Blaming Screens Won’t Fix the Teen Sleep Crisis

​by Terra Ziporyn

Conversations about adolescent sleep so often drift toward the same familiar culprit: screens. It’s an easy explanation, and it lets us imagine that a few household rules could fix a crisis affecting millions of students. But focusing on phones and “better habits” obscures the real issue: school schedules that run counter to adolescent biology.

When we treat sleep deprivation as a matter of personal responsibility, we overlook the one intervention that consistently works: aligning school start times with what decades of research tell us about teen sleep. It's easy, and sometimes gratifying, to blame the victim, but shifting the conversation from blame to biology is critical if we are serious about meaningful change.
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Read the full Substack post here: https://terraziporyn.substack.com/p/the-screen-time-scapegoat


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