Here’s Why Science Says Your Teen Daughter Needs More Sleep Than You Son

New research, from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, may have found that teen girls need more sleep than boys. Okay, okay, so both your son and your daughter need sleep. Teens may seem to think that staying up all night SnapChatting away won’t affect them in any way. But you know better. And now science does too!

Sleep often eludes you. Without that sweet, sweet sleep that you desperately need, you drag all day (even after a bucket of coffee). Well, the same goes for your teen. The recent study looked at how sleep disturbances affect teens’ functioning during the daytime hours.

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After reviewing data from 731 teens (420 girls and 311 boys in ninth through eleventh grades), the researchers found that the girls who didn’t sleep well had more trouble staying awake than the boys did. Not only did they find staying awake for school a challenge, but they also reported difficulty staying awake during after-school homework hours, missing school, taking naps on the weekends, passing on activities with friends and feeling less motivated as a result of too little sleep.

Even though the girls in the study, which was recently published in the online supplement of the journal Sleep, had more sleep-related issues than the boys, both sexes used caffeinated beverages equally to combat sleepiness in school.

—Erica Loop

Featured Photo: Ivan Obolensky via Pexels

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