For the Northfield Healthy Community Initiative, the following is Project Parenthood with Pam Vig.
Click here to listen to the show (and read along below)!
Research shows that adolescents need 9 plus hours of sleep each night to achieve optimal health. Note that nine hours is not a suggested amount but a need. A regular lack of sleep is shown to negatively effect health and behavior in people of all ages but particularly in adolescents. In her book, “Sleepless in America,” Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, gives great advice on how to develop a healthy sleep schedule for younger children. She explains that often what our misbehaving or chronically unhealthy children need are not more “consequences” or medication but rather more sleep.
And yet for our teens, the school work, after school jobs and extracurricular activities in which they participate seem to conspire to make even 6-7 hours of sleep a night a rarity. How then do we help them get their required amount of sleep on a regular basis? There are no easy answers but we can start with the following:
First – Evaluate – Walk thru your teen’s weekly schedule together. Where and how are they spending their time? Are there pockets of unused time that by simply rearranging the day’s activities could be used for sleep? What could change so that most nights they are able to have 30-60 minutes of down time before they go to sleep for the night?
Second – Prioritize – If our child is regularly not getting enough sleep, what needs to change? We will need to be creative. Rather than eliminating an activity or two, together we might talk to the teacher who regularly assigns several hours of homework a night and to the coach who often schedules post practice and weekend sessions about how this is effecting our child and how we, our child and they might work together in the best interest of our child and his/her health.
Lack of sleep in our children is truly a matter of mental, physical and emotional health. As parents, we must help our children develop good sleep habits as a foundation for the healthy adult life we hope for them in the future.
