Teens are sleeping less – but there's a surprisingly easy fix
Jean Twenge, San Diego State University Something is stealing teens’ sleep. In a newly released analysis of two large national surveys , my co-authors and I found that the number of U.S. teens who reported sleeping less than seven hours a night jumped 22 percent between 2012 and 2015. Sleep experts agree that teens need at least nine hours of sleep a night . But by 2015, 43 percent of teens reported sleeping less than seven hours a night on most nights – meaning almost half of U.S. teens are significantly sleep-deprived. What could have raised sleep deprivation among teens to such unprecedented levels? Some factors are easy to rule out. For example, we found that the amount of time teens spent working, doing homework and participating in extracurricular activities held steady during those years. But there was one large change in teens’ lives between 2012 and 2015: More owned smartphones. It starts as an alarm clock… Today’s teens – whom I call “iGen” – a...