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Later bedtimes. Bedtime resistance. A tween or teen who insists they’re “not tired” until 10 p.m. or later.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not imagining things—and you’re not doing anything wrong.

In this episode, Allison explains what’s really happening inside your child’s body as they move into the tween and teen years. During puberty, the circadian rhythm naturally shifts later, delaying melatonin release and making kids feel alert well into the evening. The problem? School start times don’t shift with them.

This biological mismatch often leads to chronic sleep deprivation, inconsistent schedules, and nightly power struggles. But here’s the good news: even though tweens and teens don’t feel tired early anymore, they can still fall asleep early enough to get the sleep they need—with the right structure and support.

Allison breaks down how to work with your child’s changing biology (instead of fighting it), why sleep matters more than ever during adolescence, and what intentional bedtime routines can look like at this age.

This episode is especially helpful for parents who want to protect their child’s mental health, academic performance, emotional regulation, and overall well-being—without turning bedtime into a nightly battle.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
— Why tweens’ and teens’ circadian rhythms naturally shift later
— How school schedules contribute to sleep deprivation
— The difference between “not tired” and “can’t fall asleep”
— How inconsistent weekend sleep makes weekdays harder
— Why structure matters more—not less—as kids get older
— Simple, realistic bedtime routines for tweens and teens
— How stretching and meditation can support sleep readiness
— Why screens in the bedroom make earlier sleep harder
— How sleep impacts mental health, learning, sports, and safety
— Ways to help tweens and teens understand why sleep matters

If bedtime feels harder than it used to and you’re worried about your child getting enough rest, this episode will help you feel informed, grounded, and confident about holding sleep-supportive boundaries.

Allison recommends these related episodes:
Episode 178. Melatonin and Children: Why I Don’t Recommend It
Episode 218. Why Screens Don’t Belong in Your Child’s Bedroom (And How to Set the Boundary)

Wondering if your child is getting enough sleep? Allison’s free guides take the guesswork out of bedtime. Learn the optimal sleep ranges for every age so your little one can feel their best—day after day. Get your free copy now: 0-2 Years Old or 3 to 10 years old

From baby sleep to toddler sleep, daycare naps to sleep training—How Long ’Til Bedtime? is the podcast for parents who want practical, guilt-free sleep tips they can actually use.

Hosted by pediatric sleep coach Allison Egidi, each episode delivers real solutions for every stage—from navigating newborn sleep struggles and weaning night feedings to helping your 3-year-old fall asleep independently (and stay asleep!). Whether you’re trying to make sense of daycare sleep patterns, craving your evenings back, or simply need a working mom podcast to keep you grounded, you’re in the right place.

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Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.

223. How to Help Tweens and Teens Get Enough Sleep—Even When They’re Not Tired
Allison Egidi: Before we dive in today, I want to let you guys in on something very personal. And this seems like the perfect episode to bring this up because if you have a tween or a teen, you may also be in your forties. At the time of this recording, I am four weeks into hormone replacement therapy, specifically estrogen and progesterone. And I’m scared to jinx anything, but I can already tell you that it’s helping.

Assuming I continue to see improvement in my health and overall wellbeing, I’m definitely going to do a full episode on this in the future. But let me just tell you that if you are consistently not feeling like yourself and you eat well, you exercise, you prioritize sleep, et cetera, the old go-to things are just not working, I want to encourage you to start tracking your life, for lack of a better way to say it. I just did it through the notes app on my phone and I literally would just put a date in on a line and a note. So I might type feeling beyond exhausted despite having a good night of sleep or have no motivation today, woke up with a headache or even days where I felt really good, I would put that in there. Feeling great today. I did not make a note every single day but I noted anything that like really came to mind in a specific day, particularly when it was me not feeling like myself, so the headaches or if I was awake for two unexplainable hours during the night, unexplainable, meaning it’s not like because I had had three glasses of wine with my girlfriends the night before. So I knew why my sleep was messed up. Like I did all my sleep things and I was still up for two hours. I noted that.

I also tracked my periods and then I took that info in from my annual appointment back in August. Since I’m only 44, I’m going to be honest, I was kind of blown off. So I tracked the next three months with a little bit more detail and it was so obvious when I did that, that I was crashing out for the four or five days before a period came, which my periods were inconsistent anyway, but I was having major issues in this specific chunk of time, even though there were certainly other times throughout the month I didn’t feel great, but that was hardcore. So I made another appointment, I went back in and when she looked at those notes, she quickly said, okay, great, this makes total sense why you would want to try hormone replacement therapy.

I am thrilled to share that for the first time in ages, I had a period with no crashing out and it was normal flow and I was stoked. So I realize, this is way TMI, particularly if you’re one of my lovely male listeners. So glad you’re here by the way. But whether you’re a woman or a man who has a perimenopause woman in your life, if you’re one of these guys, this is important stuff for us to know about because I had to tell my husband repeatedly, the reason I want to your head off is more me than you, but it’s not me because I know something’s not right. So what helped me really start to advocate for myself and figure out the best way to do it was hearing other people’s story. And that’s what made me track things. So more on this later but that’s my latest and very specific life update that I want to share with you guys, my little inside community here. And I’m sharing it at the start of this episode because hormones matter. And just like what’s happening in my body right now, hormones play a huge role in what’s happening in our tweens and teens sleep.

So now on to today’s episode, which also involves hormones. Tween and teen hormones, which is another wild ride. If you have a tween or teen who is wanting to follow their natural rhythm of going to bed later, but they are not then able to get enough sleep because of school start times, this episode is for you.

Hey there, Allison here. Welcome back to How Long ‘Til Bedtime. Today we’re diving into something that so many parents of tweens and teens are wrestling with, later bedtimes. Or maybe more accurately, the apparent inability of tweens and teens to go to bed early. If you found yourself saying things like, why is she clearly not tired until 10 p.m.? Why can’t he fall asleep earlier even when he was clearly exhausted this morning or cranky at dinner? Or why does every night feel like a battle to get them into bed at a decent hour? You are not imagining it. There is something real changing inside their bodies.

As kids move into puberty, their circadian rhythm naturally shifts later. Their body delays melatonin release, which means they don’t feel sleepy or tired as early as they used to. Their brain would happily fall asleep later. And ideally they would also then be able to sleep in later to match that shift. This is normal. This is biological. This is expected.

But here’s the kicker, school start times don’t shift with our tweens and teens biology. That’s a whole topic for another day. We won’t tackle that here today, but the vast majority of kids still need to be awake early, sometimes painfully early for school. So now we have a mismatch. Their body wants to go to bed later, but they can’t sleep in because of school and so they shift into consistent sleep deprivation. And while that deprivation can sometimes be made up for a bit, not completely, but a bit on the weekends, that too can result in wildly inconsistent sleep because when the weekday schedule is different than the weekend schedule, it can actually make the weekday schedule even harder. But I do have good news. And this is the message I want parents to take away from this episode.

The fact that their body wants to fall asleep later is not the same thing as being unable to fall asleep earlier. Your tween or teen can go to bed early enough to get the sleep they need in order to thrive. But because of their circadian rhythm shift, it’s now much easier for them to not fall asleep or resist going to bed earlier. So let me say that again in a slightly different way. Your tween or teen can go to bed early enough to get the sleep they need to thrive, it’s just much easier for them to resist it now because they don’t naturally feel tired earlier. And that difference matters because when you understand it, bedtime becomes less about why can’t they do this and more about, how can I help their body be ready to sleep earlier?

Because the truth is they can fall asleep earlier, but it’s going to require intentionality. And while it’s not always easy or fun, being intentional about your tween and teen sleep really does matter. It’s important to remember that while they’d like to stay up later than most of us parents want to, tweens and teens still need more sleep than adults. According to the National Sleep Foundation, tweens need 9 to 11 hours of sleep and teens need 8 to 10 hours. Sleep impacts physical health, mental health, academic performance, and athletic performance. I recently attended the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Sleep Symposium and there was a lot of powerful data presented on the importance of children’s sleep health and the lack of education out there in this area, both for pediatricians and for parents. They talked about their concerns with the increased use of melatonin amongst adolescents. I discussed this back in episode 178. If you want to hear more on the specific topic of melatonin, it’s probably worth another episode.

But I do want to share something else that one of the presenters talked about with teens that really stuck with me. And I think it stuck with me because it was info that I didn’t already know. And it prompted me to text several of my friends who have teens because this was new info to me. I was worried to know it, but glad I know it. And I thought it was important to share. A professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and she’s also a senior faculty member at Boston Children’s Hospital, presented on adverse health outcomes in children with poor sleep health. She covered many areas, but this one area that caught my attention was related to driving. One statistic that really stuck with me was that about two thirds of accidental fatalities in adolescents in the United States are related to road crashes. New drivers are at significantly higher risk and according to police reports fatigue often plays a major role.

What really hit home for me when I heard the statistics was thinking back to those years when my daughter wasn’t sleeping well, the whole reason I’m here today doing this podcast. I remember how dangerous it felt to be driving when I was that exhausted. And that’s what many teens are doing every day, driving on less sleep than their brains and bodies need.

There were many powerful presentations during this symposium, but the overall message was that regularity of schedule matters and not getting adequate sleep has adverse effects on a child’s cognitive abilities, academic performance, mental health, risk taking, accidental injuries, and immune function. They even shared the downstream effects on cardiovascular and metabolic health that they are now seeing an adult who had poor sleep as a child. Sharing that early poor sleep is now linked to increased mortality rates down the road. I share this because sleep really does matter. It’s not sexy and fun for tweens and teens to prioritize, but it’s our job as their parents to create a structure and hold boundaries that allow our children to get adequate sleep.

So what does being intentional about your tween and teen sleep actually look like? For tweens and teens, bedtime has to become more structured, not less, not more complicated, just more consistent. Let me give you an example from my own house. My tweens evening routines are super simple. They put on their pajamas, they do their bathroom routine of brushing their teeth, washing their face, brushing or braiding their hair, and then they read in their room with a dim bedside lamp. That’s it. No elaborate multi-step plan, but the power is in the consistency. That dimly lit room, the quiet reading, the predictable order of these events, it’s all sending signals to their brains. We’re winding down. It’s time to get ready for sleep.

And because we stick to that rhythm, guess what? Even though my daughter who is about to turn 13 this month, clearly has an internal clock that would absolutely let her stay up for two more hours or more. And just to be clear, she does not like her 9pm bedtime. She is able to fall asleep and she gets the sleep she needs to be her best little self.

And let me tell you, she didn’t get it all over Christmas break. And we all felt the repercussions of that. Even she was able to admit that. If we removed that consistent routine, if I didn’t hold that boundary of insisting that she goes start that routine at 8:30, 8:35, you guys, she’d be up way later. Not because she can’t sleep. Not because she’s a bad kid, but because her body isn’t nudging her toward bed anymore. And hello, she’s 13. So obviously she doesn’t want to go to bed.

Now some tweens and teens will need more to help them settle and sleep ahead of their natural rhythm. And I want to be honest, sometimes this high energy 13 year old of mine does as well. So I want to share some additional things that you can consider incorporating into their evening slash bedtime routine. Stretching and meditation can be incredibly helpful. If your child is wired, they got home late from a sports practice, so they have all those hormones telling them to be alert and awake, or they were just doing homework or studying right up until bedtime, it is absolutely worth taking 10 additional minutes to have them stretch and or meditate.

If you’ve been around for a while, you certainly have heard me talk about my love for Peloton. Both my daughters and I love a good 10 minute full body stretch with Ben. He’s our favorite for stretching. And if my 13 year old is a little resistant to the idea, because hello, she doesn’t love to do everything her mom tells her to do, then I will often just say, well, let’s do it together. I’m not just going to tell you to do it. I’ll do it with you. And that does seem to help her be more willing to do it. She is not a big fan of meditation. So that is not part of her wind down. We’ve had much more success with her relaxing into a good 10 minute stretch than I have with getting her to meditate, but meditation has helped many teens that I work with and it has helped me significantly. I personally love a good guided meditation if my brain is racing before bedtime. And again, I use the Peloton app for this, but there are a lot of great meditation apps out there. Calm and Headspace are certainly too worth checking out.

If you’re just starting this practice with your tween or teen, start with five minutes and you may need to test out different apps or the style of the meditation to find one that works for your child. And just be careful about not letting the meditation turn into screen time because I also think it’s mission critical to keep screens out of your child’s bedroom if you’re trying to help them fall asleep earlier. I just did a full episode on this topic, so I’m not going to rehash it here, but if you’re dealing with screens in the bedroom, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to episode 218.

And in case you need to hear this, let this be your reminder that you can reserve the right to change your mind. If you let screens into your tween or teens room and are now realizing it was not a good idea, you can just let them know that you learned something new or you see that this isn’t working. You can share a bit about the importance of sleep and let them know that you’re changing your mind on the screen rules as it relates to screens in the bedroom. Because even if they don’t like it, it’s your job as their parent to protect their sleep.
So on the screen topic specifically as it relates to meditation, often, me included, we’re using some sort of screen device to run the meditation, have it face down so they’re not looking at the screen during the meditation. And if you’ve brought it in the room for them to do it, that’s fine. But as soon as the meditation’s done, you want to take that phone or iPad or whatever it is right back out of the room.

I also think it’s just in important in general, whether your child’s having a problem or not, to talk to our teens and tweens about sleep. I don’t want to tell my anxious child that poor sleep can lead to poor cardiovascular health down the road and increase mortality risk, but I do share with her that sleep prepares the brain to learn and that sleep helps her brain actually remember what she learned.

And she now definitely understands that in many, many cases, sleep is more important than spending additional time studying when it comes to her academic performance. We’ve tested this out. There’s proof in concept. She has seen it in practice. And so that message has gotten through, even though sometimes it makes her anxious to stop studying and go to sleep. But one of my favorite ways to help tweens and teens buy into sleep, especially kids who love sports, is to share a study that came out of Stanford University. Researchers worked with the Stanford Men’s Varsity Basketball Team. So we’re talking elite college athletes. And they asked them to do something really simple, but something that probably felt really hard. They asked them to spend 10 hours in bed each night.

Before the study, these athletes were sleeping under seven hours a night, which honestly, let’s be honest, that looks like a lot of teens these days. After several weeks of prioritizing sleep, I think it was five to seven weeks that they had to do this. They weren’t actually sleeping 10 hours, but they were now averaging about eight and a half hours, which is a big improvement. And here’s what happened. Their free throw shooting improved by 9%. Their three-point shooting improved by 9.2%. They ran sprints faster. Their reaction times improved and they reported feeling better mentally and physically during practice and games. Nothing else changed. They didn’t train harder. They didn’t change their workouts. They didn’t add extra practice time. They literally just slept more.

And I love this example because it helps kids understand something really important. Sleep isn’t taking away from their performance or time to work on their performance. It’s actually one of the fastest, most effective ways to improve performance. And this is true for sports and academics.

So to wrap things up, I’ll repeat what I said at the beginning. Your tween or teen can go to bed early enough to get the sleep they need in order to thrive. But because of the shift in their circadian rhythm, it’s just now easier for them to not fall asleep or resist going to bed earlier. Tweens and teens need a cueing process, i.e. a good bedtime routine to prepare their bodies for sleep and they need us as their parents to hold them to the timing of starting that routine. If you’re the parent of a tween or a teen resisting bedtime, I feel your pain. I am literally right there in this with you. But I hope this episode inspires you to keep sleep a priority.

As always, thank you so much for listening and I will be back here next week. Bye for now.