According to psychologists, sociologists, and educators, as well as anecdotal reports and stories from parents and teachers, adolescents growing up in the United States are portrayed as stormy, moody, persistent, entitled, self-centered, independent, and emotional. Sleep researchers, parents, and teachers have added that adolescents are frequently sleepy and exhausted. This intense developmental stage is marked by physiological, cognitive, emotional, and psychosocial changes. Among the host of changes that accompany adolescence are alterations in sleeping and waking patterns. During adolescence, quality, quantity, and timing of sleep are influenced by changing academic demands, new social pressures, altered parent-child relationships, and increased time spent in part-time jobs, extracurricular activities, and sports. Likewise, the way adolescents sleep critically influences their ability to think, behave, and feel throughout adolescence. Researchers have documented that adolescents growing up in the late 1990s and early part of this decade are not getting enough sleep; however, countermeasures have not been developed to reverse this trend.

Although sleep consumes approximately one-third of our lives (50% at early school age), it is often ignored by developmental psychologists, pediatricians, educators, and others who devote their lives to working with children and adolescents. For example, sleep is rarely mentioned in textbooks on adolescent development, child-adolescent sleep topics are infrequently presented at the Society for Research on Child Development meetings (.3% of presentations at the 1995 biennial SRCD meeting), and pediatricians get very little training in sleep medicine.