This TED Talk features sleep researcher Wendy Troxel, recorded live at TEDx Manhattan Beach, 2016.

It's 6 o'clock in the morning, pitch black outside.

My 14-year-old son is fast asleep in his bed, sleeping the reckless, deep sleep of a teenager.

I flip on the light and physically shake the poor boy awake, because I know that, like,

ripping off a band-aid,

it's better to get it over with quickly.

I have a friend who yells fire just to rouse her sleeping teen,

and another who got so fed up

that she had to dump cold water on her son's head

just to get him out of bed.

Sound brutal, but perhaps familiar.

Every morning I ask myself,

how can I?

Knowing what I know and doing what I do for a living,

be doing this to my own son.

You see, I'm a sleep researcher.

So I know far too much about sleep and the consequences of sleep loss.

I know that I'm depriving my son of the sleep he desperately needs as a rapidly growing teenager.

I also know that by waking him up hours before his natural biological clock tells him he's ready,

I'm literally robbing him of his dreams, the type of sleep most associated with learning,

memory consolidation, and emotional processing.

But it's not just my kid that's being deprived of sleep.

...