The fact is that adolescents experience a normal sleep phase shift after puberty, the result of which is that most are unable to fall asleep until about 10:45 P.M. (and their brains stay in sleep mode until approximately 8:00 A.M.)24 Compounding the problem is that teens are more sensitive to the effects of light—and use more technology at night.
The key, especially with teens, is to negotiate in a respectful manner. Many kids resist changing their sleep patterns because they don’t want to hear “I told you so” from their parents. It is important to approach the subject in such a way as to validate their knowledge of themselves. You could say something like, “You may be right. You may be one of those kids who needs less sleep than most people. Let’s see if that’s the case. I want to support you in making good decisions for yourself.” As Helene Emsellem, sleep expert and author of Snooze . . . or Lose! points out, at the end of the day, if teens aren’t interested in changing their bedtimes or being less tired during the day, there’s no point in trying to make them embrace sleep-enhancing interventions.25
So start with the presumption that your child knows what it feels like to be tired, and how good it feels to get a good night’s sleep. You can acknowledge that some people need less sleep than others, and that he may be someone who only needs eight or eight and a half hours. You can also say that most kids can’t really judge very well how tired they are or how much sleep they need, and invite him to do an experiment. On some weekday when he’s home from school, have him lie down in a dark room at 11:00 A.M. How long does it take him to fall asleep? If he’s out within a few minutes, it’s a sign of serious sleep deprivation. Another idea is to recommend doing a “study.” Suggest that he stay up until he thinks it’s time to go to bed for three nights in a row and then rate how he feels during the day. He can rate himself on a scale of 1 to 5 according to his alertness, focus, academic productivity, mood, worry, frustration, and/or ability to get along with others. The next three nights, encourage him to go to bed early enough to get the amount of sleep you think he needs. Have him chart how he feels during those days, too. What does he see? If he really feels no difference, he may be right.
“It’s clear that my daughter is chronically tired, but I can’t get her to buy in to the idea that she needs to sleep more. She says that sleep is a waste of time. What should I do?”
There’s no question that this is a fine line to walk. On the one hand, you want to respect her autonomy and refrain from making sleep an issue of control. You can’t make your child sleep, nor can you make your child want to sleep more than she does, but you can promote a quiet slowing-down routine in the evenings. If your child is resistant, you can say, “If you’re having trouble falling asleep, my responsibility is to help you with it, to make sure you’re in a dark room when your doctor says you should be in bed.”
The evidence that sleep is important is irrefutable. Some strategies you might use in your consultant role include:
Often when the advice comes from a third, nonparental party, kids are more willing to take it seriously. With a school-aged child, tell her that you want to get her pediatrician’s advice about sleep—or the advice of another adult the child respects. If you have a teenager, ask her if she would be open to your sharing articles about sleep with her.
With school-aged kids and younger, you can enforce an agreed-upon lights-out time. Remind them that as a responsible parent, it’s right for you to enforce limits on bedtime and technology use in the evening (more on this later).
Because technology and peer pressure can make it very difficult for teens to go to bed early, say, “I know this is hard for you. I’m not trying to control you. But if you’d like to get to bed earlier and need help doing it, I’m happy to give you an incentive.” An incentive is okay in this case because you’re not offering it as a means to get her to do what you want her to do, but to help her do what she wants to do on her own but finds challenging. It’s a subtle but important distinction.26
For older kids, make privileges like driving contingent on getting enough sleep—since driving while sleep deprived is so dangerous. How to chart their sleep is more complicated. Reliable tools for assessing when a child falls asleep and how long he stays asleep, such as the actigraph, require extensive training and are not something parents can use at home to track their kids’ sleep. Moreover, Fitbits are unfortunately unreliable in gathering data. But you can ask your child to keep a sleep log where she records what time she turned out the lights, and (in the morning) how long she thinks it took her to fall asleep, and whether she was up during the night. She may not know how long it took her to fall asleep; that’s okay. Just ask, “Was it easier to fall asleep than last night or harder?” Helping kids figure out if they’ve gotten enough rest is a process, and trust, communication, and collaborative problem solving are key to that process.
Encourage your child to do screen-time homework earlier and save reading homework for later so she gets less late light exposure.
Ask questions such as “If you knew you’d be better at everything you do if you slept an extra hour and a half, would that change your sense of how important sleep is?” And “If you knew you’d be at risk for developing depression if you didn’t sleep enough, would that change your mind?”
Talk to her about your own attempts to get to bed earlier. Ask, “Would you be open to us supporting each other in getting the sleep we need? I’ll remind you and you remind me?”
“My sixth grader seems to consume a lot of caffeine. She drinks several sodas and a Starbucks coffee every day, though she hasn’t gotten into energy drinks—yet. Should I be worried?”
The simple answer is yes. We worry about the significant increase in the consumption of caffeinated beverages in teenagers, and despair that some of these products are marketed to children as young as four. Many teens consume up to 800 milligrams of caffeine a day, which is equivalent to around eight cups of coffee. (The Mayo Clinic recommends a maximum of 100 milligrams of caffeine per day for adolescents and no caffeine for children.)
The effects of caffeine on children’s development have not been well studied, but we do know that children can develop a tolerance, which contributes to habitual consumption.27 And caffeine stays in your system for hours. If you have caffeine at 10:00 A.M., for instance, at 4:00 P.M. half of it is still in your system.28 Though kids metabolize what they consume faster than adults do, it’s nonetheless concerning to have a stimulant in their systems for so long. Our recommendation is to not serve caffeinated foods and beverages to children, with the exception of some chocolate and an occasional soda. If they are intent on feeling “grown-up” like their friends, suggest decaf as Ned does. (Though there is still some caffeine in decaf.)
It’s unlikely that you could keep your teenager from consuming sweet caffeinated drinks even if you wanted to. The best course, then, is to talk with your teen about the effects of caffeine, which can be positive in the short run but negative in the long term. When sleepy teens use caffeine, they sleep even less. And they experience the same side effects adults do: jittery nervousness, racing thoughts, anxiety, increased heart rate. These symptoms are exacerbated when you drink a lot of caffeine in a short period of time, or chug energy drinks.
Ask your child to pay attention to his level of alertness and tension or nervousness after consuming caffeine. When adolescents really pay attention, some report that caffeine keeps them awake but does not make them more alert or clearheaded. Let your kids know that there are other ways to increase alertness and energy (such as sleep and exercise). Tell them that staying well rested without the use of stimulants is a great challenge for most adults in our society, too. Ultimately, it is their responsibility to figure out how to manage their own energy. Bill tells kids that if they can figure out how to stay well rested and not be dependent on stimulants, they’ll be way ahead of the game as they move into young adulthood.
“I’m a night owl, and
I know my kid is, too. It’s tough to fight that tendency and get to bed at a reasonable hour.”
We agree, it’s not easy to get to bed early when you’ve got your circadian rhythm working against you. There’s a study we love to cite on this subject. The researcher, Kenneth Wright, studied young adults after a typical workweek, and then after a week camping without electric light and digital technology. After a week of normal life, melatonin (a drowsiness hormone) onset was about two hours before the subjects went to sleep, which was usually around 12:30 A.M. After a week of camping, the melatonin onset moved up by approximately two hours—and so did bedtime. This study also found that camping reduced individual differences between the sleep schedules of “late sleepers” (night owls) and early sleepers (larks). The biological clock of night owls is often delayed by exposure to electronic media and electric light. In short, if you and your child are night owls, you will need to pay particular attention to the amount of light you expose yourself to from dinnertime on, and start your wind-down process earlier than someone who is a lark. There are also glasses you can buy to reduce the effect of blue light on your system, and now many devices have a mode for reducing blue light built in. But the stimulus of online news, movies, or e-mails will still often get in the way of a good night’s sleep, so be sure you’re paying attention to more than just light.
“My teenager has to get up at six thirty on school mornings but sleeps until twelve thirty on weekends. Is that okay?”
Advice varies on this point. If on weekends we get up significantly later than our normal wake time, we’re going to experience the mental confusion and “feeling off” that we feel when we’re jet-lagged. For that reason, many sleep experts suggest that teenagers not get up more than two hours later on weekends than they do on school days—and that they take short naps instead if they need to fill the tank. Others, like Danny Lewin, a behavioral sleep specialist at Children’s National Medical Center’s Division of Sleep Medicine, feel that negotiation and flexibility is the name of the game, and we agree. Talk to your teenager about the ideal sleep schedule and figure out what works best for you and your child. Let him know that if he sleeps in more than two or three hours later than he does on school mornings, he’ll have that jet-lagged feeling and it will make it much harder for him to fall asleep on Sunday night. But if he’s listening and weighing the pros and cons, let it be his call.
What to Do Tonight
Make sleep a family value, and set a family goal of sleeping more. Ned always tells his teenage students, “Pay yourself first,” a lesson adopted from financial planning that involves putting money into your savings account before you pay your bills. He tells kids “you’ll need to sleep something in the neighborhood of sixty-three hours a week (nine hours a day), so plan that and then plan what you’ll do the rest of the time.” It’s good advice for you as well as your kids. Talk to your kids about your own sleep-related challenges, and let them know if you’ve found things that have worked for you. Tell them you’re open to their suggestions.
Assess whether your child has an effective wind-down routine before bed. If not, read about what experts call good sleep hygiene, or sleep habits. Try getting ready for bed before you’re really tired, as it’s harder to inhibit the desire to do one more thing or watch one more episode when you’re tired. Encourage your teens to try the same thing. Dim lights and pull shades at least thirty minutes before a child’s bedtime, which will trigger melatonin production. Try using blackout curtains and/or relaxation tapes. Also try warm milk, which actually does have a sleep-inducing effect. If necessary, talk to your pediatrician about the use of melatonin, which can be very effective for highly anxious kids and for kids with ADHD. Encourage exercise during the day, particularly if falling asleep in the first place is hard.
If your child is a light sleeper or struggles to fall asleep, consider a white-noise generator.
If your child is an athlete, do a Google search for studies that document the incredibly powerful effect sleep has on athletic performance. A study of Stanford basketball players found that they all ran faster and shot more accurately after several weeks of training when they got more than eight hours of sleep a night.29 Let your kid know that, on the advice of sleep specialists, many NBA teams have eliminated morning shootarounds to give players more sleep.
Talk as a family about creating technology-free zones in the bedroom at night. Danny Lewin recommends that kids (and parents) leave their devices charging in the kitchen thirty to sixty minutes before bedtime. (This gives us a chance to resist our phone only once, rather than all night.) Lewin also encourages negotiating with teenagers in a respectful way. If no phones in the bedroom seven nights in a row is too much for your teenager to manage, how about five? Then you and your child can discuss the difference between what happens when the phone is in the room and when it isn’t. If your child insists that she needs her phone because she uses it as an alarm clock, go to the store immediately and buy her an alarm clock. Get her the most high-end kind she wants. It’s money well spent.
Suggest that your high school child ask her friends or other kids in her grade who do get eight-plus hours of sleep a night how they do it. Kids commonly learn more from each other than they do from adults.
If your kids are tired, remind them to be patient with themselves and with others. Help them recognize that their emotional reactions will be different when they’re tired—and that they’ll be more irritable with you and with friends.
Ideally, we want kids to learn to calm themselves. But there are some—particularly those with ADHD or anxiety problems—for whom it’s too hard. Some kids need to listen to music (but not on their phones) or even to have the TV on to fall asleep. Though it’s not ideal, it’s not worth fighting about if it works.
Encourage your sleepy teenager to take a twenty-minute power nap after school or during study hall. Naps shouldn’t be longer than that, otherwise they can cause grogginess and throw off sleep rhythms for the night. Think of them as a little pick-me-up to get through to bedtime.
For kids who have sleep disorders and/or are suffering from severe sleep deprivation, consider having a doctor write a letter recommending that they be permitted to miss first period. Also check out the sleep tool kit on www.racetonowhere.com/sleep-page.
If your kid’s circadian clock is off, exposure to bright light early in the morning can be an effective tool, but consult with an expert on sleep before trying light therapy. Also, if weather permits, go camping. We constantly encounter kids who struggle with sleep the whole year, and then summer camp gets them back on track. For the duration of the camp they’re in bed at 9:30 P.M., because there’s no electric light or digital technology. A camping trip won’t be feasible if it’s in the middle of winter, or if you live in the northern parts of the world where the sun doesn’t go down until very late. But it’s a very effective technique when you can swing it.
Continue reading about sleep. Books we recommend are Helene Ensellem’s Snooze . . . or Lose! and Dr. Richard Ferber’s Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems.
Assess the extent to which school commitments—and particularly homework—are undermining your child’s efforts to get to bed. This last is not a simple matter—which is why your child’s school environment is the subject of the entire next chapter.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Taking a Sense of Control to School
WE SEE A LOT OF KIDS who hate school. Not coincidentally, a student’s sense of control lowers with every year they attend.1 In order to help our kids manage their school lives, we need to first spend a moment thinking about what school feels like from their vantage point. They transition from lots of free choice in the youngest grades to mandatory homework, standing in line, having to ask permission to use the bathroom, and needing to do what’s asked, exactly as it’s asked, almost every moment of the day. Where is the autonomy there?
From preschool
through to college, we want kids to have a school experience that is engaging, and inventive. School should provide a mixture of stimulation and downtime. It should encourage kids’ natural curiosity and allow them to be in a state of flow for long periods of the day. In an ideal school, teachers have autonomy and kids have choices. This type of school environment provides a nearly perfect model of an internal locus of control. Unfortunately, whether you go public or private, this isn’t the direction schools are going.
Recent trends in education make it hard for teachers to teach and students to learn. Teachers are losing autonomy to “teacher-proof” instructional techniques. Many full-day kindergarten programs begrudgingly allow only one ten-minute recess, based on the misguided assumption that cutting recess time will increase instructional time and raise test scores. As early as first or second grade, kids are bogged down by homework. By high school, they feel defined by: 1) their grades, 2) their standardized test scores, and 3) their college admissions—all of which depend on external validation. Some adult somewhere to whom they can rarely make an appeal is sorting them. Do you remember that TV commercial where people walk down the street with their credit scores floating above their heads? “I am not a number.” we all want to cry. With the perception that school is a Sorting Hat with the mindset of an actuary, is it any wonder how stressed some students are?
For more than two decades, school reform has been driven by an agenda that appears to be uninformed by even the most basic research into what we now know about the functioning of the brain or the healthy development of the child. Educational leaders and policy makers aren’t asking, “What do children need for healthy brain development?” “How do they learn best?” or “When’s the optimal time to teach him or her to read or do algebra?” Rather, they seem to be asking, “What do we need this child to be able to do in order to meet our school, local, or national standards?” Most reform has been focused on what to cram into children’s heads—and testing them ad nauseam to see what sticks—rather than on developing their brains. What this means is that we do more but accomplish less. Educational reforms fail because they hinge on policies that lower the sense of control of students, teachers, and administrators alike, predictably leading to greater stress, lower student engagement, and ever more teacher dissatisfaction and burnout.
The Self-Driven Child Page 17