Teenager Sleep Habits

I wrote last week about the bedtime routine for my younger two children (8 and 9 years old) who will run, hide, and do everything they can to delay, if even for a minute, the time that they go to sleep at night. 

But I’ve found that when kids get a little older that their sleeping rituals tend to do an about-face somewhere around the age of 16. When my oldest son turned that age, he went from not wanting to sleep like my other two children, to rivaling his 70 year old grandfather’s sleeping habits of nodding off and taking daily naps.

It all begins with my son when he gets home from school.  He will immediately go down to his room, lay in bed and either work on homework, play video games, watch television or update his Facebook status.  All four activities though will eventually lead him to the same outcome – falling fast asleep and making it impossible to wake up.

This presents a problem around dinner time, when I have the extremely difficult job of trying to wake him up to eat.  Our routine usually plays out the same night after night.

About five minutes before dinner is ready, I will make my first attempt to wake him by turning on his light and telling him it is time to get up to eat.  Ten minutes later I have to repeat the dinner call, but this time I don’t leave until he is sitting up in bed.  By my third attempt, while the rest of the family is well into eating their meal, my son will actually carry on a conversation with me looking me in the eye and telling me that he is awake, but the minute I leave he’ll be out like a light.    

After that I usually give up and my son will continue sleeping for a couple more hours.  He’ll then eventually wake up, declare that he’s starving and ask, “Why didn’t you wake me up for dinner?” 

Please give me strength!

And now, just as the rest of the family is settling down for a night’s rest, since my son is refreshed and raring to go after just having slept for the past several hours, we can all look forward to hearing his TV blasting and him carrying on conversations with his friends on Skype. 

Usually around 2:00am he will finally nod off again, lying in his bed surrounded by his phone, IPod, Xbox controllers and with his laptop and TV still on where he’ll be exhausted the next morning and sleep past his alarm – and I’ll be right back to trying to wake him up again. 

Since he’ll be leaving for college in a few months and will be completely on his own with no one to monitor his sleep schedule, I am getting a little nervous.  His registering for afternoon classes is a must as well as me getting a copy of his schedule and putting his new dorm room phone number on speed dial!