Sleepy teenager

Maybe this sounds familiar to you, too: In the evening, your child is as bright as a button, but in the morning he or she can't get up. This often leads to stress in the family. Some parents spend a lot of energy trying to get their offspring to get up on time. What's behind the night owl and morning tiredness? And how can you and your child deal with it?

What is it that keeps teenagers from sleeping at night and ties them to their beds in the morning? "I just can't fall asleep," parents often hear from teenagers. Some young people don't even try, preferring instead to chat with friends or surf the Internet.

Young people who don't fall asleep until midnight, however, only get six hours of sleep when they have to get out of bed at six in the morning. On average, however, teens need at least eight hours to be rested. Unrested teenagers not only feel listless - they also perform less well and are less able to concentrate at school.

However, difficulties falling asleep in the teenage years are often not only the result of high and late-night media consumption. Due to puberty, adolescents also experience a shift in their usual sleeping times.

What's behind it: every person has their own internal clock that controls bodily functions as well as sleep and wake phases depending on the time of day. A distinction is made between the early risers, the larks, and the night people, the owls. While small children, much to the chagrin of their parents, often belong to the larks and already romp around the house at 6 o'clock in the morning, children in their teens usually develop into owls.

The owls stay up well into the night and perk up correspondingly later the next morning. Studies show that in teenagers, production of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin starts on average two hours later than in young children. This shift in the internal clock makes teenagers tired later. Accordingly, they fall asleep later. No well-intentioned advice to go to bed earlier will help.