Are Your Teens Getting Junk Sleep?

I think we all know the kind of sleep you get when you decide to go to bed with a TV blaring. It's not good. But I like the name The Sleep Council in Britain gives to the kind of sleep teens get when they go to sleep watching TV, listening to music, or using other electronic gadgets: "junk sleep."

A poll of 1,000 kids, ages 12 to 16, found that 30 percent go on four to seven hours of sleep a night, far from the recommended eight or nine or more that teens often get when they can. As Reuters reports, nearly all of the teenagers surveyed had a phone, music system, or TV in their bedroom and two-thirds of them had all three. What, no PC, too? A 2005 Pew Internet & American Life project study found that 26 percent of U.S. teens spent time online in their bedrooms, and that's two years ago.

As Helene Emsellem, a sleep physician, told the NPR's Allison Aubrey, "As we have more and more ways to stay connected at night, we've seen an exaggeration of the night-owlism in teenagers." Research shows that teens' internal clocks shift toward much later sleep times, and tech that keeps teens engaged and not relaxed doesn't help—especially when they have to get up early for school.

Check out Emsellem's recommendations to help teens sleep better in the article. (Link below) For starters, she tells parents to take TVs out of teens' bedrooms, enforce turn-off times on PCs and phones—every tech gadget except music players. Ensellem encourages teens to listen to music at night—but tune into a soothing playlist, on low volume, that helps them relax and go to sleep.

If you've got more tips to help kids de-tech at the end of the day and get the sleep they need, please post them below.

LINKS: "Junk sleep" damaging teenagers' health [Reuters via Yahoo! News]
Helping teens make peace with sleep [NPR]