Those Darn Gadgets... Keeping The Youth Of America Awake All Night
from the or-maybe-not dept
The headline certainly looks ominous enough: Technology keeps teens awake, study shows. A new study has found that (surprise, surprise) teenagers don't get the recommended amount of sleep -- and that there's at least some sort of correlation between the number of gadgets in their bedroom and the amount of (non) sleep the teens get. Of course, the tech story is just one angle, and other articles on the same exact study don't even bother to mention the gadget angle. Perhaps that's because it's not clear that it's really the gadgets that are the issue. There doesn't seem to be any comparison to data from the past where gadgets weren't around, which would be a lot more interesting. Certainly, it's easy to see how kids using computers and mobile phones to chat away with friends or surf the internet could potentially be staying up later than before -- but it's not clear this study proves anything just yet.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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sleep
Marty
Lehigh Valley Internet Media
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Re: sleep
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The problem
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Re: The problem
[sigh] Welcome to the real world (no not that assinine TV show)...
Savor your youth. Don't ever go around telling people you're "bored". I become more convinced that youth really is wasted on the young when I hear them saying that.
Read What You'll Wish You'd Known. A solid strategy for youthful success...
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Also, if you want to "hack sleep" you could attempt to follow 1 of these non-traditional sleeping habits.
http://www.dbeat.com/28/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
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Re:
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Speak for yourself on that statement. I don't know how long it's been since you were in high school, but these days high school students do have a lot of homework. Also, you evidently didn't take many (or any) challenging courses; if you take any type of challenging course these days, it's more than just a "study hall" assignment.
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Re:
im not sure where you went to school either. i had TONS of homework and studying and i was always "engaged" in school, didnt have study hall. i had practice or a game after school year around. student council, nhs, spanish club, dfyit, etc ...
but we were using college books in high school...
i usually got about 4 or 5 hours of sleep. and when i went to college, it was no different. tons of homework and projects but i had less extracuricular stuff related school.
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Re:
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sleep
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This shit
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Re: This shit
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sleep
if you're sleepy, take a quick 10-20 min nap....
unfortunate for me, we don't allow that in military...
and there aren't enough waking hours for me to watch TV...if there was a way to watch DVD and play games during your sleep....
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bogus
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On the issue
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Re: On the issue
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its true
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You want to know what REALLY wastes their time? I'll tell you. It's school. We all know that it doesn't take 13 years to be taught everything you need to know by the time you graduate highschool.
Somebody please tell me why this is news-worthy.
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Re:
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It has nothing to do with gadgets
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Honestly, we're teenagers. We do what we want to do. Sleep isn't all that fun, so we don't do it.
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Re: #19
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Changes in how school is done
I personally think that middle school should be more like HS and HS should be more like community college. I would have gotten a lot more out of HS if this was how things were. I got horrible grades in HS and better grades by almost a full grade point in college.
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Hmmm....
gotta keep moving till this exam is over at 4
time to get back to the grind
PS. what parents of college students would really get a kick out of is the popularity of using/abusing adderall as a study aid..... I guess there are worse ways to "abuse" such a drug...
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Re: Hmmm....
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FYI
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Re: FYI
Um. Would you care to defend that? We do not use those email addresses for anything. They are simply there in case we need to contact the commenter, as has happened on occassion. We do not put them into a list. We do not do anything else with them, and we do not even require a valid email address.
So, if you're worried, don't put in an email address, but you are completely wrong that entering an email address here increases your risk of getting spam.
So, if you're going to make completely baseless statements, you should at least have something to back it up... because in this case you're 100% wrong.
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Re: Re: FYI
I've noticed a pattern...started getting phishing emails shortly after I began commenting here. The more I comment, the more I get.
And, oddly, within an hour or so after commenting, I always receive 2-3 new ones.
Maybe the phishers are getting my address from somewhere else, but this is the only site I frequently enter my email address at?
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Re: Re: Re: FYI
I've noticed a pattern...started getting phishing emails shortly after I began commenting here. The more I comment, the more I get.
It's not from us. We would NEVER give out your email. Please don't make accusations like this without proof.
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youth and sleep
"Yes I love technology, but not as much as you you see, but I still love technology, always and forever......allllwayyss...and....forever....."
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Now if you get to grad school
Did this pizza delivery guy play with too many gadgets?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/national/28seattle.html
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What a wierd synopsis.
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these kids today ...
if we wanted to be insomniacs we had to work at it! like poster #1, under our covers with flashlights, reading books! remember books? yeah, we read them! and if there was nothing to read, we wrote! bad teenage poetry! uphill through the snow!
hmmph. young insomniacs these days don't know how good they've got it.
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School work is for school, not home. Students being required to do school work at home while spending 7 hours every weekday at class minus a couple months of vacation per year for 13 fucking years is abso-fuckin-lutely ridiculous. Thats a lot of time you're wasting in their lives.
I can back that up Personally. I learned every little nitty grity detail I know about computers on my own time. Look at my sourceforge profile if you're curious, its accurate. All that time I wasted at school or doing homework I could have been home learning something much more important (more important because I make a living of it). Public Schooling wasted nearly 2 solid years of my time.
7 hours per day, 5 days per week, 38 weeks per year, for 13 years. thats 17,290 hours learning how to pronounce each letter of the alphabet, perform sufficient algebra, simple geometry, and learn a shit load of lies about american history (ie, the pillage of the native americans)
Separation of Church and State -- Separation of Home and Class, anyone? At least public schools.
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Bad Parents Not Bad Gadgets
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Re: Bad Parents Not Bad Gadgets
exactly! that goes for any activity that leads to lack of sleep and not fulfilling responsibilities. if a kid can't get enough sleep to function parents need to consider what to trim out.
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Huh
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Public education is FAR from "proper", and thats enough with the grammar and punctuation comments, you troll.
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In conclusion...
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another thing keeping the kids awake....
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When I was a teen...
I slept 2-4 hours a night during the week and still maintained a 3.8 GPA. I hated sleeping, it seemed like a boring colossal waste of time to me.
I enjoy sleep much more now, as a 35 year old adult, but I still don't feel like I need to or have to have 8 hours a day. I'm lucky if I get 6 hours.
These are TEENAGERS, gadgets have nothing to do with it - teens just don't needf as much sleep as we think they do.
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Agreed
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Time management
I highly doubt I did more than two hours homework a night, and typically far less than that. I had people in most of my classes constantly crying and moaning that they got too much homework... Where? How?
I'm absolutely convinced that the people who complain about having too much work assigned lack the basic time management skills to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Like it or not, when you're out in the real world you're going to have to do the same - bad employees who can't manage their time get fired, and after a while when your resume shows that you haven't held a job for longer than six months anywhere, nobody is going to hire you.
Figure it out early - stop pissing away your day! You can't do homework in front of the TV and if you daydream and fall behind in class you need to bloody well get caught up on your own time and not just flounder along!
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Actually, the second article does talk about the link between teens not getting enough sleep and having gadgets. (4th paragraph from the bottom.) The difference is that the first article is all about what's supposedly causing the lack of sleep while the second article is about the lack of sleep itself.
I find it interesting that neither article talks about caffeine. Since according to the poll's key findings caffeine and tech toys also take their toll on adolescent sleep.
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On the contrary, Teenagers do generally require shit loads of sleep. I'm 20, and for as long as I can remember I sleep 12 consecutive hours if nobody wakes me up and I'm a happy boy. Now, some may not need sleep at all. I know people younger than I that sleep around 5 hours per week.
Teens may need sleep, but that doesn't mean they want it or get it.
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my theory
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i disagree
hows it a surprise surprise* that teens dont get enough sleep at night? are you trying to say ALL of us suck, ill admit i usually crash at about 2 or 3 in the morning every night but thats cuz im so freaking busy with sports, school, computer, music, photography, skateboarding,,, im really bussy. and it kind of bugs me that your stereotyping all of us cuz quite fankly i know some pansies that go to bed at 8 at night.
so please, shut the hell up.
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