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Seven hours of sleep a night is enough for most older teens, research shows.
If your teen’s lack of sleep is keeping you up nights, a new study should help put your mind at ease.
National guidelines recommend at least eight hours of serious snooze time a night for young people. But that’s an unrealistic goal for adolescents, who are overloaded with homework, extracurricular activities and part-time jobs, experts say. Or who feel the need to stay up late texting friends or updating Facebook.
In fact, if standardized test performance is any indication, 16-year-olds score best with about seven hours of sleep a night, surprising new research finds.
Brigham Young University economists Eric Eide and Mark Showalter -- who are also dads -- used a nationally representative sample of 1,724 students, comparing children’s and teens’ standardized test scores with the amount of sleep they reported.
For older teens, seven hours a night was plenty. The optimal amount of sleep for 12-year-olds was higher, about eight hours, while 10-year-olds did best with about nine hours. The report appears in the current issue of the Eastern Economics Journal.
“If your kid’s not getting nine hours of sleep, maybe you don’t have to worry so much,” Showalter says, unless they’re regularly getting significantly less. “Certainly there is good scientific evidence that extreme sleep deprivation or oversleeping has serious health consequences,” he says.
Showalter believes the current recommendations are based on surveys of adolescents in the 1970s. The teens were brought into a lab a few days a year for three years and told to sleep as long as they wanted to. Any parent of a teen knows that how much they want to sleep could be way more than how much they need to sleep.
“We couldn’t find much scientific empirical backing for the common recommendations,” Showalter says, echoing a paper that came out last week in the journal Pediatrics. That report, by Australian researchers, concluded that “no matter how much sleep children are getting, it has always been assumed that they need more.”
What about research suggesting students are more alert in morning classes with later start times?
That might have more to do with how early the teen has to get out bed, Showalter says, rather than the total time spent in bed.
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Kids don't get enough sleep (and neither did their grandparents)
Leave a Comment:
It sounds as if this is yet another 'study' that has found the answers it was searching for.
It sounds as if you don't understand the process, and will complain about any study (especially if they contradict the answers you were searching for).
This is dumb. Correlation doesn't imply causation. I bet the kids that get 7 hours of sleep instead of 8 hours of sleep are the type of kids that study more. Getting less sleep in itself isn't beneficial. I'd be interested in what the results would be if they used hours of study time as a control variable.
Have you read what the common "teens need 9 hours of sleep" is based upon? It's the same correlation between putting enough delicious food on the table to feed a family of four, telling a teen to eat as much as he or she wants, watching that teen eat enough for two-and-a-half adults, then concluding that teens require two-and-a-half times more food than a typical adult. Do you really want to defend that?
This is one step towards a thorough analysis of the subject.
Teens need less sleep. I certainly hope this study does not become the basis for adding another hour onto the homework requirements teens have (or even to justify what is already required). Kids need boundaries on their education day (school time and home time combined). Although most adults work by the clock, we somehow think that children can function without limits on what they have to do. Let's let the kids use this extra hour as they wish. Kenneth Goldberg, Ph.D. www.thehomeworktrap.com.
Most kids in the US only go to school 180 days a year. Way less than most other advanced countries. Only 180 days a year and many parents pull their children out for a week or two to go on vacation duing school. Many miss a week or two of school for sickness. Most teenage girls have figured out that their period is good of at least one or two days a month off of school. Australian go 200 days a year. In China the average school day is from 7:30 am until 5PM. In France school is from 8Am til 4 Pm with a half day on Saturday. In Iran the go to school 200 days a year.
Most Japanese schools run on a trimester schedule. The academic year begins in April and ends the following March, with breaks for summer, winter and spring separating the three terms. Uniforms are required and there are extensive rules for hair styles, shoes, socks, skirt length, make-up, accessories, and more.
I agree with Dr Kengoldberg! Too much homework is a nightmare for child and parent alike! Also, to devilson, other countries that you've mentioned don't give much homework, if any. I am appalled that it is common practice for teachers here to assign massive amounts of homework on holiday breaks! Kids never get a chance to actually be kids anymore!
I spend hours a day doing homework on top of going to school. It gets depressing haha
Just wait until you graduate college and need to work retail.
Devil's Son,
You must live in a state that has a lot of money to give to schools. Here in Ohio, we are having trouble with maintaining a standard day due to budget cuts. As of now, we are voting to cut the school day by 30 minutes to make up a 9 million dollar problem and it is not all the schools fault.
As far as homework, I would not have a problem if at times so much of it was busy work. In many cases our education is not adapting to how technology changes what we need and the way we need to study. Our curriculm at times is out of touch and needs to be addressed on state levels.
After a long day, parents cannot wait to have down time, why do we as a society not understand that so do kids. Parents have gotten themselves in the trap of having to work so many hours after they have put in a full days work. Is that the message we want to teach our kids. All homes and relationships need balance.
So forget the studies of actual medical folks who study sleep for a living, let's take the word of two economists, they obviously know best. Another example of the contempt of America for science and scientists.
This sort of thing is old news:
Constantly questioning what was previously known to be true is integral to science.
Sorry to burst your anti-anti-science bubble.
boom! reason: That's well and good, except, in the article you link to, they are talking about adults, not teenagers, which are the subject of this article.
Ha - some even less. When I was a teen I generally slept maybe 5 hours, from 12 or 1 am until 5-5:30. I was up before everyone else, reading the morning paper, then off to school. I'm retired now and still wake around 5 - but don't get up until I'm good and ready, lol. Stay up just about as late too. If I actually sleep more than 7 hours, I'm sick.
I don't know, I would say that it varies. As an adult-21 years old-I can say that I definitely still 'need' more than 9 hours of sleep for optimal functioning. Do I get that? Definitely not, often it's less than 5 hours, thank-you university. I have some friends that do great with 7 hours, others are like me. I know my 9 hours + from observing my sleep and energy levels in the summer months.
Can I still function on what I get? Yes, but it's not ideal. I don't drive to the university, thank goodness (way too many accidents are caused by tired young people on the roads in the mornings), and now that I am practising in the morning at 8:00ish instead of going to an 8:30 class two times a week, I don't have to worry too much about a little bit of drowsiness. I don't nap at any point, as I physically can't anyways-not even in my own bed with the room dark and me exhausted. But I know that I have to get AT LEAST 7.5 hours to be properly functioning at all times, and more is even better.
And at age 10, I definitely needed more than 9 hours!
Again, it varies, but one thing we DO know is that overall, in the past 100 years, people are sleeping on average close to 2 hours less-this goes for just about all ages after about age 4-5.
Next week, a study will probably come out saying that teenagers need more sleep. The important thing is to know your body and how it functions, and in the case of a child, know their body and how it functions. We are all unique, so a one size fits all approach does not work.
When I was a teenager, I remember needing 9 hours of sleep. I had a lot of homework and a lot of it I had to do myself, which is how it should be. Kids need to learn themselves.
Some of the comments above saying that children get too much homework--give me a break! Ya'll are just lazy, imho. Children nowadays don't get enough homework and they don't attend enough days of school. They should be going all year round. Children in Japan go pretty much all year and have a month off in July/August. They have standardized exams that have to be taken to get into a decent high school and they learn far more advanced level math by the time they graduate. It's almost embarrassing comparing it against our education system. Children need to be pushed harder because they're supposed to be tomorrow's leaders. At this rate, they'll be China's followers.
Doesn't Japan have one of the highest suicide rates too?
Sometimes it seems like we are slowly turning into society's working slaves.
If I had more homework than the hours of schoolwork I have to do daily I would probably consider dropping out. The vast majority of homework is busy work that does help me learn jack @!$%#. It's a waste of time. But I have to do it if I want to pass the class. Such a great system huh.
Well...I guess this explains all those college nights where I was able to stay up until 2 am and then get up for a 9 am class without any problems.
When I was a youth, my high school encouraged teachers to give less homework so that we could do extracurricular activities. I did tend to get more sleep when didn't have a girl friend.
I don't think it would be a bad idea for schools to require students to do extracurricular activities and give them a lot less home work.
Not having homework in high school has helped me and many of my classmates out. Some of those guys are rich and we're all on the good side of 30.
My insomnia started in high school and I still have it to this day. I would kill for 8 hours of sleep per night.
Maybe if they put recess back in schools they would sleep better. There are studies now that are showing not getting proper sleep could be leading to a prediabetic condition.
If you get enough exercise, and for teens that would be at least one hour per day, of which 30 minutes high intensity exercise like running (faster than mere jogging speed), then you do need more sleep. Teens would certainly need 9 hours or more. The general rule of thumb is that for each hour that your heart rate is kept above about 140 bpm per day, you need an hour more sleep per day.
It is well known that the fitness of the general population has sharply declined in the last few decades. Cooper test scores of the 1980s compared to those of today show that the highest scores of a typical class are below average of the 1980s scores. Also, today a teacher cannot simply do a Cooper test, as in any class it's typical to have some kids who are so physically unfit that it is dangerous for them to run for any significant length of time. In the 1980s this was almost unheard of.
Sleep also influences physical fitness, and lack of sleep is implicated as an independent factor, apart from diet in obesity.
This is such BS it's laughable. Trying to find a correlation between hours of sleep and standardized test scores? Ha! There are SO many outside factors involved in a study like that, it's impossible to draw a reasonable conclusion from those two pieces of information alone. Case in point: I and my high school cohort of friends were all "gifted" students in the International Baccalaureate program at our school. Our workload was extremely rigorous, and rarely did any of us get more than 6 hours a night. For most of us, it was around 4. Of course we all scored very high on standardized tests, simply because we were smart (I never studied for the SAT because I didn't have time and I still got a very, very high score). So, judging by this study, we shouldn't have needed more than the 4 hours we were getting, because our standardized test scores were high. That is ludicrous. We were ridiculously sleep-deprived and stressed and we knew it, and somehow learned to function around it. This is a common phenomenon with students in programs such as IB and AP...and of course, no allowance is made for that in this study. No allowance is also made for the fact that we often would try to get more sleep than usual the night before a standardized test such as our own state's benchmark test or the SAT.
Here's a hint to these economists: don't quit your day job and leave the science to the scientists.
Maybe, just maybe, the kids that are scoring higher on tests with 7 hours/sleep a night are staying up an hour later to study?
Just a thought.
The ptoblem is they dont function well at 7am when a lot of schools start
and this doesnt mention that 40-60% of people ahve restless leg syndrome which makes their sleep much less efficient and is easily treated with generic pramipexole (mirapex)
-a doc
Very funny this; coming so quickly on the heels of the study concerning lack of sleep and Alzheimer's.
I was thinking the same thing. It was always my understanding (not that it is correct), that sleep was the time that brain repairs took place, so what would be the long-term effects of slightly-less-than ideal amounts of sleep?
Some good posts here so far, but I have to mention, what about the fact that a teenager's brain is growing and developing at a rapid speed? Correct me if I'm wrong, but sleep is necessary to allow for the proper associative connections within the brain as all the day's information gets placed into short- and long-term memory.
Since teenagers have rapidly growing brains, they often need MORE sleep than an average adult in order to process this info correctly.
Any experts (real experts, please) care to chime in?
Oh, and yeah, the "research" that this article was based upon sounded inadequate. Most research is, actually. And where are the confirmational follow-up studies that are required for scrutinization before the scientific community gives its approval? Did the author of this article contemplate that?? Typical MSM "news".......
When in high school 40+ years ago it was get up early for school to catch the bus, go to school, followed by basketball practice until dark, go home, eat, study for 4 hours and then go to bed. I remember my chemistry teacher waking me up by passing ammonia around the room. The guy next to me woke me up with a nudge handed me the ammonia, I took a whiff and ran out into the hallway to the nearest water fountain. That was my favorite teacher. He made us use a Cornell University freshman chemistry text for our plain old (We didn't have honors) Chemistry class.
well im taking Tylenol PM Night
man i must be broken cause i can't function without 12 hours of sleep
Didn't MSNBC run a story just last week saying that kids still didn't get enough sleep? And now MSNBC is running a story that says the opposite?
http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/13/10398136-kids-dont-get-enough-sleep-and-neither-did-their-grandparents
So which is it? Are they getting enough or aren't they?
Looks like it is time for a another study to figure out which study was right.
Speaking from an undergrad level of education, high school sucks. I relearned everything all over from high school while in college. It was like high school was sh-t. trust me home school your kids high school is nothing but a big drag.College is an even bigger drag. If you do not have money your screwed. Its amazing how much you invest in college yet they do not invest in you. My family became bankrupt after my fourth year in college (I never expected it), it was my last semester there and I could not pay off the tuition and when I asked my university (university of michigan ann arbor by the way) to help me out in someway they said there is nothing "we can do you just have to figure it out on your own". F-ck that Its like give me your money or @!$%# off. I hate the U.S education system ever since then.
How much sleep does a Teenager need? The writer of this Article certainly doesn't know. Junk Journalism here, nothing more. All Bull@!$%#, like most of the @!$%# that these College-Educated Pin-Heads write all the time.