Teen Sleep Problems Are Hurting Academics and Wellness

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Teens are sleeping less than ever before, and the impact is showing up in exhausted students’ ability to learn and focus in school, their mental health, and their overall well-being.

A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics shows a steady decline in teens (age 12-19) getting at least seven hours of sleep every day across three decades, with the most recent data collected, from 2021-23, being the lowest on record. A lack of sleep affects how teens retain information, how productive they are, and how they manage their emotions and stress.

“Sleep can be seen as a resource that confers advantages for health, learning, and development,” according to the report.

The University of Minnesota School of Public Health researchers analyzed data from the Monitoring the Future survey, which collected information from over 400,000 teens across the nation from 1991 through 2023. To gauge sleep cycles over time, researchers focused on two questions: how often teens reported getting at least seven hours of sleep per night and how often they were getting less sleep than they should.

During the most recent period, 2021–23, only 37% of teens ages 12–13 reported getting at least 7 hours of sleep per night. The percentage of 18-19 year olds who reported the same is lower (22%). The study also found Black and white teens in 1991-95 were equally likely to report 7 or more hours of sleep per night, but by 2023, Black teens were less likely to report meeting that mark.

Adolescents should get between eight and 10 hours of sleep per night—that’s considered optimal, says Rachel Widome, a professor in the division of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and a lead author of the study.

“People think that adolescents need dramatically less sleep than school-aged kids, and that’s not the truth,” she said. “They need a little bit less, but it’s still more than what we would recommend for adults.”

In a conversation with Education Week, Widome discussed why teens are getting less sleep today than in previous decades and what schools can do to help.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are the main points you would like the public and school officials to take away from the study?

Adolescents in the United States are not getting enough sleep, and the problem has gotten worse over time, especially in recent years.

We’re seeing disparities where adolescents who come from households with greater social advantage—maybe they have parents that went to college—are more likely to report getting enough sleep [than] households that might face disadvantage or come from or have marginalized identities.

Specifically with the Black-white inequity. In the 90s, Black [and] white adolescents were equally likely to report that they got at least seven hours of sleep. However, in the most recent time period, 2021-2023, Black adolescents were less likely to report that they were getting as much sleep as white adolescents—that particular disparity that we’re seeing now wasn’t always like that.

I view sleep as a resource, like money or social connections. We have a population that already is experiencing some social disadvantage—this is yet another resource that they have less access to, which is not a good thing.

What are the factors negatively impacting teens’ sleep?

When kids hit puberty, there’s a lot that goes on in their families, social life, and academic life. They’re getting more homework, they have more extracurricular activities, or family responsibilities. They might have jobs, they might have increasing social pressures to do more, and stay up late.

There’s a lot of things developmentally that happen around the time of adolescence that compete for their time and can eat into sleep; that’s something that has existed for generations.

I view sleep as a resource, like money or social connections.

What’s different now?

The big question is, why are we seeing sleep declining in recent years? There are a lot of things that we can point to that have been evolving in the last decade that influence teen sleep.

These include social media exploding, screens becoming super ubiquitous in teens’ lives, more smartphones, more screen use in school, and homework [done more on laptops]. Screens can always be distracting, even if they’re being used for educational purposes.

There’s also been a lot going on in the past five to 10 years in society that puts a lot of stress on people. We have the pandemic, periods of social unrest, so there’s a lot of stressors too that might be influencing sleep as well.

What are the long-term effects of getting less sleep?

People think of sleep as this kind of disposable thing: it’s not really necessary, it kind of makes your life a little bit more pleasant or comfortable, because it feels miserable to be tired the day after you don’t sleep, you can just tough it out.

The reality is that not getting enough sleep has greater implications than just temporary discomfort the next day. For adolescents who aren’t getting as much sleep, they’re [more vulnerable to] a variety of risks that we don’t like to see, like a greater risk for injury from accidents. Mental health suffers when you’re not getting enough sleep, and we also know from the research that not getting enough sleep chronically in adolescence and through adulthood puts you at greater risk for a variety of chronic diseases.

This idea that sleep is disposable and adolescence is about being tired is just a really bad way to do things. We are putting a generation of kids at risk of harming their well-being by just thinking that sleep is no big deal, and they don’t need it.

I talk to so many people who say, “Oh man, I was like tired every single day of high school, it is just the way it was.” Why are we accepting of this? We’re not accepting of kids [not getting] enough food or other things they need.

Mansfield Senior High School senior Talitha Cameron, 18, listens during her health class on sleep, in Mansfield, Ohio, Friday, Dec. 6, 2024.
Phil Long/AP

What can schools do to make sure that kids are getting adequate sleep?

One of the most important things that you can do is to have later school start times. In the United States, high school starts incredibly early. Despite there being a body of research that shows that adolescents get more sleep if they have a later school start time, that is not the reality for a lot of kids. A lot of kids still are getting up super early, and that is cutting into their sleep.

I would like to see schools adopt what I’ve called a culture of sleep. If you have a school culture that values sleep and thinks of it as a key piece to adolescence well-being and learning development, a lot of things fall into place.

[Schools can] no longer have this macho culture about taking all the AP classes, staying up all night, having situations where even adults often brag about how little sleep they got. [It’s also about] not having assignments being so screen-based, and learning-management systems having taken over schools, like assignments are sometimes due at midnight. Why have assignments due at midnight? That’s trying to encourage people to stay [up] until midnight, right until they’re due.