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| Sunday, 16 June 2002 |
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How sleep affects teens So now we know how the teen brain functions and why teens do what they do. This wee we take a look at research that is helping scientists understand another puzzling aspect of adolescent behaviour -- sleep. Mary Carskadon, director of the E.P. Bradley Hospital Sleep Research Laboratory at Brown University, has spent years mapping the brains of sleepy teens. She has calculated that most teens get about seven and a half hours of sleep each night, while they need more than nine. Some say these sleep debts can have a powerful effect on a teen's ability to learn and retain new material -- especially abstract concepts like physics, math, and calculus. Despite all the new scientific research, those who explore the Teenage Brain suggest that there is a consensus among experts that the most beneficial thing for teenagers is good relationships with their parents. They wonder about the kinds of lessons parents can draw from science. "The more technical and more advanced science becomes, often the more it leads us back to some very basic tenets. ... With all the science and with all the advances, the best advice we can give is things that our grandmother could have told us generations ago: to spend loving, quality time with our children," they conclude. Ellen Galinsky, a social scientist and the president of the Families and Work Institute, has seen scientific fads come and go. But she says her research for a book about children shows there are enduring lessons for parents. Drawing on her interviews with more than a thousand children, she found that, to her surprise, teens were yearning for more time and more communication with their parents, even when they seemed to be pushing them away. She says: "Even though the public perception is about building bigger and better brains, what the research shows is that it's the relationships, it's the connections, it's the people in children's lives who make the biggest difference." |
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