Kids and Phone-Interrupted Sleep 2

All this week we’re looking together at the issue of how smartphones are cutting into the sleep time our kids desperately need, and what we as parents must do to remedy this problem. For our kids today, uninterrupted sleep is about as familiar to them as pay-phones, black and white TVs, transistor radios, and other artifacts that they see as part of their parents’ olden days. Researchers tell us that children and teens have always needed just over nine hours of uninterrupted sleep for healthy growth and development. This is the way God has created our kids to grow, and he has established a need for all of us to experience a daily rhythm of waking time and rest. But judging from what the research is telling us about new patterns of adolescent sleep, healthy physical and emotional teenage development is also in jeopardy of becoming an artifact of the past. Teenage pressures and distractions are on the increase, while good old-fashioned uninterrupted sleep is on the decline.