Teens who want to sleep late have some experts on their side

If your teenager is a real night owl, the kind who likes to hit the snooze button on school days and sleep in on the weekends, Dr. Edward O'Malley has a diagnosis: "That's a completely normal teen," says O'Malley, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Conn.

"Teenagers," he explains, "are hard-wired to have a different sleep cycle than adults or younger children. It's a biological reality that they want to go to bed later and sleep later." What's not normal, says O'Malley, is expecting the typical teen to get up at the first light of day, head off to school and function at peak levels on the road and in class.

Especially when research suggests adolescents need a minimum of 9.25 hours of sleep a night.

One reason teens are not getting that kind of quality shut-eye is the early start of the school day, O'Malley says.

For O'Malley and other sleep experts, getting school districts to consider changing their start times has become something of a mission.

"Parents sort of accept that kids have to keep these crazy schedules to succeed," says Dr. Saul Rothenberg, who is affiliated with Greenwich Hospital's Sleep Center in Greenwich, Conn. "For a lot of kids and their families, there is no room in their long list of priorities for sleep. Instead, it's, 'I have to go to ballet. I have to go to soccer. I have six or seven hours of homework.' Parents tolerate it because they think that kind of pressure is normal and they almost expect it."

Rothenberg says parents need to ask some tough questions of their teens -- and themselves -- if teens are coming up on the short end of a good night's sleep. Take note of whether you have "to pry them out of bed in the morning," he says.

"If a kid is staying up past midnight to do his homework, something's got to give," Rothenberg says. "And the first place I would start to look is at afterschool activities."

O'Malley has been traveling Connecticut in recent months, visiting any school district willing to consider the problems he says are wrought by teenage sleep-deprivation, including inattention in school, poor grades, depression, caffeine dependence and, in the worst cases, auto accidents.

O'Malley notes that national statistics show that most teenage car wrecks don't happen at night but between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., "when they are going to school." Two months ago, People magazine told the story of a 16-year-old high schooler from New Mexico who crashed his car when he fell asleep at the wheel on the way home from an alcohol-free outing with friends. His classmates chipped in their prom money to pay his funeral expenses.

School start-times controversy"It's not an uncommon story, unfortunately. We know a lot of teenage accidents involve falling asleep at the wheel because there are not any skid marks," Rothenberg says. "And if you add alcohol into the mix, then sleep-deprivation is even more toxic."

Rothenberg, who treats adolescents in his private practice, says parents often bring him teens to evaluate and counsel when they've started to have difficulties in school. "Sometimes sleep-deprivation is a major component of what they're dealing with, but nobody realizes it," he says.

While some school districts have taken heed and are considering altering their start times, not every community is receptive.

"It's not always a popular subject," concedes O'Malley, who says factors ranging from altering school-bus schedules to extracurricular activities are among the reasons school districts use to defend their early high school start times. While many school systems argue that parents prefer to send younger children to school later than adolescents, O'Malley notes that children in elementary school are much less affected by an early start time. "They naturally get up earlier," he says. "Really the ideal solution, in many communities, would simply be to switch the times the younger children start with the times the older children start." Some school districts counter that it's not that simple.

"The biggest problem we see is how [altering start times] would interfere with after-school activities," says Sarah Arnold, spokeswoman for the board of education in Stamford, Conn. "The school day is already long, and the consideration is that you might be extending it into the early evening for kids who participate in sports and other activities."

Others argue that a 30- to 40-minute delay wouldn't be terribly significant, so there's no point in causing so much disruption.

"A half-hour may not seem like that much, but the effect I'm talking about is cumulative," O'Malley says. Let a teen sleep an extra 45 minutes a day and that's 2 1/2 hours a week. "Add that up over the course of a year and the impact is huge," he says. "It would make a real difference in the quality of their lives."