My two older little dudes, Sarcasmo and Zippy the Monkey Boy, both tend to really hate me when the clock rolls around to 9 p.m. on weeknights during the school year. That’s when they have to be in bed. I don’t care how old they are. We feel like teenagers need as much sleep as possible and, considering that Sarcasmo has to get up at 6 a.m. every school day, that means getting an early start on bedtime.
While I’ve always felt an early bedtime was a good thing for the little dudes (not least because it allowed me to have a little adult time without having to worry about little dudes), I never actually had any evidence to back it up. And we all know how much teenagers rely on evidence when they’re trying to argue their case to change a rule. Unless, of course, the evidence is against them and then it doesn’t matter. Anyway, it looks like I’ve actually got the goods on them now.
A recent study said that teenagers that stay up late (after midnight) on school nights are more likely to be clinically depressed or suicidal than are those teens with parents who enforce an earlier bedtime. All of which boils down to this: I was right. Again. Hah!
Not that that’s important. You know, considering.
The findings are the first to examine bedtimes’ effects on kids’ mental health — and the results are noteworthy. Middle- and high-schoolers whose parents don’t require them to be in bed before midnight on school nights are 42% more likely to be depressed than teens whose parents require a 10 p.m. or earlier bedtime. And teens who are allowed to stay up late are 30% more likely to have had suicidal thoughts in the past year.
I probably don’t have to spell this out for you, but, considering this is a written post and pretty much all of it has to be spelled out, I think I’ll go ahead. In plain language, getting teenagers to bed earlier is better for their health. Like their adult counterparts, teenagers need more sleep than they’re getting. And it’s probably worse than the researchers think it is since the data for this study was taken from information gathered in the mid-1990s.
The new data come from analyses of NIH surveys from 1994 to 1996, but. . . the disparities between teens with and without prescribed bedtimes are even greater today, given greater distractions in their lives. In 1996, for instance, teens couldn’t stay up late texting friends and checking Facebook pages.
All of which makes me even more glad that I make the little dudes turn off their phones and put them away outside their bedrooms during the night. It’s not that I don’t trust the, it’s just that I don’t. . . trust them. Remember, they’re teenagers. They don’t have a well-developed frontal lobe, which means they can’t really think through anything all the way to its logical end.
So I can’t wait to actually show the older little dudes this information. I might actually win an argument without them muttering imprecations beneath their breath about how stupid it is that they have to follow the rules of someone who’s so obviously out of touch with modern reality. Yeah, they actually do mean me. Hard to believe, yeah?
– Richard
Tags: A Dude's Guide to Kids, Adult, Adult Counterparts, Adult Time, bed, Bedtime, clock, Depression, dude, facebook, Freak, Freaky Friday, friend, Friends, Frontal Lobe, hate, health, High Schoolers, information, kid, kids, little dude, little dudes, men, Mental Health, Monkey Boy, parents, Plain Language, research, Researcher, richard, sarcasm, Sarcasmo, school, School Nights, School Year, sleep, study, Stupid, Suicidal Thoughts, Teen Sleep, teenager, teenagers, teens, texting
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