Sunday morning. The house is quiet. Teenagers are sleeping. Somewhere between the first and the second cup of coffee, the familiar parental question surfaces yet again: Should you let them sleep in, or are you only making the problem worse?
You know the standard story. Teenagers go to bed too late. Biology, screens, social pressure, and schools that start at unforgiving hours. The result is predictable: sleep deprivation during the week, followed by an attempt to catch up at the weekend. “Social jetlag”, as it is often called, usually accompanies a wagging finger. Bad for the body clock. Bad for routine. And bad for everything.
But it turns out to be less simple than that.
A recent study by Carbone and Casement, based on a large, representative sample of 16- to 24-year-olds in the United States, explicitly examined weekend catch-up sleep. That is, sleeping longer on weekends than on weekdays. The researchers linked this pattern to depressive symptoms, measured very concretely as feeling down or depressed on a daily basis. They used data from NHANES, one of the most robust public health datasets available.
What did they find? Young people who slept longer at the weekend were about 40 per cent less likely to report daily depressive feelings than those who did not. This association remained even after accounting for a wide range of factors, including weekday sleep duration, sleep timing, age, gender, BMI, and more.
This fits with what we already know about adolescence. Teenagers’ biological clocks run later. Their sleep needs are higher than those of adults. And the systems they move in, with early school start times and packed schedules, are poorly aligned with that biology. The result is chronic sleep debt, with potentially serious consequences. Seen from that perspective, sleeping in at the weekend is not indulgence but recovery. I suddenly realise my own children occasionally read my blog.
Now, here is the nuance that often gets lost in headlines. This does not mean that sleeping in at the weekend is the solution. In the same study, sufficient and well-timed sleep during the week showed an even stronger association with mental well-being. In other words, consistently good sleep beats temporary repair. But as long as the former is out of reach, which it is for many young people, the latter may be better than nothing.
So the story resists simple framing. Weekend catch-up sleep does not solve the problem, but it clearly relates to fewer depressive symptoms. That alone undermines the claim that sleeping in is inherently harmful. Sleep deprivation is not a moral failing. Biology pushes adolescents toward later sleep, while expectations, schedules and institutional rhythms pull the other way. The clash is structural, not personal.
So, should you let your teenager sleep in on Sunday? The honest answer is probably: it depends. On how much sleep debt has built up. On how late and how irregular the week has been. And above all on the alternative. As long as sufficient and well-timed sleep during the week remains unrealistic for many adolescents, weekend recovery looks more like compensation than derailment.
This is not an argument against structure, nor a romantic defence of social jet lag. It is an invitation to be cautious with firm advice. Perhaps we should be quicker to ask why young people need that extra sleep, and slower to correct it.
And now: silence in the house. The day can start slowly.