Getting your teenager to wake up in the morning can be a constant struggle in some households. It’s frustrating—after you’ve gone into their bedroom for the 6th time, yanked the blankets off their bed, hollered, threatened, and pleaded, yet they’re still happily off in dreamland while the clock keeps ticking away. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that they’re late for school and that life is moving on early in the morning. They’re content to doze off while you pull your hair out.
Experts say that teenagers actually require as much sleep as they did when they were babies, but life’s responsibilities and desires prevent them from getting ample rest. Some kids would do better if they went to bed around 8:00 p.m., but often they are still working on homework or unwinding in front of the television. So what’s a parent to do?
Unfortunately, some kids will always struggle. We all have our own individual internal clocks that we function best around, but the rest of the world operates on its own schedule. As adults, we have a few more options regarding our schedules—night owls may turn to third-shift work, early birds may hop out of bed for their 7:00 a.m. meeting with a smile on their face, and the rest of us fall somewhere in between.
Getting Your Teen on a Better Sleep Schedule
Struggling to get out of bed is a trait that some teenagers will hold onto for the rest of their lives. They may schedule their college classes late and try to land jobs that don’t start early because their internal clock ticks later than most. However, despite their internal clocks, school starts at 7:45 a.m. sharp, and tardiness is frowned upon.
The first place to start is on the opposite end of getting up—going to sleep. Most likely, your night owl isn’t hitting the sheets until after 11:00 p.m., despite your constant reminders that they need to get up in the morning. Setting aside homework time right after school or before dinner and insisting it be completed before anything else is a good place to start. Many teens have between 2 and 3 hours of homework each night. Starting at 7:00 p.m. sets them up for a late night.
With the homework out of the way, they will still have a couple of hours to unwind, but playing sports after 8:00 p.m.—like a pick-up basketball game—releases endorphins, making it harder to sleep. Physical exertion should be restricted to before 8:00 p.m. It may seem like a lot of restrictions, but once a good routine is established, it’s easier to maintain.
So, you’ve worked all week to get them to calm down and get to bed earlier. By Thursday night, they’re in bed about 45 minutes earlier, and things are looking up. Then the weekend hits. A schedule that took effort to attain can be completely thrown off over the weekend. Just because there’s no school doesn’t mean staying up into the wee hours of the night is beneficial. Altering the schedule by more than an hour or two can really hamper weekly progress. There may be a lot of pushback on this, but when your teen is able to get up on their own in the morning, they can have more say about their weekend schedule.
Kids who are completely unenthused about school are harder to wake up. Getting your teenager to rise when they’re uninterested in their day is like having a tooth pulled without Novocain. Who wants to jump out of bed, especially when it’s cold and dark outside, for a day they’d rather avoid? Understandable, but not very responsible.
As much empathy as we may have for the need for sleep, learning to get up on time is an important part of growing into adulthood. Bosses aren’t very friendly toward employees who are perpetually late for work because they overslept. Unfortunately, it may come down to a matter of discipline and consequences for not getting up on time, including earlier bedtimes.
Set an annoying alarm clock across the room, forcing them to get out of bed to turn it off. Anyone can get used to an alarm after about two weeks, so getting one with a changeable sound is a good idea. Encourage them to at least splash cold water on their face as soon as they turn off the alarm. A little chill can help wake up a sleepy teen (or adult) even if it means leaving a basin of cold water in their room. During the winter months, turn back the thermostat a bit at night, so their bedroom is mildly chilly, or close off one of their heating vents. You don’t want to make it so cold that they crawl back under the covers, but just enough to help their body wake up in the morning.
Finally, attaching rewards and consequences to early wake-ups is probably necessary for some super sleepy teens who are just not interested in adjusting themselves. Want to go to a party on Friday night? That’s fine, as long as you don’t have to drag them out of bed. Be reasonable at first, offering one wake-up reminder, such as: “If you want to go to the party Friday night, you need to be out of bed. If I have to remind you again, no party.” A little positive and negative reinforcement can often get a teenager up and struggling their way to the bathroom.
Once you succeed in getting your teenager to wake up in the morning without constant nagging, prompting, threatening, and dragging, both of you will find mornings much easier.
