As a new school year begins, finding a schedule that works for the family is important. One of the crucial factors of your children’s academic success is their sleep habits. Unfortunately, smartphones are having a negative effect on our children’s sleep.

A study, published in the May 2026 JAMA Pediatrics, found that teens averaged over 50 minutes of smartphone use between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. on school nights, and nearly half of teens use their phones between midnight and 4 a.m. Researchers drew data from an app installed on the teens’ phones that passively tracked their screen use patterns.

Adolescents need eight to ten hours of restful sleep, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have reported that only about 1 in 4 teenagers get 8 hours of sleep per night, and this study seems to indicate that smartphones might be a big reason. Researchers were particularly surprised to find that half of teens used their phones between midnight and 4 a.m. on a school night, as this is an important window for restful sleep needed for critical brain development at this age.

Researchers noted that the impact of smartphones extends beyond the time taken away from sleeping. Most activities on the phone are very stimulating, which then degrades sleep quality. Social media use in particular is very emotionally activating, which can make it harder for teens to wind down, even after putting their phone away.

The 5 most used app categories for teens during the night were social media, entertainment, games, communication, and music. The majority of the phone use was spent on social media apps like YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. Other teens were looking at streaming entertainment apps like Netflix or playing games like Roblox or Clash Royale.

Why are these study results so important?

Sleep is essential for adolescent brain development, learning and mental health. Both the National Sleep Foundation and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine agree that teens need between 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night to function properly and maintain good health, which is clearly not happening for the majority of teens according to this study.

Past studies have demonstrated that when teens get at least 8 hours of sleep they obtain numerous benefits including:

• improved attention and memory,
• sharper analytical thought,
• better mental health,
• increased creativity, and
• improved immune function.

When teens don’t get enough sleep, they are more prone to:

• irritability and exaggerated emotional reactions,
• poor academic performance,
• accidents and injuries,
• poor decision-making and detrimental thinking,
• high-risk behaviors, and
• negative health implications, such as weight gain, hypertension, depression, and increased pain.

In a previous study of more than 15,000 middle- and high-schoolers, teens with bedtimes of 10 p.m. or earlier were 24% less likely to suffer from depression and 20% less likely to have suicidal ideation than those with bedtimes of midnight or later.

What can parents do?

It’s important that parents prioritize sleep within the family. Here are some tips:

Talk to your children. Discuss the importance of sleep and give your children facts about the benefits of sleep and the negatives of sleep deprivation. Your teen may be more motivated to go to bed early and/or stay off their phone if he or she understands how it impacts their mental and physical health.

Role model. Parents often underestimate their influence. Studies consistently show that teenagers are heavily influenced by their parents’ role modeling on a wide variety of issues. Specifically, what parents do matters way more to teens than what parents say. In fact, teens tend to really hate hypocrisy, so they pay close attention to whether parents do the things they preach rather than what their parents preach. So, when it comes to prioritizing sleep, consider it a family action plan, and parents are the leaders. Start by modeling good habits.

Set a bedtime. Decide on a bedtime for school nights with your teen. An ideal bedtime would allow your teen to get about nine hours of sleep each night, but at least eight hours. Open a discussion, listen to their concerns, and negotiate a compromise. Try to hear your teen out about their own feelings and needs in order to develop a realistic solution and gain your teen’s buy-in. The goal is to make a bedtime feel like support, and not punishment.

Set a device curfew for the family. This is probably the most important point to address a teen’s sleep duration and quality. Everyone in the family should have a time that all devices – smartphones, ipads, laptops, etc. – must be placed in a charging location outside of bedrooms on school nights. Maybe all devices get plugged in to the kitchen charging station by 10pm every school night or all phones are charged in the living room no later than 9pm. Experts recommend removing all devices 30 minutes before bedtime. Studies have shown that eliminating screens from the bedroom is associated with the best quality and longest duration of sleep.

If your teen absolutely cannot imagine leaving their device outside of their room, then consider getting them a cell phone Brick, which disables smartphones for a set period of time. At a minimum, perhaps they will agree to use the Brick from 11pm to 5am to improve their sleep.

Final Thoughts…

Two-thirds of teens report that they sleep with their phones. The middle-of-the-night usage reported in this study may indicate that phone notifications are awakening kids, that they’re struggling with insomnia, or that they are reflexively reaching for their phone when they awaken naturally in the night. It can be a hard cycle to break, but it’s important that families work together to brainstorm solutions. A phone-free bedroom might be the objective, but the goal is to hopefully get there with buy-in. Parents of adolescents should be trying to teach teenagers about how to navigate these types of challenges themselves and make healthy choices without just implementing and enforcing rules that don’t mean anything to them.