Teen Sleep, Brain Science and the Debate Over School Start Times
An update on the Stanford Sleep Camp studies
From time to time, I’ll feature a news story that has relevance for this space. Today, I want to share this conversation about sleep from the EdSurge podcast. Here’s the background.
Scientists ran an unusual summer camp in the 1970s and ‘80s. It’s main purpose was to study the sleep patterns of kids and teens. Campers wore electrodes all day so they’d be ready to plug in for monitoring at night. What researchers found, and have continued to study in the years since, is that teens have different, and greater, needs when it comes to sleep than people of other ages. But it turns out that plenty of schools make it hard for teens to get the amount of sleep that doctors recommend. This has led to heated debates in recent years over school start times. Advocates for later starts say that the issue is about more than whether teens have enough sleep to learn—there are serious implications for mental health as well.
The Study
The official name was the Stanford Summer Sleep Camp. And it had the trappings of a camp in that, for kids and teens, they came and they did have camp activities. But really it was a sleep study. It ran for a decade from 1976 to 1985. And it really was a long-term sleep study of kids and adolescents to look at teen sleep, because prior to then, there really had not been as much done looking at sleep during the day, and particularly looking at the specifics of teen sleep.
Lisa Lewis, an education journalist turned advocate for later start times, has spent the last few years researching the issue. She’s author of a book due out next month, “The Sleep-Deprived Teen: Why Our Teenagers Are So Tired, and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive.”
Here’s what she had to say about the study over on the EdSurge podcast:
So these campers, they got electrodes basically glued to their skull. They had a couple by their eyes. They had one by their chin. One of the former campers who's an adult now said it was sort of like the cord that runs out of your iPhone. And they had to wear these electrodes the entire time. So in between doing the normal camp activities—you know, eating meals and playing volleyball and going for ice cream—they had to go back to their rooms every two hours and take naps. And that was the real purpose of it.
Basically they were studying how long it took them to fall asleep. And there was a new test that had just been developed called the MSLT—the Multiple Sleep Latency Test—which is essentially, how long does it take you to fall asleep?
And what they found was that across the board, the kids and the teens were getting about nine and a quarter hours of sleep each night. But the teens often were falling asleep much more quickly during nap time.
[The lead researcher was] Mary Carskadon. She's gone on to find many other insights ... into the fact that teens did indeed sleep differently. For instance, later on, she was able to measure melatonin. Melatonin is what's released by the brain and that's what primes us to go to sleep at night. And what she surmised and was later able to prove with a series of subsequent tests was that the timing of when the melatonin is released is later at night in teens. And when it subsides in the morning is also later in teens.
Q: Why does it matter that teen sleep is different?
The first thing to understand is the amount of sleep teens need is eight to 10 hours. Eight is the minimum recommended amount. We look at our teens and often they'll look like adults, but they're not, they do need more sleep.
The other thing to recognize about teen's sleep is that their sleep schedules are different. They have essentially a different body clock that is governing when they want to fall asleep and when they want to wake up in the morning. So it's a circadian rhythm shift, which means that unlike when they were younger, they really aren't sleepy and ready to fall asleep until close to about 11 o'clock at night. So then that means when you do the math, they need eight to 10 hours. If they are supposed to be sitting in their desks for a 7:30 a.m. morning bell at school, there's no way they can be getting the eight to 10 hours of sleep that they need.
Q: How did the school start times get so early in so many places?
Back about a century ago, schools started closer to 9 a.m. and they have drifted earlier over time. One large factor that played into that was the transportation piece. So as more schools cropped up, eventually there was school consolidation. You know, we had suburbs, we had all the growth in the school system. At some point with transportation, school districts often were using the same fleet of buses for pickups and drop-offs for the elementary and the middle and the high school level. So they were doing it in a tiered fashion, so they could use the same buses.
Well, at that point in time, all this research about teen sleep wasn't yet widely known. So the thought was, well teens are older. So they should definitely be the ones to start earlier. And then unfortunately those start times in so many cases have endured, even now that we know that teens should be starting later in the morning.
Q: And you write in your book that it's mental health as well as their ability to learn.
We know there is a link between mental health and sleep. When we're sleep deprived, all of us tend to be in a worse mood. It affects mood, but more seriously, there's a link with depression, there's a link with suicidality. There are some very, very profound implications. When you look at being sleep deprived and what that does for mental health, [statistics have shown] that the less sleep teens get the more their suicide risk goes up. For instance, there's one study in Fairfax County, they found for each hour of lost sleep, it was linked to a 42 percent increase in suicidal thoughts and a 58 percent increase in suicide attempts. So that's very, very concerning as a parent.
… continue to read the conversation by clicking here.