The average teen needs 8-10 hours of sleep per night. And between 6 and 8 hours of social time, preferably unstructured. Which means they need around 14 to 18 hours to be.
All people need sleep and social time, but teenagers in particular need it more. A lot more.
Most of us are aware of how important sleep is. It is how our brains process everything we take in during the day.
Teenagers need more of it. And their brains are wired to learn socially. Which means, they take in way more from gossip about what their friends are up to or what someone meant by the word “nice” than they do from, say, algebra.
This is the minimum requirement for teenagers to learn, adjust, and develop. If we want our teens to perform at their best, this is what we should see.
Now think about an average day.
School itself takes up seven to eight hours. Plus getting ready and travel. This doesn’t include homework or extracurriculars.
Throw in a shower, making lunch, driving to and from school (more if they take the bus), and doing homework, add in sleep and social time, and you get something close to a 25- to 29-hour-day.
This is before we factor in extracurriculars or, you know, taking time to listen to music in your bedroom, sketching, or playing games.
The school day is full of structured time.
While most of us start from the assumption that school is the most important thing our young people have going, we’re actually starting from the wrong end of the equation.
We’re starting with school, adding in sports, clubs, and all the other stuff our kids want to do. And then we factor sleep into that. And if there’s any time left in the day, maybe they can talk with some friends.
In reality, however, our kids have to go in at 5:00 for mandatory pool time or weight training. Or they stay after school until 6:00 for practice.
In the fall, my daughter got home from rehearsal (they were doing Oklahoma!) at 8:30 for the two weeks before the performance and after 9:30 the week of. Then came homework. And then sleep.
We’re assuming all of these things are immutable. And sleep is a luxury?
Causing Harm and Gaining Less
We’re introducing our kids to grind culture really early. And I suppose, if this had a genuine upside, we could make some sense of it.
But it doesn’t work like that. We’re doing harm and yet not getting “better” adults. We treat it like a sacrifice on behalf of greatness, but there is no greatness, only stress.
Keeping our teens under-rested and overcommitted is causing high rates of depression and leading to the twin epidemics of anxiety and loneliness. We’re doing harm to their bodies and their minds.
But at least, they’re gaining grit and learning to persevere through hardships, right? Are they any more prepared for success in the world in spite of this? No.
Our kids are doing well at testing and struggling at life.
The problem is us
Most of the research around homework shows that we’re giving way more of it than we should. A little can help. A lot doesn’t. At all. In fact, more than an hour of homework seems to have a negative effect on learning.
And while the structure of extracurricular activities leads to a lot of great opportunities, it doesn’t count as unstructured social time. Which means that it doesn’t engage the brain to problem-solve the way a pick-up game at the park would.
We’ve engineered a flawed system to make our youth really good at a few things, then damn them for not succeeding at other things. Those things which are, unsurprisingly, the very things antithetical to the system. Famously, creativity. But also social skills, empathy, and patience.
We’re overworking our kids, overcommitting them, depriving them of sleep and social time, and preventing them from engaging in activities which enhance their emotional and spiritual well-being.
Let’s not pretend this system we’re forcing our kids to navigate gave the world Shakespeare or Bach. We built this over the last few decades.
Which means we made it.
So let’s change it.
This is a good time to share again Seth Godin’s seminal work: Stop Stealing Dreams. Check it out.