Left to the Wrong Devices: How Your Teen’s Sleep is Suffering

When I was 15 there were exactly two ways to connect with your friends: seeing them in person, or talking on the phone.

This was in the 80’s. If you were lucky, your house had a phone with a big long cord that you could take into your room. Your parents, siblings or pets were sure to trip over it, leading to the inevitable, “You’re spending to much time on that darn phone!” tirade.

At 9PM at our house, the phone option was shut down. No more incoming phone calls were accepted. The social options were over, and it was time to go to bed. There was no Internet. No Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat or Twitter.

Now? Every single teen has their own phone with seemingly unlimited options for connection and communication.

They have to keep up their “streaks”, make sure they are posting to their wall, ensure they are giving their friends enough “likes”. And they do it on multiple platforms for dozens of friends at a time.

Reduced Sleep has Health Consequences

It would be easy to dismiss this as a “when I was your age” rant, but in 15 years of practice I have seen a change in my teen patients around sleep and mood. Of course teens want to stay up later and sleep in. Of course they can be moody and prickly. They are teens, after all.

But typical teen moodiness is not what I’m talking about.

We are seeing more teens (and pre-teens) with true insomnia, anxiety and mood disorders than we ever did 15 years ago. A recent study about mobile phone use and teens has recently confirmed what I already thought to be true: Kids and teens with access to tablets and smartphones at bedtime sleep less and are sleepier during the day.

This review article looked at 20 previous studies which, when combined, covered more the 125,000 kids. The reviewers excluded studies that looked at TV or personal computer use. So this wasn’t about “screen time”. It was about the engagement of using a tablet or smartphone.

Texting vs Talking

With a good old-fashioned phone conversation, there is a beginning, a middle and an end. In the texting or social media world, conversations can keep going all night. And if you get up for a pee in the middle of the night? Check your phone for the time and 15 new notifications draw you right back in.

Add to that the fact that your teen can re-engage without disrupting anyone in the house. When we were kids, you would never phone a friend at 3AM–you’d wake the whole house up and there would be consequences for that!

How to Help Your Teens

So how do we help our teenagers? We can’t take the smartphones away – that would be tantamount to putting them on a desert island.  Connecting to their friends is VERY important to teens and is an important put of how they develop their autonomous and independent selves.

What we can do is help develop skills and boundaries around the use of these great tools of communication and connection.

  • Set a “finish” time. When I was a kid, phone use was done at 9PM. Why not set a time for conversations to be over with smartphones as well? This allows your teen to finish all their conversations. Their friends know that they are off-line at a certain time and there is no possibility of connecting.
  • Get the technology out of the bedroom. Bedrooms are made for sleeping and reading when you are a teenager. Screens, phones, homework, really anything that engages their brains should be left to other rooms of the house.
  • Practice not being connected. Just because you can connect – doesn’t mean you should. Go for a walk with your teen and leave the phone at home. Insist they get a weekend job, where using their phone is not allowed or not possible. Support their schools in no-phone policies in class.

Kids need to experience the joy of solitude, quiet and focus, but may not be able to choose that on their own…hence one more tip:

  • Model the behaviour you want to see. Practice improving your own sleep and device-free time, too! Remember, kids do as you do, not as you say…:)