Most doctors say teenagers need at least 9 hours of sleep a night, but the National Sleep Foundation says only 15% of teens say they get even 8½ hours a night—which means most teenagers are often very sleep-deprived. People and institutions have blamed this on everything imaginable, but despite all efforts, kids simply don’t seem to be able to do everything they need and want to do without staying up late or waking up early. So what’s the problem? Well, the simple answer is that kids’ lives are way overscheduled. It may seem like we waste time, but between school, church, and extra-curriculars alone—not to mention sleep, relaxation, and entertainment—it is becoming more and more clear that there’s simply not enough time in the day, especially for kids who have trouble managing their time.
First of all, let’s do the math. How much time do you really have in an ideal school day? The average school day is about 7-8 hours long, from 7-8am to 3-4pm. Add an hour of travel to and from school. Now add perhaps an hour or two staying after school for something or other, such as tutorials, sports practice, or other clubs and organizations. Don’t forget the hour frantically getting ready before school. If you have an hour’s worth of homework in the evening, which is fairly common, suddenly you are spending more time on school than everything else combined, including sleep. But we’re not done yet. Most kids have something or other to attend in the evening—perhaps a church meeting, a sports game or practice, or some other event. Give that perhaps two hours, including travel. Plus, for most kids, they have at least an hour of studying each night. That’s a lot of hours upon hours of scheduled activities we are given to fill every day.
Also, for all these things I’ve mentioned, everything is treated as a crisis. You wake up and quickly get ready for school, go to school surrounded by deadlines and time-limits, go home and do more schoolwork so you don’t get behind, and make sure you have time for anything else you wanted to do that day. Everything is competitive and urgent. Jumping from one activity to the next all day, kids take every free moment they can get. Any time that is not an emergency is spent recovering from an emergency—relaxation, after all, is an essential and underappreciated part of our day, allowing us to recover the energy that is constantly being drained by the world. Still, in the back of our minds, there is always another crisis already waiting. But as long as you don’t have a special occasion like a late-night football game, our calculations only bring us down to 9 hours (minus any “recovery” time), which should probably be enough time to sleep—at least more than the 6-7 hours most kids actually get—so why not?
Well, everything I’ve said above is ideal, how long things should reasonably take. But all the things kids need to do take longer than they “should”. Since our time-management and self-control skills are not fully developed, we are not only distractible, but we also have trouble prioritizing our lives. Because of this, it’s very difficult to keep track of ourselves and do what is important in a reasonable space of time, especially when there’s a more entertaining or urgent distraction nearby. Simply put, we waste time, and that’s very difficult to prevent. It is only a few minutes at a time, but minutes add up to hours more quickly than expected.
Many people say we would have enough time if we didn’t waste too much time (on video games and social media, for example) instead of doing what is important. This is true, but you have to remember that these are more entertaining and sometimes artificially urgent, so they’re prime distractions and, thanks to our developing brains, very difficult to resist. And yes, I did say urgent. Social media may be pointless, but it’s certainly entertaining, and it gives the illusion that strangers are relying on you. Video games also pressure you to play often with “streaks” and virtual rewards, and if you’re not, there are artificial consequences. None of this is real, of course, but sometimes it is hard to see that.
In other words, it may not look like it, but kids’ lives are way overscheduled considering how much time they spend getting distracted or recovering from emergencies—which has not changed much over the years. What has changed is the speed and competition that drags us from activity to activity without enough time to transition. It’s impossible to add more hours to the day, as we seem to be trying to do—it’s really no wonder that kids are becoming more and more sleep deprived. What we really need to do is reevaluate the time we’re given.