Sleep Deprivation Among Adolescents Essay

Teenagers around the United States are waking up every week day for school, exhausted. Parents are noticing that their teens are feeling depressed, anxious, or constantly grumpy. Most middle schools and high schools have early start times, usually around 7:25, making it hard for adolescents to stay awake and focus in classes- and there has been a significant drop in grades to prove it. The sleep deprivation amongst teens becomes dangerous in the sense that teenagers sixteen years old and up begin to drive into school, and driving while sleep deprived is proven to be just as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. While schools are mostly based off standardized testing, missing or falling asleep in class could prevent teens from doing as well as they could on their tests. With the grading system in America today, getting above a 3.5, the necessary GPA to get a college scholarship, is becoming more and more difficult. Most families in the United States do not have enough money to pay for …show more content…
The Huffington Post did a survey in this past year, and revealed that the number one cause for stress amongst adults is the lack of sleep- so you can only imagine what it is doing to teens. Sharon Jayson, writer and reporter for USA Today, did a recent survey in February of teens. Her survey told us that over a quarter of American teens (twenty seven percent) say that they have experienced “extreme stress” during the school year.Thirty four percent expect their stress levels to increase in the next year. With ten to fifteen percent of teens reporting insomnia, you can only imagine the stress just from sleep deprivation. In fact, The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System did a survey in 2009 showing that only thirty one percent of American high school students got eight or more hours of sleep on school