If you ever accused the teens around you of not even knowing what time it was, you now have science to back you up:
The major problem with teenagers and sleep can be boiled down to two things, researchers say: melatonin and school start times.
Melatonin is a hormone that regulates our sleep cycle. Research shows it floods the brain about 7 or 8 p.m. in children, but with the onset of puberty this hormone doesn't show up until 9 or 10 p.m. This means many teenagers are staying up late but are still expected to wake before dawn.
Even worse, studies show traces of melatonin in the adolescent mind up until 8 a.m., said researcher Mary Carskadon.
"If the brain thinks it should be nighttime at 8 a.m. and the child has been in school since 7 a.m., what do you think the brain wants to do?" asked Carskadon, director of a sleep-research lab at Bradley Hospital and a Brown Medical School professor.
Actually, I feel some sympathy for the kids. I just took a week off from work (except for the blogging, of course) and gave myself a treat by sleeping as late as I wanted to every day. The alarm going off yesterday morning was the rudest sound I've heard in a long time. By the end of the week, I suspect I'll be back to my habit of setting the alarm back about 45 minutes, so I can ease into getting up with five or six hits of the snooze button.
Comments
It's the Daylight Saving Time and Eastern Time Zone for a state that ought to be in Central Time, I tell ya. Double fast time! (Yeah, yeah, it's all about DST for me.)
My brain gets flooded with melatonin from reading such "scientific" research. Kids sleep late because they stay up late. They are sleepy at school because they don't get enough sleep the night before. When does melatonin show up? When you have programed your body and brain for it to show up. Yes, puberty brings on changes but the worst changes are in their parents and teachers who just get tired of fighting and give in to them. I worked in Juvenile Boot Camps and saw kids come in with the late night pattern, but structure quickly returned them to pattern of night and day.