Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine talks about the problem of teens not getting enough sleep….

As a pediatrician, I find that there are few topics that parents want to discuss more than sleep. Parents worry about their own sleep deprivation when babies arrive. Later, they worry about their children’s. I almost never encounter patients who are convinced that they’re getting the recommended amount of sleep.

But serious sleep deprivation in adults is most likely rarer than many think it is. After all, people in controlled studies of sleep deprivation are usually getting very, very little sleep. Complicating things, not all people react to sleep deprivation in the same way. Some people just need less sleep, and that may be somewhat genetic. Many news reports that highlight the dangers from too little sleep are assuming that all adults need at least 8 hours. There’s just little evidence that’s so.

There’s one group where that may not be true however. Younger people need more sleep than adults. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute recommends that newborn babies get 16-18 hours of sleep a day. It’s likely that many of them get that, because we let them. As I tell parents all the time, only a fool wakes a sleeping baby. The usual recommendation for preschool children is 11 to 12 hours, school-age children 10 hours and teenagers 9 to 10 hours a night.

It’s likely few teenagers are sleeping that much.

The most obvious reason for that is that the high school day generally starts so early. Next year, when my oldest heads to 9th grade, his bus will come for him around 6:45 a.m. To get 9 hours of sleep, he will have to be asleep by 9:15. Going to bed early doesn’t seem to bother Jacob much, so I imagine he might just do that; most teenagers can’t though.

Many of them are engaged in activities after school. They eat dinner late, so that they can be with their parents, who probably work late. They also need time to get their homework done, let alone to have any type of social life.

There’s no good reason school has to start this early, and starting it later might improve the amount of sleep teenagers get. A study published in 2014 examined 9,000 students in 8 public schools in 3 states. It found that in high schools where classes began at 7:30 a.m., about a third of children got at least 8 hours of sleep a night. If they started at 8:35 a.m., about 60% of children achieved that goal.

Moreover, the later start time was associated with improvements in a number of subjects, as well as state and national achievement test scores. Attendance increased. Perhaps more important, the number of car crashes by drivers 16 to 18 was reduced by 70% when school start times were changed from 7:35 to 8:55.

It’s for reasons like these that the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement in 2014 calling for a shift in school start times to 8:30 or later. Few school systems, however, have heeded the call.

Many media stories about sleep breathlessly worry that the average American is at grave risk because of sleep deprivation. Even if it were true, that could be improved for many of us by choosing to turn off our devices and shut our eyes just a little bit sooner. Too few stories focus on those who who are really at risk for sleep deprivation, namely teenagers. It’s not their fault. We could fix this problem for them.

nytimeshealth.com

March 28, 2016