How much sleep do teenagers actually need? An expert explains

Yahoo

23-04-2025

Along with answering back and leaving dirty dishes in their room, sleeping in until noon is a habit that often earns teenagers grumbles from their parents.
But according to sleep experts, teenagers have a vastly different set of sleep needs than adults, and habits that are often seen as 'lazy' could actually be vital for their developing brains and bodies.
Recently, a study from the University of Cambridge shed light on this age-related sleep hypothesis, finding that teenagers who sleep for longer and go to bed earlier tend to have sharper mental skills and score better on tests than their peers.
The study, which involved more than 3,000 adolescents, found those who got the most shut-eye consistently outperformed others on tasks involving reading, vocabulary and problem-solving.
If you're a parent of a child aged 13 or older, you might be wondering, 'How much sleep does my teen really need?'
More importantly, with nearly 65% of teens regularly falling short of the government's recommended sleep guidelines, what can you do to help ensure they're getting enough rest? We asked a sleep scientist to break it all down…
Most of us consider 'eight hours' to be the magic number when it comes to sleep. After all, that's how much government guidelines suggest adult men and women in the UK should aim for each night.
But when it comes to teens, many need a whopping two hours extra of nightly sleep than their parents to feel fully rested and recharged.
"Teens between the ages of 13 and 18 should ideally be getting between eight to 10 hours of sleep each night," says Loughborough University sleep expert Professor Kevin Morgan. "That said, every teenager is different, and some naturally need more sleep, while others function well on slightly less.
"By the time a child reaches their teenage years though, many parents already have a sense of their child's individual sleep needs, with some kids being deep sleepers, while others naturally struggle to get off to bed."
To work out whether your teen is getting enough kip each night, Morgan suggests looking beyond bedtime habits and observing their daytime behaviour instead. He suggests you ask yourself:
How alert are they during the day?
Are they constantly tired?
Are they struggling to get out of bed in the morning?
Do they crash at the weekend and need 20 hours to feel better?
These are all red flags that your teen may not be getting the consistent, good-quality sleep they need.
Sleep is important for people at any age, but during the teenage years, it becomes especially important.
Whether they're preparing to sit their GCSEs, learning a new language or simply balancing social and academic responsibilities, teens rely on quality sleep to support brain processes like learning, memory consolidation, attention and problem-solving skills.
"There are also metabolic processes happening in teenagers that demand more restorative sleep," Morgan adds. "Human Growth Hormone, for instance, is pumped out during deep sleep. Younger children get plenty of it to support bone and body development, and since teens are still growing, they need sleep to access it, too."
Teens also tend to need more sleep than parents thanks to the fundamental principle of development that suggests we need less sleep the older we get. "An adult in their 40s will usually sleep less than they did in their 20s, and often our bodies naturally dictate how much we need," Morgan says.
Added to this, poor sleep can fuel mood swings, depression, anxiety and tell-tale teenage irritability, all of which can be particularly challenging when combined with fluctuating teenage hormones.
"When someone's sleep-deprived, they might laugh louder, talk more, get irritable or overly sensitive. That's because emotional regulation becomes harder when we're tired," Morgan notes.
"We need adequate sleep to stabilise our moods and manage our emotions, and children, especially teenagers, are no different," he says. "In fact, there's often an even greater challenge for our children, as during the teenage years, hormonal surges can add to the emotional instability of sleeping badly."
Morgan says that parents of teenage girls might need to be more vigilant in setting up good bedtime routines.
"Interestingly, the biological need for sleep is probably the same across genders," he explains. "But after puberty kicks in, girls are more likely to have trouble sleeping than boys, mostly for hormonal reasons."
He says that a gender sleep gap starts in the teenage years and tends to continue, and often intensify, throughout life. "In general, women have so many reasons to sleep worse than men – some biological, some social, and often the two overlap," Morgan points out.
'It starts with the onset of menstruation, where premenstrual symptoms can affect sleep, along with the practicalities of managing periods. After that, there's pregnancy, child-rearing, breastfeeding, and then pre-menopause, perimenopause and post-menopause."
He underscores: "At every life stage, women face extra challenges when it comes to sleep, and yet it's something that's almost entirely overlooked."
If you're keen to help your teens clock up to 10 hours, Morgan shares his golden rules for getting kids into good habits:
Asking your teenager to leave their phone in another room after 8pm can be a helpful way of limiting late-night scrolling under the covers. "You can't police everything your children do, but you can gently suggest that scrolling through stressful content just before midnight might not be helping them wind down," Morgan notes.
Rather than fixating on a specific number of hours, Morgan says it's more helpful to think about building a consistent sleep schedule with a set sleep and wake time. "Science suggests that a good routine supports healthy sleep in the long term,' he says.
Finally, Morgan adds that meeting a young adults' sleep needs can actually be a great opportunity for parents to reassess their own poor sleep habits, many of which they may have been carrying since the newborn years.
"If you lead by example and model good sleep behaviours, it often carries a bit more weight than just legislating and laying down rules with teenagers,' he believes. 'By negotiating rules for teens, adults can learn a bit of extra discipline around taking their own phones to bed at night."
Read more about sleep:
Why can't I sleep? (Yahoo Life UK, 8-min read)
Tips for a better night's sleep as bad rest linked to memory loss (Yahoo Life UK, 8-min read)
I've had insomnia since I was 18 and it's affected my whole life (Yahoo Life UK, 6-min read)