How many hours of sleep each day should my teenager get?

How many hours of sleep should a teenager get? That's a good question. Many times now as kids have more and more homework or activities that keep them up at night, parents are worried oftentimes that teenagers aren't getting enough sleep. Or they might find that their teenager likes to sleep many many hours on weekends and maybe each day is a struggle to get to school in the morning and can be wondering if your child got enough sleep the day before. Ideally a teenager should get between 8-10 hours of sleep, even more like 9 and 10 hours of sleep on a daily basis. It seems like a lot but as a teenager is growing they really need that extra sleep to make sure that they're growing normally and getting enough sleep for the energy that they need for their activities. Many teenagers are involved in sports, extracurricular activities, and also studying that can get them fatigued and also affect their health. Getting that sleep is very important. Also it's important to understand in our day and age with technology, teenagers having computers, having cell phones and smart phones that they may also have sleep trouble because they're using those products late at night or they're supposed to be in bed and they're actually on the computer. They've shown that it can take an hour for us to start slowing down and feeling tired after using a computer or a white screen and so using those products can keep us up late and give us trouble. It's important for a teenager to have a good hour of down time before they want to sleep to be able to just relax and not think too hard about what they got to do the next day and just prepare for bed and make a good sleeping environment in their room by making sure it's dark and it's not a place where they're just doing homework and immediately trying to go to sleep five minutes later. They need to try to maybe slow it down and make their room dark and not watch TV to fall asleep or have their video games and Internet time before they go to sleep but to try to have a good hour before sleep to get into bed on time and then getting that 9-10 hours of sleep. And then on weekends hopefully having a somewhat consistent sleep time so they're up until two in the morning and then trying to sleep ten hours but trying to go to bed at a reasonable hour, maybe a little later on a weekend versus a weekday but trying to keep a reasonable time so that they can have the energy for school and activities and they don't get their sleep patterns all mixed up at the end of each weekend and having to start over on Mondays.