Sleep and Puberty

Okay, so my NINE year old is almost in the "full" throes of puberty and by the time my husband got home from work tonight, she had already finished her homework and was passed out in her room. Being a 5th grade teacher, I thought that he would understand this, but I got some funny looks when I told her to let her sleep rather than wake her for dinner.

The fact is that, whether they are a teen or not, puberty inflicted children lose sleep.

Puberty is a restless time and you don’t sleep as well. For this reason those in puberty seem to need more sleep than children or adults. Some of the causes for this sleeplessness are external, like social or sporting activities and anxiety relating to peer pressures and interactions, and others are internal, like the fact that a growing and developing body is going to need extra energy to thrive. Whatever the causes are, it is a well-documented fact that pubescent children, whatever their age, sleep more than other age groups. Once again the solution to this problem is simple, sleep as much as possible and as much as your body signals it needs you to.

As a matter of fact, the first signs of puberty are hormonal changes, but you would not be aware of them without special blood tests. In girls and boys, puberty is driven by the onset of rhythmic releases of high levels of the hormone GnRH from the hypothalamus of the brain. This pattern of GnRH secretion causes nighttime peaks of secretion of the gonadotropin (gonad-growing) hormones, follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH) from the pituitary gland. Nightime peaks of LH and FSH occur only during early puberty and only during sleep, so it is critical for pre-teens and teens to sleep enough and sleep deeply.

In girls, LH and FSH cause the ovaries to make higher levels of estrogen. The levels of FSH rise first at about ages 9 to 10 followed by LH. Estrogen levels begin to rise steeply at about age 10 to 11. So, there are actual scientific and chemical reasons why she wants and/or needs the extra sleep.

So, for those of you out there with pubescent children, let them sleep as much as their body tells them to.