A new study has emerged from a research team at Columbia University Medical Center that affirms both biblical and common sense principles about teens and when they go to bed at night. You may read the USA Today article here.
Some excerpts from the article:
- Middle- and high-schoolers whose parents don’t require them to be in bed before midnight on school nights are 42% more likely to be depressed than teens whose parents require a 10 p.m. or earlier bedtime. And teens who are allowed to stay up late are 30% more likely to have had suicidal thoughts in the past year.
- The NIH survey found that kids whose parents called for a 9-10 p.m. bedtime said they were in bed, on average, by 10:04 p.m. They slept for 8 hours and 10 minutes on average, compared with 7½ hours for kids allowed to stay up past midnight.
- Gangwisch believes the disparities between teens with and without prescribed bedtimes are even greater today, given greater distractions in their lives. In 1996, for instance, teens couldn’t stay up late texting friends and checking Facebook pages.
I am definately not a sleep expert, so I really do not care how long students sleep. I am no stranger to long nights reading and writing research papers. The real issue is what youth are doing after midnight instead of sleeping and why the parents do not know what they are doing. The statistics of adolescent pornography access are staggering. In a study conducted in 2003 discovered these statistics: 90% of children aged 8-16 have inadvertently viewed pornography, 19% of intentional online pornographic access is comprised of children under the age of 15, and some adult-oriented marketing firms believe that 20-30% of adult-oriented traffic are actually children under the age of 18. A recent Girl Scout survey discovered that 54% of the girls surveyed would participate in a cyber romance and 42% said they would view a pornographic website.
The issue of teens desiring to view pornographic material online is more of a spiritual issue than a pragmatic issue, but parents can definately reduce the possibilities of teens viewing inappropriate and spiritually destructive material just by enforcing an earlier bedtime. Parents should also know what their children are doing at night and discuss the spiritual destructiveness of “cyber-sin.” Teens and children should never have unlimited access to the internet and computers should always be located in family-centered areas of the home — not a teen’s bedroom. Jesus said in John 12:35, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.” If our teens are walking in the darkness, they certainly do not know where they are going. Jesus is the light. If our teens do not know the light and walk in the light, they do not know Jesus. We must make sure they know Jesus…
