Why Teen Sleep Matters -

When asked to assess the current state of teen sleep today, psychotherapist, Heather Turgeon does not hesitate. “It’s not good,” she says. “It’s really not good.”

Increasingly, sleep appears to be a luxury rather than a necessity—especially for teenagers.

“Teens are really the ones who need our help the most,” Turgeon, co-author of Generation Sleepless, told Lianne Castelino during an interview for whereparentstalk.stagingserver.cloud/.

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Welcome to Where Parents Talk, my name is Lianne Castelino.
Our guest today is a psychotherapist and a registered marriage and family therapist who has a particular focus on sleep and parenting. Heather Turgeon is also an author. Her most recent book, co authored with Julie Wright, is called Generation sleepless, why teens and tweens aren’t sleeping enough, and how we can help them. Heather is also a mother of two,
and she joins us today from Los Angeles.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Oh, thanks. I’m so happy to be here,
Heather. I wonder if you could set the scene for us, because you’re looking at this question of sleep among tweens teens, really, kids in general, from multiple different lenses, as a mother, as somebody with a clinical practice, as a psychotherapist and a registered marriage and family therapist, how would you describe the current state of sleep
as It pertains to tweens and teens.
Oh, it’s not good. It’s really not good. And Julie and I have been working with families for many years on sleep. We wrote our first book was about babies and little kids called the happy sleeper. We worked with, you know, parent, and we still do with parents of young ones for many years. And then as our practice expanded and we started, you know, following more of the research, we kind of looked around and we’re like, gosh, the teens are really the ones who need our help the most. They turn out to be the most sleep deprived segment of the population. They’re the most sleep deprived of any generation in history. In human history, there’s never been a group of individuals as sleep deprived as today’s teenagers, and overlapping with that, what we’re seeing in terms of the mental health issues that have you know, been so widely discussed, those two trends are highly connected, extremely interconnected. So when we looked at that, we thought, well, this is what we really need. This is an urgent, you know, when, when our kids are little, we know how important sleep is, and we are so impacted by when our little kids don’t sleep, so we’re desperate for the information. But then, as kids get older, parents sort of either, you know, start forgetting that it’s important, or they feel like, well, well, my teen is so busy, like, what am I supposed to do? Or they go to bed before their teenager does, and meanwhile, these poor teens are missing I mean, teenagers need an average of nine and a quarter hours of sleep. They’re getting around six. So that’s three and a half hours almost of missing sleep every night for the average teenager.
So I guess it really begs the question, if
we break it down, first of all, how did we get here? And I understand that you know, you’re, you’re the topic has been described as a silent epidemic. So why is it a silent epidemic? And
how did we get here? We
got here through, we call it a perfect storm of factors. So we have, if you imagine teenagers sleep as being nine and a quarter hours on the bedtime end, we have a shift in the biological clock that naturally happens for teenagers. They have about two hours of a natural shift in their circadian rhythm, meaning completely natural for the average teen to be two out, two hours delayed and wanting to fall asleep, so they don’t get tired until two hours later than they used to, and they don’t want to wake up, and they don’t feel alert, and their brains are not as active two hours later in the morning. So you have this shift in the period of sleep, then you have technology that’s a huge impact you have the activities and just the general workload of a teenager, they’re busy, they’re social, and so all of those things push their bedtime later, and then you had on the other end, at least in this country, we have a huge problem with early start times for teenagers. So their morning start times are way too early for their biological rhythms. So those forces have been, you know, working for sort of decades, I would say, to whittle away at teenagers sleep. The smartphone definitely jumped that that decline. So when the smartphone became really, you know, just a an appendage for all of us, which was, you know, like the saturation point for smartphones, you see a dip, like teenagers sleep really tanks at that point. So smartphones are definitely, you know, as any parent knows, and I’m included, that’s a real deterrent. So, and it’s silent, because, again, lots of teens can muscle through, although it shows in their in their mental health, but they’re tough and they can muscle through, except that their mental and physical health is deteriorate is, you know, not optimal when they’re sleep deprived. So they seem tough and they start their day and we wonder. Like, why are they grumpy? Like, why, you know, why is my team not talking to me? Why do they seem, you know, like, difficult to interact with? Um, they’re sleep deprived. They’re massively sleep deprived, and it’s accumulating over the week, you know. And sometimes they sleep in, you know, really late one day to try to make up for it. But I think that’s why it’s silent.
You know? It’s really interesting, because many parents struggle with this in their homes, regardless of the age of their children. And you know, you, you, you talk about grumpiness as an example of how a lack of sleep can affect a teen’s mental health. Do you have any other examples that maybe can be tangible, so that parents, if they see it, can sort of relate to it. Yeah,
well, a teenager who, you know, seems like they’re sleeping okay, but then you notice that on Saturday morning, they sleep until one in the afternoon. That’s a teen who’s making up for a lot of lost sleep, a teenager whose schedule is moving around a lot. So like they’re, they have to get up at 630 for school every morning, and then maybe they’re taking a nap in the afternoon. And then some nights, they’re staying up really late, and other nights, you know, they’re, they’re not, and then they have this big sleep in on the weekend. That would be a definite. And I do think that the mental health aspect is something you know, if you feel like your child’s anxiety is high and it feels out of proportion, it’s something to think about. Are they sleeping enough? Because we do need sleep to be able to regulate our feelings and keep our feelings in check and know when something is a big deal or when it’s not a big deal, our barometer for what’s a big deal kind of goes out of whack when we’re not sleeping enough so. And then also kids who fall asleep in the car, you know, like you’re you’re going, going, going. And then you get in the car and you can just pass out at any point. And also teens who are drinking energy drinks, which are really pretty common, they’re just trying to stay awake because they’re not sleeping enough, so they’re drinking coffee or they’re drinking an energy drink.
So along those same lines, do you have examples that you can share with us with respect to sleep deprivation in a teen and how it affects their physical health?
Physical health is something you know, for example, if you have there’s certain things that are short term obvious, and then there’s long term consequences of sleep deprivation that are harder to quantify, because we don’t, you know, we’re just talking about cardiovascular risk, for example, for the future. That’s not something we can see right now, but things that you can see are, for example, injuries like athletes who have chronic injuries, who have trouble getting recovering from injuries. Um, sleep deprivation is very closely tied to risk of injury, and also, you need growth hormone during the night to repair your injuries. So for athletes, high school athletes who are not, you know, feeling like like, Why do I keep hurting my shoulder? Why does my tennis? You know, I’m playing tennis, but why does my shoulder keep hurting?
Those are some of the physical
you know, signs that that sleep deprivation is a problem. You can also look at immune function and see that when we’re not sleeping enough, we’re more likely to get sick and we don’t recover as quickly.
Along those same lines, I guess for some parents who don’t sleep enough themselves, you know you have to make the case to them before they’re able to support their children. Can you take us through Heather, what is happening when we’re sleeping, to our bodies, to our brains? That maybe really is important for those individuals and all of us, really to understand.
Yeah, so the first thing to know about sleep is that it’s not rest. So this is kind of a fundamental shift in how you think about sleep. You don’t experience sleep because you’re not conscious, so you don’t kind of appreciate all the work that’s going on during sleep. But I think it’s helpful to think about sleep as not being a time that your brain shuts off, but that a time that certain parts of your brain are really firing extra hard. They’re going extra hard in a way that they don’t during the day, because there’s really important work that happens during sleep. So for example, your memories are being shuttled from one place to another, from short term memory into long term memory. So for students, for for high school students, this is really important. If you’re learning a lot which that you are, you need somewhere to put that memory. You need to take that information and put it somewhere. And that happens during sleep. It goes from short term active memories into the long term memory. And I mean, all kinds of things are happening. Your brain is sort of getting there’s a system in the brain that cleanses during sleep. This is a system called the glymphatic system. It’s like the lymphatic system, but it’s your brain. Uh, shuttling toxins out. So when you fall asleep, your brain has this way of washing, kind of like a dishwasher. While you’re sleeping, it’s washing the toxins out. It’s washing these byproducts of activity during the day out. So when you wake up and you haven’t slept enough, and you feel like cloudy and just kind of like, like, that’s your brain not being clean. It’s not getting the time that it needs to flush those toxins out fully. So that’s a real visual, I think, representation that really resonates with teens, too, when we tell them that they’re like, oh my god, that makes so much sense,
absolutely. And then on top of that, we’re talking about an age and stage of life where they’re developing and changing, you know, physiologically and a whole other list of ways. Is it more? Is sleep deprivation more pronounced in this age group than, let’s
say, others because of everything you’ve just described?
Absolutely, it’s way, way more pronounced. So when you look at the percentage of kids who are asleep, for example, elementary school kids, about 70% of them get healthy sleep, but only about five to 10% of high schoolers get healthy sleep, and the amount of sleep they’re missing is way more. So if they, average, need one and a sorry, nine and a quarter hours of sleep, but they’re getting six. That’s the average amount that a high schooler is getting by about nine by 10th grade, they’re getting about six hours of sleep. So that’s three and a quarter hours of sleep deprivation accumulating every night. And like you’re saying, they’re in this period of massive brain growth and reorganization of the brain, so it’s sort of like a second wave of of reorganization, much like when they’re the zero to three age and their brains are changing so much and restructuring. It happens again in adolescence, and we know that that brain growth is so important and so much of that work happens during sleep. So yes, they’re missing way more sleep than we are, and their sleep is arguably way more important than ours because of all the work that they have to do in the night to restructure their brains.
So are the side effects of a lack of sleep also more pronounced than in the teenage and tween brain.
I think so. I mean, when you consider that, you know, for example, teenagers who sleep you know, six hours or less are somewhere around double as likely to say that they have thoughts of hurting themselves, and the rates of depression and anxiety really skyrocket during in that, you know, pattern of missing that much sleep. And when you consider how much we care about our kids mental health and how we prioritize that, and we puzzle over it, and we think, what can we do to support them? You know, parents are always trying to work on how to support their kids, and this is a fundamental piece of their foundation of their mental health. So yeah, I think that the side effects are really drastic.
It’s so interesting because there has been so much research around this area of sleep, certainly in the last several years. So it’s not new to most of us, if you’ve been paying attention, I wonder, in the course of writing generation sleepless, which came out in 2022 but is recently available in paperback format, what struck you Heather, as a health professional in this space, as a mother and all that again, the different things that you do.
What struck you in the research?
Well, I think we started doing the research before covid, and covid was an interesting experiment in what happens when you lose an interesting experiment in lots of ways, what happens when you lose your daily routine. You know, a lot of kids were initially sleeping more because they didn’t have to get up for school. And then technology kind of just really saturated our lives much more. And then teenagers were kind of back to where they started not sleeping enough and feeling more isolated and like they had lost the rhythms of their daily life, which is so important for sleep. You know, get up, get out in the sun, be, you know, have your ritual, be out with in the world. And all these kind of markers and signposts for how your day goes is really important to your but your internal clock. So they really lost a lot of that. But I think in in maybe the last year or two, I would say that the awareness, and I hope we’ve been able to contribute to this, the awareness of sleep has been growing for teenagers. It’s definitely been growing for adults. Like, there’s definitely a resurgence, or, like, a new understanding of how much sleep is important to our health. But I do think teenagers are. Still not quite benefiting from that as much as adults are, but there is more of an awareness. I’m hearing, you know, my son, who’s 16, I’m hearing from his friends that they’re actually they understand, like his friend told me the other night, that he needs to go to bed by 10, because the most growth hormone is secreted between 10 and 12, and he really needs to get that growth hormone in, and he needs to go to bed at 10. And I was like, yes, yes. It’s so true, and it’s great that that that information is out there
along those lines, with respect to, you know, trying to shift that narrative in a home, trying to get tweens and teens and kids in general to understand for their own lives how to adopt healthy sleeping habits, a habit at the best of times is hard to to adopt. What do you suggest in terms of, you know, laying this out for parents and how they can support their kids to create healthy sleep habits? Yeah,
so if you have a tween, then I would say, you want to be able to hold the structure of good sleep habits. So you want to have family practices that involve like putting your you know, everybody park your phone. We’re going to have wind down time we say good night to technology. You want to model those habits and really hold on to it, and hold on to a bedtime and a bedtime routine. When, when you have a tween, when your kids are older, like 15 or so, you start to lose control of the thing, of the basic things, you start to like, not have the control anymore. And it’s really hard. And at that point, I would say the most important thing is to have conversations that inspire your teenager’s self motivation, because they have to feel it themselves, or else you might be able to control certain things, but then they’re gonna stay up later than you, and then they’re gonna go to college, and then you’re not gonna have any control. So you have to have conversations that start with you listening. So we always incur and in generation sleepless, we have a whole chapter dedicated to communication with teenagers, because we have to listen first and figure out what is important to them and follow their lead and try to inspire them with whatever that is. So if you have an athlete, that’s an in if you have a kid who really wants to, you know, get good grades. Then you talk more about that. Or somebody who’s not feeling like as confident or as happy, we can talk about that, follow what they’re what they’re interested in, and where their mind is going, and then weave in how sleep can help. That’s really important. Otherwise, all these habits kind of just start to fall apart for them because they have to feel it themselves. And then, in the book, we have five habits of happy sleepers, and we have ways for families to do that together, or just kids to do it on their own, and a sleep challenge to modify your sleep habits and track them.
Let’s break down some of the you know, issues and contributing factors to sleep deprivation a little bit. And I wonder if you could just provide a quick tip or two, if you could screen time you talked earlier about, you know, the wind down period, that’s required. But what in general, should parents know about screen time as it relates to trying to create those healthy sleep habits for tweens and teens.

I would say that it’s screens affect our sleep in in a few different ways, and so it’s important to think about those multiple ways, because that we hear a lot about blue light, which is sort of a thing. It’s sort of a thing, but it’s not quite as much of a thing as people think. You don’t want to have a ton of light in your home during wind down time. So you do want to lower the overhead lights and just have a couple of lamps on. Wind down time, as we describe it in the book, is one one hour before bedtime. So if your bedtime is 10, your wind down time starts at nine. You do want to lower the lights and not have bright overhead lights on, and you want to just opt for watching TV, maybe at a distance, so not having a close up screen, and that blue light is is somewhat of a thing, but it’s not the only thing, the more important thing for teenagers is that and for actually all of us. Technology is so engaging that it’s hard to put down. It just is. Everybody can identify with that. There’s just one more thing to watch. There’s one more scroll, there’s one more thing that, or for teenagers, because they’re so social, it’s one more text. It’s one it’s I can’t say goodnight to my friend. I can’t stop FaceTiming them. I need to know. I need to respond. I need to I’m wondering what they’re doing so that shutting down, so that the wind down time and saying good night to technology, is not just about blue light activation and all that stuff and melatonin. It’s really about giving your brain permission to relax, because teens. Don’t feel like they can relax. They have so much going on. So that’s a really important thing to think about, is, is saying good night to the to the rest of the world, basically. And we all need that. We we can all kind of benefit from that at any age. But I think teenagers need it. You know, even more than we do.
How does a parent who perhaps is really all over this topic in their house and has established a wind down time combat other kids who don’t have this going on in their homes and now are impacting their kids, be it screen time, smartphone time or social media?
That’s a great question. I would say, you know, I’ve said to my kids like, you know, you, you, I understand. You want to always start with the understanding piece with the, we call it the attune step. So don’t just dismiss them right away. Like, you’ll, you’ll see them in the morning, like, don’t, I think that’s usually our, our go to is like, to, you know, just to go to what you think and not to listen first. So practice a tuning and, like, ask a couple of questions about that. What is it that you’re wanting to know from your friend? Like, is there something going on? I want to hear I want, I want to understand what you’re saying and then reflect it back to them. So you’re saying that what I’m that when you turn off your phone, it feels like you’re going to miss out, or you’re going to your friend might need you and you’re not there. Like, really try to lean into that first and then say something like, you know, I know it feels like that, and I totally understand, but your brain really needs permission to sleep, and you will be such a better friend if you can feel positive and optimistic tomorrow, and like you’ve really got you’ve taken care of yourself and you know, or whatever it is that you want to say about, you know, maybe you if you want to stop studying at a certain point, because you’re going to do better on your test, if you get a good night’s sleep, you give them the information, But listening first, I would say is the key.

Is there something that you uncovered, Heather in either the research, through the research for the book, in your own clinical practice or your own lived experience, that really is a compelling argument or a compelling point to make to a tween or teen that kind of really gets them to understand, in a granular way, the impact of sleep debt on their lives.
I would say there are two things that are sort of specific, and I really think this depends on the teen, so you have to figure out what your teen is interested in and frame it in their ways. But I would say that the the athletic piece has been extremely compelling for dancers, for kids who play any sport, for gymnasts, for all the kids who are active or just want, you know, to do well in their sport. You know, you can look at how people like LeBron James talk about sleep. It is absolutely integral to athletic training. And you can, you know, tell the or if kids want to grow tall, lots of kids want to grow tall, tell them that the first two hours of the night, from 10 to 12 are when you get your the most growth hormone. If you’re awake during that time you’re not getting that growth hormone. So if you want to grow go to bed before 10, and then I think that that sort of washing the brain out. If you look at the glymphatic system, and you look at it online together, and you see these videos of when we do talks at high schools, or actually any talks that we give we always show a video of what happens in the brain, that machine washing and it really kind of vision. It really, kind of brings it home for a lot of teenagers.
You also mentioned early school start times, which certainly has gotten a lot of headlines over the last several years, more in the United States, I would say, than in Canada. What would you like to say about that? In terms of we’ve talked about the household piece and what we can do in our own homes, but in terms of policy makers sleep as it relates to this age group that we’re talking about, what would you like to see done there?

Yeah, well, what we did in California, which is the the state of California now has a law that you cannot start school, high school before 830 in the morning. So for a lot of schools, that was really a big change. And all the research backs up that kids, you know, get sick less often. They overall the mental I mean, for me, the most compelling thing is that the mental health of teenagers goes up. There are fewer kids saying that they feel hopeless. There are fewer kids saying they feel sad and like they have thoughts, you know, darker thoughts when start times are moved to me, that’s a no brainer. And so I think having, you know, hopefully more. Our states are going to move towards that 830, or later as a start time. But it really is. It’s like it’s been a struggle, because change is hard. People just fundamentally don’t like change, and there’s been resistance to it. But you know, in my own kids high schools, when I talk to parents, they’re like, this is wonderful. It feels humane. It feels better. My kids are not as you know. It’s not as hard to peel them out of bed in the morning, and it just makes sense.
Heather, do you believe that educators, teachers themselves have a role to play when we talk about generation sleepless teens and tweens.
I think that it’s fun for educators and and helpful to integrate sleep information into different classes. Like you imagine it being in health class, but I, you know, I would like to see it in biology class. I’d like to see it in, you know, other classes that just make it as part of a basic, you know, way that we take care of our brains and bodies. So, you know, I think that that’s that can be part of the curriculum, and also getting everybody on board. So when we work with schools, we try to make, we don’t just put it all on the parents. We don’t want to be like, you know, this is all your your job, and now you have to fix this. That’s another thing that’s on your plate. We talk to the kids. We want to get the common language between the kids and the parents and the school so that they can work as a system. And that’s really the most effective way to move kids into getting more sleep, is for everybody to be involved
in your clinical practice, in
the talks that you give, in the you know, with the people that you meet, are there certain trends or common obstacles that you’re hearing from parents around this topic, and how to create self motivated kids as it relates to their own sleep?
And what are some of those common obstacles?
The obstacles, I suppose, are technology. That’s a big obstacle, because it’s like, you know, it’s just so woven into teenagers daily lives. So I think that parents being, not being night owls. So most parents, you know, because, like I said, adolescents, we shift in our internal clock two hours later, but then we shift back when we’re adults. So somewhere around age 25 we we shift back into being more morning people overall. So it’s a huge obstacle when you feel tired at 930 and your teenager is like, just ramping up. They’re like, Oh, I’m just going to start doing this whole I have this whole other chapter of my life now where I’m going to talk to my friends and do my homework and be in my room, and this is this whole other you know, so that’s that’s really a challenge. And I think that another challenge is that technology is so captivating that it makes kids procrastinate. It’s harder to get your work done and sort of pack away everything in your life early in the evening so that you can wind down in time to fall asleep on time. So technology tends to delay everything. Because, you know, it’s just harder to be productive. I see kids with, you know, homework open, and and their and their phone going, and they’re trying to multitask, and it just makes everything take longer, so then everything just gets pushed out into the evening.
That’s a really interesting point. I don’t think parents who see that happening, if it looks like it seems to be working, ever contest like, how much actual work is really going on in terms of delaying that work getting done. Heather, what would you want parents to take away from generation sleepless?
I would say that, you know, remember how important you felt sleep was when you had a toddler, when you’re like, oh my gosh, my toddler needs a nap. I know they need a nap because their brains are growing, because I can see how it affects their behavior, and I know how important it is to their development. Act like you have a toddler again. Remember that your teenager’s brain is growing in this way, but also the empathy. Because I am a parent too, of a teenager, I understand that you can’t. You used to have control over all these things. You used to, you know, be able to just change your toddler’s bedtime routine and then put them in their crib, and that’s fine. You don’t have any of that same control. So the approach is different, but the importance is still there. It’s just something we have to think about in a more holistic way. We have to engage our kids. We have to educate ourselves and talk about ways that we can have a mutual understanding of why this is so important, and then set up family habits so and I also think that. It’s important to know that even if you can’t just fix all of it, if you just support your teenager to sleep 30 minutes more every night, then by the end of the week, that’s two and a half hours of sleep that they’ve put back in their in their bank, and that is significant. So maybe you can’t get them to sleep nine to 10 hours a night. Most people can’t, but if they can add in 30 minutes, it is, it is going to be it’s helpful. That is really something.
At what point should a family or a parent consider getting professional help if they’ve tried all of the things that we’ve talked about here and it’s still not making a difference?
Yeah, that’s a good question. So we have, in the second half of generation sleepless is all practical tools. And we have the five habits that we have people follow, and we say to follow them consistently for two weeks. And if you are really being consistent and modifying all of your habits, and you still feel at the end of two weeks, and maybe I would say three, if you’re kind of spotty about not getting it all completely dialed in at that point, it’s a good idea to talk to your doctor, because then you might want to explore something else. We do find, though, that when people follow the five habits and they really do get on board for a few weeks, that their sleep. Can really turn around quickly.
Lots of excellent food for thought on a very important subject. Heather Turgeon, psychotherapist and author of generation sleepless, along with Julie Wright, co author, thank you so much for your time and
your perspective today.
Thank you. This was so fun. Thanks a lot.

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“They turn out to be the most sleep-deprived segment of the population. They’re the most sleep-deprived of any generation in history. In human history, there’s never been a group of individuals as sleep-deprived as today’s teenagers, and overlapping with that, what we’re seeing in terms of the mental health issues that have been so widely discussed — those two trends are highly connected, extremely interconnected.”

The Crisis of Sleep Deprivation in Teens

Sleep deprivation among teenagers is not just a phase—it’s a growing public health issue. While nearly 70% of elementary-aged children get enough sleep, only 5 to 10% of high schoolers do. Teens require about 9.25 hours of sleep a night, yet the average 10th grader logs only six hours, accruing a significant sleep debt that impacts their mental and physical health.

“Adolescence is a period of massive brain growth,” Turgeon explains. “It’s like a second wave of reorganization, akin to what happens between ages zero and three. Much of this critical work occurs during sleep.”

Without sufficient rest, teens face impaired brain development, increased anxiety, and higher rates of depression. Alarmingly, teens who sleep fewer than six hours a night are twice as likely to report thoughts of self-harm, underscoring the urgency of this issue.

Why Sleep Is Essential

Contrary to the misconception that sleep is “downtime,” it’s a period of intense activity for the brain and body. “[It’s] a time that certain parts of your brain are really firing extra hard,” says Turgeon. “They’re going extra hard in a way that they don’t during the day, because there’s really important work that happens during sleep.”

Some of that work includes:

Memory Consolidation: Sleep helps transfer knowledge from short-term to long-term memory, vital for learning and academic success.
Brain Detoxification: The glymphatic system clears toxins that build up during the day, preventing cognitive fog and sluggishness. As Turgeon notes, “Teens love the analogy of the brain as a dishwasher—it helps them understand why they wake up groggy after a bad night’s sleep.”
Physical Recovery:Sleep supports growth, immune function, and overall health, making it foundational for both mental and physical well-being.

The Impact of the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted sleep patterns for teens in profound ways. While lockdowns initially allowed them to sleep later, technology quickly became a double-edged sword. Increased screen time for socializing and education interfered with natural sleep rhythms.

“A lot of kids were initially sleeping more because they didn’t have to get up for school,” explains Turgeon. “And then technology kind of just really saturated our lives much more. And then teenagers were kind of back to where they started not sleeping enough and feeling more isolated and like they had lost the rhythms of their daily life, which is so important for sleep.

Coming out the pandemic, however, Turgeon believes there is greater awareness of the importance of sleep, generally, and in particular for the dynamic stage of growth and development that is adolescence.

How Parents Can Help

Turgeon emphasizes that parents play a pivotal role in addressing the sleep crisis. Here are her top strategies:

1. Advocate for Later School Start Times

Early school start times conflict with teens’ natural sleep cycles, leaving them groggy and underprepared for the day.

Research shows that even a 30-minute delay can significantly improve sleep duration and academic outcomes.

California’s mandate for high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. serves as a model.

“When schools start later, rates of depression and feelings of hopelessness drop significantly,” Turgeon notes.

2. Limit Technology

Screens are a major barrier to healthy sleep, not just because of blue light but because of their engaging nature.

Turgeon recommends establishing a “goodnight technology” routine at least an hour before bed. Family-wide habits, like parking devices outside bedrooms, help teens wind down and transition to sleep.

3. Model Healthy Sleep Habits

Parents who prioritize their own sleep set a powerful example. “When parents sleep better, they’re better equipped to help their kids,” Turgeon says. Demonstrating the importance of rest reinforces its value for the entire family.

4. Make Sleep a Priority

Help teens manage their schedules by avoiding overloading them with activities that encroach on rest. “Sleep needs to be treated as non-negotiable, just like nutrition or exercise,” Turgeon emphasizes.

5. Educate Teens About Sleep

Empower teens by explaining the science behind sleep. Tailor messages to their interests: for athletes, highlight how sleep aids peak performance; for academically driven teens, emphasize its role in focus and memory.

“Teens need to feel the importance of sleep for themselves,” Turgeon advises. “It’s important to know that even if you can’t just fix all of it, if you just support your teenager to sleep 30 minutes more every night, then by the end of the week, that’s two and a half hours of sleep that they’ve put back in their in their bank, and that is significant. Maybe you can’t get them to sleep nine to 10 hours a night. Most people can’t, but if they can add in 30 minutes, it is going to be it’s helpful. That is really something.”

When to Seek Help

If sleep challenges persist despite consistent efforts, Turgeon recommends consulting a doctor.

“Follow the five habits outlined in Generation Sleepless for two to three weeks. If there’s no improvement, it’s time to explore other underlying issues,” she advises.

“If you feel like your child’s anxiety is high and it feels out of proportion, it’s something to think about. Are they sleeping enough? Because we do need sleep to be able to regulate our feelings and keep our feelings in check and know when something is a big deal or when it’s not a big deal. Our barometer for what’s a big deal kind of goes out of whack when we’re not sleeping enough,” says the mother of a teenager.

For Turgeon, restoring sleep to its rightful place is essential for teens to thrive. “Sleep is foundational to everything—mental health, physical growth, and academic success. Without it, we’re asking our teens to operate at a disadvantage every single day.”