Although adolescents need just as much sleep as younger children, sleep times decrease over the course of development, leaving many teens chronically sleep-deprived. Studies have consistently indicated that insufficient sleep can have a negative effect on many aspects of adolescents' lives, leading to mood disturbances, poorer physical health, and academic difficulties. But few studies have examined how sleep affects the ways adolescents function on a daily basis or how the effects of sleep change over time.
The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) will host a symposium during its Biennial Meeting at which researchers will consider the effects of sleep on adolescents. All of the papers that will be presented look at day-to-day variation in adolescents' sleep by using daily diaries, and consider how sleep patterns are related not only to concurrent well-being but also to outcomes later in development.
Among the questions that will be addressed:
- How do nightly variations in teenagers' sleep affect their experiences the following day? In turn, do daily experiences one day affect sleep the next night?
- What are the delayed effects of sleep (or lack of sleep)? For example, does insufficient sleep in one year lead to problems in later years?
- Does sleep affect such important outcomes as how well teens do in school, their emotions, physiological markers of stress, or symptoms of depression and anxiety differently as adolescents grow older?