Increasing Sleep Helps Teens Develop Valuable Life Skills
It’s Graduation Day. 400 students gather in a gymnasium to celebrate setting off into the world. However, some of them aren’t ready. For the past 12 years they have been developing habits without even realizing what is was really doing to them. This happens to you too, and you don’t realize it either. But what if we can change it? There is one simple way to do this. Increasing the amount of sleep a teen gets will increase their ability to develop valuable life skills.
Some might say, “This isn’t a real issue. Teens are just lazy and they don’t want to have to get up and go to school like they should.” But this is not the case. Losing sleep is a true issue, and gaining more will increase their success in life.
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Alice Park quoted in Study: Kids Who Get More Focused, Emotionally Stable Kids, “If being deprived of sleep leads to a drop in attention in class, children may miss out on learning and on opportunities to be creative.” (para. 7) If students don’t get enough sleep, they are tired (duh), but many won’t want to come to school at all. That is an issue. Even if they do show up, often they will fall asleep in the middle of class and miss important information. This also teaches them that they can miss school whenever they feel tired, which is not the case. School isn’t a suggestion, it’s a requirement. Students who lacked sleep were also proven to have behavioral issues. “Researchers asked parents to allow the children to sleep as they normally would to establish a baseline — those who were deprived of an hour’s sleep had worse scores on behavior measures than those who were allowed to sleep an hour more.” (qtd in para. 4) The brain has certain functions it must have in order to make the body work successfully. However, it can’t perform the tasks it needs to without energy from
Lack of sleep can cause short term effects like headaches or mood changes, but it can also contribute to more major issues like heart disease or high blood pressure. It can also impact memory and attention span, which causes problems with attending school. These effects can be extremely harmful and can put many students at risk of health problems. Semuels interviewed a student who has a particularly busy schedule. Her say starts off at 3pm with class, and she continued to work through the night and into the next day, “That afternoon she attended a parent-teacher conference, capping off more than 24 hours straight of work and school with no sleep.”
starting times begin at 7 A.M in the morning, making teenagers wake up around 5:00 A.M to 6:30 A.M. causing teenagers that stayed up last night weary and fatigued when they arrive at school. Sleep is an enormous part of growth, health, and prevention of stress, think about what happens when you lack sleep. Almost anybody that is exhausted will have lack of focus throughout the day. 28% of tired students tend to fall asleep in their first class causing a harmful grade. Some sleepy students do not even bother to show up to school, contributing to drop out rates and damaging grades to rise.
70 percent of teens aren't getting enough sleep. Activities also can interfere with a students sleep. Including any activity you choose to do, it may be sports, gymnastics, dance of maybe even after school club but if they end later that's a problem.
Teenagers need more time to sleep based on the development of their brains. Students should be getting eight to ten hours of sleep in every night (Wahlstrom). Due to the sleep mechanism in teens, research says that the earliest healthy wake
Lack of sleep increases students chances of depression and suicidal thoughts. It can also potentially weaken the immune system. The school day is hard enough on a child and not getting enough sleep does not make it any better. School
The biggest thing the lack of sleep causes is stress but there are also so many other things. When we have this lack of sleep there are many ways our brain is affected, such as causing the lack of focus, bad eating habits, bad conversational skills, and slow reflects . But two of the main problems that affect school life are the enlargement of the amygdala and the hippocampus shrinking. As this happens our emotions are enhanced causing us to have less patience in classroom teaching and we begin to have a harder time focusing and retaining information. These two things are mainly caused by the stress caused by the lack of sleep which can also cause
There are 24 hours in a day, 8 of those hours belong to school. From the moment when a student wakes up, they begin to prepare for school then go to school, most schools start around 8:00-9:00 am, so most students get up 1-2 hours earlier to get ready. Students need at least 8-9 hours of sleep to be able to function. With students having after school activities that take up around 2 hours, students are exhausted and when they get home all the want to do is relax, but some of them have responsibilities that they have to do, which gives them less time to relax from a long day of school. On top of having homework students end up staying up late getting all their work done, which cause them to be less focus the next day not allowing the
In fact in the same article “Why We Must - and Can - Restore Safe & Healthy School Hours” it states “Kids who are tired can't learn at their best, and sleep deprivation impairs learning, memory, and attention as much as it impairs health and overall well-being.” By the same token in the article “School Start Times Found to Affect Student Achievement” it points out that “A new study finds that delaying middle-school start times by one hour, from roughly 7:30 to 8:30 a.m., would increase standardized math and reading scores by 2 to 3 percentile points.” Finally “Learn More About Sleep and Academic Performance” says ‘A National Sleep Foundation poll reported that 28 percent of teenagers have fallen asleep in class at least once due to lack of sleep.” To sum it up lack of sleep do to early school hours can have a major tull on test scores and students
School Start Times: Waking Up to the Truth Imagine staying up until the wee hours of the morning to finish the homework that had been accumulated during the day, only to have to get up a few hours later to catch the school bus, knowing that succeeding in class the next day would be short of a miracle. For many students, this scenario is not only feared but a reality they must face. The American Academy of Pediatrics states, “About 90% of high-school-aged adolescents get insufficient sleep on school nights…”(“Early
A good night sleep is critical for a students. Without it, it will be hard to focus throughout the day and it will be difficult to pay attention. According to research, “Sleep deprivation affects a whole range of mental activities, including the ability to pay attention, verbal creativity, abstract thinking, decision making, retrieval of long-term memories, and overall mood and motivation” (Ponte). With a good night sleep people are able to process things better and over all have more motivation. This sounds great, but with the amount of homework students are receiving, the recommended eight hours is just unreasonable.
Quarter 1 Assessment: Annotated Bibliography Thesis Statement: Due to adolescent sleep patterns, school needs to start at 10:00AM Source 1: The UCLA Health website tells how teenage sleep patterns differ from adults, due to changing bodies, and internal sleep clocks. This informational database is based on college research. The title of this page is “Sleep and Teens”.
Sound familiar? This seems like an ongoing struggle for teens all across America, according to multiple sources. On average, teenagers need to get about nine and a half hours of sleep each night. “"Teenagers need over nine hours sleep a night, and it looks like a large number of teens don't get sufficient sleep ... part of that relates to the time that high schools begin," said study author Dr. Robert Vorona, an associate professor of internal medicine in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk,
It is widely known that peer pressure, drug and alcohol abuse, and reckless driving are dangers that some teenagers may face; however, there is one major, yet less publicized problem that an increasing number of teenagers are dealing with on a daily basis. Both teenagers and adults suffer from sleep deprivation, but “the problem is most acute among teens” (Richter). Sleep deprivation is being referred to as an epidemic among experts, and it can have drastic effects on a teenager’s physical, mental, and social well-being. “The most recent national poll shows that more than 87 percent of U.S. high school students get far less than the recommended eight to 10 hours of sleep each night” (Richter). Teenagers have “irregular sleep patterns” and they stay up late, affecting their “biological clocks” which can “hurt the quality of their sleep” (National Sleep Foundation).
Over and over again for countless number of years, we constantly hear that getting a good night's sleep is a key to success. However, only fifteen percent of high school students report getting eight hours of sleep on school nights. In order for students to be physically and mentally ready for a day of hard work, they need to be able to get enough sleep and this can be achieved by starting a typical school day just an hour later. The reasons for delaying the start of a school day is the fact that studies have shown fewer than half of the grade ten students get the amount of sleep they should be getting which leads to issues of teens dozing off during class time. If they can not stay awake in class, what will they learn?
One psychologist, AR Wolfson, studied a variety of scenarios with varying school bell start times and how they affect students’ bedtime. Across the board, the research showed that earlier school start times forced teens to go to bed at “unfeasible or unreasonable” (205) times, which was not always possible because students have too much going on outside of school. After school activities like music, theatre, or varsity sports can take up to five hours a day. This means that they might not get home to eat dinner and begin their homework until after 8:00 p.m. Total sleep, overall, increases when the students are allowed to sleep in later - something that many parents forget.