A parent wrote this week that she is at her wit's end. Her daughter is in her last year of high school. She will not get up for school in the morning.
The parent says she has tried everything. She has even worked with the school. The mornings still go the same way.
If that is your house, I want to start with the part that helped me breathe a little: your teen is not the only one. This is not a small problem in a few homes. The numbers say it is most homes.
The numbers: most teens start school short on sleep
The CDC just released its newest youth survey, with data from 2025. Only about 1 in 4 high school students — 24% — got at least 8 hours of sleep on an average school night. That number barely moved from 2023. The CDC also says short sleep is linked with poor mental health and trouble paying attention.
Now hold that next to what teens actually need. Sleep doctors at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine say teenagers ages 13 to 18 should sleep 8 to 10 hours a night to be healthy.
So most teens need 8 to 10 hours, and about 3 in 4 are not even reaching 8 on a school night. The morning fight is happening inside that gap.
The turn: the teen body clock runs later
Here is the part many of us never got told.
In the teen years, the body clock shifts. A 2026 paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine explains it in plain terms: the hormone that brings sleep comes later at night for teens — by about two hours. So most teens truly struggle to fall asleep early, even when they are tired.
That does not mean a teen who will not get up is doing nothing wrong. It does mean part of this fight is biology, not just attitude. She cannot fall asleep at 10, and she cannot wake up at 6, because her body is running on a clock that moved — and school did not move with it.
One study shows what happens when school does move. In Seattle, high schools pushed the first bell 55 minutes later, from 7:50 to 8:45. Researchers tracked the students and found they slept a median of 34 minutes more a night — from 6 hours 50 minutes up to 7 hours 24 minutes. Grades went up a bit. Tardiness and absences went down at the school that had struggled most with them.
Most of us cannot move the school bell. I know that. But the study still tells a parent something useful: when the night and the morning line up a little better with a teen's real clock, the mornings get easier. So the work we can do at home is on the night side of that line.
The morning fight is won the night before. By 6 a.m., it is mostly too late.
I know this house
I am a dad of six. My kids are 9, 9, 13, 16, 19, and 20. So the school-morning years are not behind me. They are my house right now, and they have been my house for a long time.
What I know about myself is not flattering. When I am stressed, I talk too much. My 13-year-old told me once that our talks turn into disasters because I talk a lot and do not listen. A morning lecture at the bedroom door is me doing that same thing, just louder and earlier. It has never once made a teen move faster. It only makes sure we both start the day angry.
I have a line from my own life that I keep coming back to: guidance is not the same as control. I cannot control a body clock. I cannot drag a near-adult out of bed every day and call that a plan. I can guide the night, agree on the shape of the morning, and then let the results teach what my voice cannot.
In our house the night side of this is not new. For the younger version of the same problem — the phone glowing after lights out — I wrote about what I am trying here: My Kid Keeps Sneaking the Screen at Night. What Actually Works? A teen who is on a screen at midnight is a teen who cannot wake up at six. The two fights are one fight.
But here is the part nobody talks about
When a teen will not get up, most advice makes the parent the alarm clock. Knock. Call. Knock again. Shake. Yell. Drive.
A parent can do that for a week. In a senior year, with college and work and a whole house watching, doing it every day for months breaks something — between the parent and the teen, not just in the morning routine.
So the plan below moves the job, slowly, from the parent's shoulders to the teen's. That part is below, and it is the part worth finishing this article for.
If this helped you, here's how to go deeper — pick the one that fits you:
"Just give me something I can print."
Some of us don't want another app. You want paper — print it tonight, fill it out with a pen, stick it on the fridge. I make exactly that: printable chore charts, family agreements, and screen-time tools in my Etsy shop.
→ Get the printables on Etsy
"I don't want paper — I want it all in one app."
Then you'll like the membership: assign chores from your phone, your kids check them off, plus our family courses — everything clean and in one place. It's $9.99 a month — less than two cups of coffee — and you can cancel anytime.
→ Join The Family Ground membership
"I'd rather just watch."
New video every week on my YouTube channel — real talk about screens, chores, and staying close to your kids. No perfect families here.
→ Watch Amam The Family Man
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