Snooze alarm

[cactuswatcher]

How much sleep did you get in high school? A group calling itself the "National Sleep Foundation" has decided that kids from age 11 to 17 need 9 hours of sleep a night. Now I have to agreed that 11 year-olds could certainly use that much. But, I have to question whether these people are doing science or just going through the motions and announcing their pronouncements to the press as a way of making themselves look important. I don't question that there are more kids falling asleep in class now than there were back when I was in high school. With more mothers needing to work, parental control isn't what it used to be. But, you have to understand that sleep is as much about self-control as parental control. There are more kids left to their own supervision on their sleep hours, so more kids are having trouble. But is it actually a growing problem as this group claims, or one that's actually reached a plateau that won't change much unless society changes again?

It's not as if there weren't always problems with some kids not sleeping enough. I remember a few kids telling me they got four or five hours sleep a night in my high school days. Frankly it showed. Kids did fall asleep from exhaustion in high school in those days, and it got worse in college when more kids were on their own.

According to this 'first-of-a-kind' study 17 year olds-average about 7 hours a night. In the studies that weren't so one-of-a-kind back in my day, kids were averaging about 7 hours a night. (You can see the dramatic changing trends can't you?) But, I was a slug-a-bed and got about 8 hours a night, which seemed like plenty. Seriously, expecting a 17 year-old kid who is either drinking coffee or caffeinated soda all the time to get nine hours of sleep a night is... well... dreaming.

Comments

[darbyunlimited.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree with you - sleep studies, on those rare times when you can actually get a look at the study descriptions themselves, are conclusions looking for an experimental design to bring them about.

So much of sleep is "common knowledge," with very little substantive data to support it. Overall, there are 2 main reasons why animals need sleep: a) to keep them from getting sleepy (yeah, I know, but that's really the best explanation - it's like enforced "down time," without a clear idea of the purpose of the down time); b) to, in bursts, take temporary memory storage from the last one-to-four days and subdivide it into permanent memory storage (that's what's happening when we're dreaming, kind of a "replay," broken and correlated with past events in odd ways. How much actual sleep a person needs to get that last thing done is highly variable, and probably the critical aspect that determines an individual's sleep needs.

I've been following this type of research for a long time, and there's very little in the way of new findings - it's just the same stuff in a sort of cycle.