If your teenager is constantly waking up for school in a fatigued and grumpy state, social media may be to blame. Just like you wake up to answer that late-night work email from your boss at 3am, your kids are waking up in the middle of the night to check Facebook and Instagram and it’s extremely disruptive to sleep patterns that kids need to follow in order to function normally throughout the day. According to this post from Huffington Post, a midnight peak at their Twitter notification isn’t as harmless as it sounds; waking up in the middle of the night to check social media can be more disruptive to sleep than staying in bed for fewer hours, and can even lead to problems with general well-being and mental health.

As the post suggests, parents should consider banning or at least discouraging the use of smart phones and other mobile devices past bedtime. Both fatigue and excessive social media use have been shown to cause problems with young adults’ mental health, so why not keep all smartphones stashed away until morning? For more on this issue, continue reading.

Read the full article here: Why Parents Should Ban Smartphones From Their Kids’ Bedrooms