A reduction in sleep amount from late childhood through the second decade has long been known; however, the weight of current evidence holds that sleep need does not decline across this span. This article will describe how the loss of sleep through adolescence is not driven by lower need for sleep but arises from a convergence of biologic, psychological, and socio-cultural influences.
The perfect storm metaphor applies to sleep patterns of adolescents in the sense that developmental trajectories of biopsychosocial factors conspire to limit the quantity of sleep for many adolescents, resulting in a number of negative consequences. A reduction in sleep amount from late childhood through the second decade has long been known; however, the weight of current evidence holds that sleep need does not decline across this span. Nevertheless, parents, pediatricians, and schoolteachers, it seems, long assumed that this sleep decline was an inevitable part of growing up and a normative expectation. This article will describe how the loss of sleep through adolescence is not driven by lower need for sleep but arises from a convergence of biologic, psychological, and socio-cultural influences.
Sleep patterns of adolescents
Adolescent sleep patterns have been surveyed by investigators in many countries from virtually every continent around the world, and a consistent finding is that the timing of bedtime on school nights gets later across the middle school and high school years (roughly ages 11 through 17 years). Rise times on school mornings, by contrast, tend to stay relatively consistent except in countries such as the United States where the starting time of school moves to an earlier hour at the transition to high school. Weekend sleep for teenagers tends to delay further, and the difference in amount of sleep reported for school days versus weekends becomes more pronounced as children pass into higher grades (ie, greater reported sleep on weeknights than school nights).
The most recent US poll of sleep patterns in adolescents was reported by the National Sleep Foundation in 2006, and collected self- and parent-reported sleep patterns from grades 6 through 12. These data serve as a good example of these general trends, as shown in Table 1 . The young people interviewed in this telephone poll reported that average bedtime on the nights before school days were approximately 1.5 hours later from grade 6 to grade 12, and reported weekend bedtime delayed from 10:31 pm to 12:45 am across this same grade span. Sixth graders reported going to bed about an hour later on weekend nights, and for 12th graders, the weekend bedtime delay was about an hour and 45 minutes. The average reported rise time on school mornings was 6:42 am in grade 6 and 6:31 am in grade 12. The reported number of hours slept on school nights declined from 8.4 hours in the 6th grade students to 6.9 hours in the 12th graders; reported weekend sleep was more consistent from grades 6 through 11—about 9 hours—falling to 8.4 hours in grade 12. The weekend extension of sleep time in this report was nearly an hour in the middle school children (grades 6–8) and approached 2 hours for grade 11 students.
| Grade in School | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sleep Variable | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | 10th | 11th | 12th |
| School Nights | |||||||
| Bedtime (24-h) | 2124 | 2152 | 2153 | 2215 | 2232 | 2251 | 2302 |
| Rise Time (24-h) | 0642 | 0635 | 0636 | 0628 | 0623 | 0623 | 0631 |
| Average Sleep (Hours) | 8.4 | 8.1 | 8.1 | 7.6 | 7.3 | 7.0 | 6.9 |
| Weekend Nights | |||||||
| Bedtime (24-h) | 2231 | 2305 | 2326 | 2353 | 0003 | 0025 | 0045 |
| Rise Time (24-h) | 0853 | 0912 | 0921 | 0954 | 0954 | 1006 | 0951 |
| Average Sleep (Hours) | 9.2 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 8.8 | 8.9 | 8.8 | 8.4 |
| School Night– Weekend Hours Slept Difference | 0.8 | 0.8 | 0.9 | 1.2 | 1.6 | 1.9 | 1.5 |
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