Getting Your Teenager to Sleep

One of the questions I get asked with regularity at parenting talks is "How to get my teenager to sleep?". Living in an age of ever-increasing connectivity, it's not just adults who aren't getting enough sleep. Teens may be in their bedrooms early, but are in fact falling asleep only past midnight, and parents know that can't be right.

That is a view which is backed up by sleep researchers. Teens require about 9 hours of sleep every night, but most are in fact getting by with only 6 hours or in extreme cases 5 or less. In my conversations with parents, anecdotal evidence suggests that US research figures do parallel the Singapore situation.

The situation is not really helped given the truckload of homework given by school, and the fact that today's teens have the world in their bedrooms through TV, the computer and the telephone. The net effect is that our teens are too stimulated to get to sleep early. Entry into puberty also causes our teens' body clocks to shift to a later sleep-time.

So what do researchers say are the benefits of a healthy night's rest?

• higher immunity levels and better general health


• better concentration in school


• cognitive operations are better - improved recall


• pleasant dispositions


• lowered risk of accidents

Parents can try a few ideas to help their teens sleep earlier:

• move the TV, computer etc out of the bedroom


• guide development of time management skills in our teens


• fix dinner and sleep times - late dinners keep teens awake, while having a clear sleep time is better than having none at all


• late afternoon naps


• lobby the school's parents support group to organise 'Sleep Awareness' days - sometimes, teens just need to hear the message from other people, apart from their parents


• get the same group to lobby the school to review the amount of homework given, after all, the MOE has reduced content already some years back

Because it's such a fundamental part of being human, we often take for granted the importance of a good sleep. Often too, we do not role model the right behaviours ourselves - I remember reading about how parents lug sleepy kids through Mustafa Shopping Centre in the early morning hours, just because the adults could not sleep - so how do we expect our teens to follow? It's time we did, for our sleepy teens' sake.

Noel Tan

(*All text is copyright of Trailblazer Trainers Pte Ltd)