above: Photo Illustration by Venera Alexandrova
Before she became a sleep scientist, Rebecca Robbins was a competitive swimmer at Darien High School, balancing early morning practices, double sessions and year-round competition. She drove to Wilton for training, then merged onto I-95 exhausted before the rest of the world was even awake. “It’s a miracle I didn’t kill myself in a fall-asleep car crash,” she says. Looking back, she remembers the cumulative toll that sleep deprivation had on her. What she didn’t know then was that her body was working against her in ways no coach had ever explained.
She would go on to spend her career figuring out why.
Today, Dr. Robbins is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. What she has to say about teenagers and sleep is something every parent in Fairfield County—and beyond—needs to hear. Not just because our kids are glued to their phones. That’s part of it. But the deeper problem is structural, biological and largely invisible to the adults setting their schedules.
Once they hit puberty, teenagers need more sleep than they did in middle school—eight to ten hours a night, often well into their early 20s—at precisely the moment our culture starts expecting them to require less. At the same time, most teens experience a fundamental shift in their circadian rhythm, or chronotype—the internal clock that governs when we feel alert and when we feel drowsy. Melatonin, the hormone that signals to the body that it’s time to sleep, secretes later in the teenage brain. The result is that for many teens, 11:00 p.m., or even midnight, is when their bodies are naturally primed to fall asleep. Not because they’re being difficult. Because of their hormones.
This makes a 7:30 a.m. school bell feel like a biological assault. “We are virtually pulling teenagers into the classroom with their heads still back on their pillows,” Robbins says. Yet more than 80 percent of schools in America start before 8:30 a.m. The consequences show up in the data: 70 percent of teenagers don’t get the sleep they need on school nights. To put that into perspective, only 30 percent of adults fall short of their own sleep needs. In other words, teenagers are chronically sleep-deprived at more than twice the rate of the adults around them.
And yet the response is rarely systemic. School districts resist changing start times, citing bus schedules, teacher contracts and athletic programming. Robbins acknowledges those logistical hurdles—she’s worked with her own former school system in Darien on exactly these interventions—but she questions the logic.
“How can we, in the face of that evidence, not ask ourselves how best to set up our school systems to support our youth?” she asks.
Studies tracking districts that have delayed start times by even one hour have found significant benefits for teens. Contrary to the common assumption, kids don’t simply stay up later. Their biology keeps their bedtimes relatively stable. The real problem has always been the wake-up time.
For many Fairfield County parents and coaches, perhaps the more persuasive angle is what sleep can do for athletic performance. A colleague of Robbins’ conducted research with the Stanford University basketball team, asking players to prioritize sleep by averaging one more hour per night. The result? A significant increase in their free-throw percentage. Sleep wasn’t simply helping them feel more rested. It was making them better athletes.
Robbins has also brought her research into professional sports. She worked with the Orlando Magic to introduce structured sleep behaviors and schedules for the players. That season, the team went on to win the Eastern Conference Championship. The research is clear: Sleep-deprived athletes are slower to react, struggle to regulate nutrition and body weight and face a greater risk of injury. ”If we’re pulling them into the weight room, the pool at four or five in the morning,” Robbins says, “we might be risking their safety.”
The mental health stakes are even more sobering. Teenagers who get fewer than six hours of sleep a night are more than twice as likely to experience suicidal thoughts compared to their well-rested peers. Rates of anxiety and depression increase; mood regulation suffers. “This can get really serious really fast,” Robbins says. “It’s unfortunately often an afterthought—how a student is sleeping.”
For parents looking for ways to improve their teen’s sleep habits, Robbins recommends a few concrete shifts. Push screen-heavy homework earlier in the afternoon, when blue light is less disruptive to the circadian system. Model the behavior—put your own phone down—and consider creating a wind-down ritual as a family.
Robbins points to Danish culture, which has a word for the cozy, intentional time families share before bed: hygge. Gathering, talking, dimming the lights—cues to the brain and the body that the day is over.
The chronotype shift that makes teenagers night owls, Robbins notes, typically resolves in the early 20s, when most people return to their genetically wired sleep patterns. But it’s during the teenage years that we push hardest—the grades, the teams, the applications. We ask the most of them precisely when their biology is least equipped to comply.
BY THE NUMBERS
Teens need 8 to 10 hours of sleep every night to support healthy development
for many teenagers, the body’s natural bedtime doesn’t begin until 11:00 p.m. or even midnight.
more than 80% of u.s. schools start before 8:30 a.m.
Nearly 70% of teenagers don’t get enough sleep on school nights.