for late night calls - if they have broken the agreement about not using the phone once they are in bed then the consequence should be to confiscate it for a day or two
4.Enlist other parents - Polite society used to frown on phone calls after 9 p.m. Network with other parents of teens to agree on community standards.
5.Stop rescuing - if you're still getting your kids up in the morning, give up that job. It's time they took on that responsibility and managed the consequences of being late if they don't get up in time. Parents should be clear that a parental ride or excuse note is not an option. We parents need to stop protecting kids from the natural results of their actions.
Your action steps for this month
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Top-level comments on this article: (6 total)Good ideas. It used to be you only had to worry if your child was watching TV in the night. How things have changed.
Tracy, Excellent article!. The days of passing letters in class are over. Our youth are fascinated with electronic gagetry. Without a doubt, it needs to be monitored. We need to manage our hard-wired youth because the consequences affect their sympathetic nervous system including the issue of sleep. Thanks for reinforcing the downside of this technological shift.Thanks James, yes I agree - our teenagers are sleep deprived. Technology is a wonderful thing but it is also taking away from important face to face social time. Keep a look out for my next article on MySpace and MSN. Cheers Tracy
Every parent needs to read this. It's easy to assume all's well when the lights go out.
Great article, We so often assume tht when all is quiet in the bedroom they are sleeping peacefully! We now have an agreement in place about leaving the phones in the kitchen when they go to bed. They seem to be in a much better mood in the morning! Obviously getting better uninterrupted sleep. Thank you.
Thats sounds nice. I'm just going to mention that I've received late night calls that were very important. Suicide attempt important. I may have saves someones life because I was able to talk to them. Being able to call my friends when I am really upset helps me as well. I used to feel entirely alone in my grief, now I can have support at the touch of a button!
hey, i get myself up everyday without my mom or stepdad having to yank me out of bed, and yet my phone is still charged in my mothers room. give us a break, if we are late to school then we have to deal with the problem and its consequences. some of us actually understand the situatuation just as well as the adults.
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