Life requires at least three ingredients – water, heat, and carbonbased molecules. With adolescents, there’s a fourth requirement: beds.
Almost all teens – male and female – seem to crave the opportunity to “sleep in”. this probably seems more pronounced in boys, because it doesn’t seem so long ago when your little tyke was up at the crack of dawn – maddeningly early – chomping at the bit to play or build a treehouse or go ice-fishing or shoot quail, any of those all-American things little boys want to do at ungodly hours when normal human beings just want to sleep. Then they hit puberty.
Before puberty, kids’ bodies signal that they are sleepy at about 8 or 9 P.M. With the onset of puberty, kids don’t start feeling sleepy until around 10 or 11 P.M. This shift in an adolescent’s circadian rhythms (the body’s twenty-four-hour cycles) is called “sleep phase delay” – a tendency toward later times for both falling asleep and waking up.
Melatonin is a hormone made by a part of the brain called the pineal gland. It is thought to help our bodies know when it’s time to go to sleep and when it’s time to wake up. An experiment conducted at Brown University showed that melatonin secretion occurs at a later time in adolescents as they mature. It also showed that melatonin secretion turned off later in the morning, making it more difficult to wake up early.
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"Why do boys sleep later in the morning during puberty?" was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 9:08 pm.