New Trier High School, on the Northshore of Chicago, (www.newtrier.k12.il.us) is one the most prestigious public high schools in the country. The students there have a record of high academic achievement. I was surprised to learn that they are still starting their “early bird” class at the unreasonable hour of 7:10 am.
A high percentage of adolescents becomes evening types and a significant number of them become true night owls who can’t go to sleep before 1 or 2 in the morning. When this sleep pattern interferes with a person’s work, school or social life, we then classify it as a sleep disorder, specifically, it is a circadian rhythm sleep disorder called Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder.
The exact prevalence in the population is unknown, but it is much more common in adolescents and young adults with an estimated prevalence of 15%. I am starting to see alot of teenagers in my clinic who have this disorder and for some it can have devastating scholastic consequences. One junior in high school had to drop out of her high school and start an on-line high school curriculum because she could not get up and go to school. She started failing classes even though she had been a straight-A student. Her grades picked up again once she could sleep in and do her studying later in the day, but I doubt that anyone would think that it is an optimal situation to have a teen staying home all day alone learning on a computer.
It has been a mission among many sleep physicians to try to convince school administrators that they would have a healthier, happier and smarter student body if they would start the teens at a later time. I hope to reach out to both parents and educators in the next school year either via lectures or webinars in order to inform them about the importance of sleep.
I think that many people say that they know sleep is important, but then they organize their lives such that sleep has very little priority. There is also a lack of knowledge about how much sleep children and teens need in order to function at their very best. For example, most people don’t realize that teens need an average of 9-9.5 hours of sleep per night.
