“Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.”  –Thomas Dekker

Each and every morning bleary-eyed teens are dragging themselves out of bed heading off to school half asleep.  These groggy youngsters are often too tired to absorb much of what is being taught in their first classes of the day.

A recent poll undertaken by the National Sleep Foundation found that kids are, on average, sleeping only 7-1/2 hours on school nights, some two hours less than experts recommend for teenagers.  All of the tempting technologies found in most teens’ bedrooms — TVs, computers, cell phones, and other electronics — certainly do not help support deep uninterrupted sleep.  Researchers from JFK Medical Center in Edison, N.J. found that teenagers send an average of 34 texts a night after going to bed.

Groggy mornings are not the only concern for our sleep deprived adolescents.  Sleep deficiencies in children may actually interfere with brain development, and may increase the risk of obesity, immune problems, depression, and may even heighten the likelihood of developing attention deficit disorder and other cognitive problems.

Dr. Mary Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University and director of Chronobiology and Sleep Research at Bradley Hospital says that “Our 18-year-olds need at least as much sleep as our 10-year-olds.  That’s because this is an age when major construction is going on in the brain……We can see during sleep the emergence of new networks,” she says. “So, we know that sleep has a fundamental role in protecting and growing and strengthening the brain — and strengthening what we’ve learned.”  Research supports her statement.  The body uses the time children are asleep to interlink critical new circuitry in the developing brain.

Neuroscientists have demonstrated that it is during sleep that the brain constructs connections to the frontal lobes, the part of the brain considered our emotional control center, and is the part of the brain responsible for: controlling impulses and judgment; problem solving; socialization; planning; working memory; language production, and other duties. All of these tasks worsen with sleep deprivation.  Furthermore, the brain uses sleep to organize the torrent of information that floods in during our waking hours.  Of course, not every experience needs to be remembered and it is during sleep that the brain sorts through all the information and decides which items are important enough to store in our long-term memory, and then file them away for later retrieval.

Scientists and health professionals worry the consequences related to inadequate sleep may reach far beyond children’s inability to adequately process information in their morning classes.  According to Dr. Carskadon, “There’s evidence that things like attention deficit disorder can be caused by insufficient sleep.  There’s evidence that some of the overeating and obesity we’re now seeing in young children and adolescents can also be attributed to not getting enough sleep.”

So, what can be done?  The solution is for parents to set a firm bedtime for their teens and pre-teens, and to ban technology (TV, computer, internet access, cell phone, electronic games) from the bedroom.  That does not guarantee that kids will not find a way around the rules, as teenagers are always trying to push the limits, but it will certainly help assure a better night’s sleep.  And, a better night’s sleep can help assure a healthy mind……..and a healthy future.