To eradicate "Kevin the teenager" syndrome, and improve academic performance, adolescents should be allowed to spend an hour more under the duvet during term time, according to a dream sleep schedule devised for teenagers.
Every parent knows that getting teenagers out of bed is no easy task, particularly when they have to go to school, triggering depression and irritation, with Kevin himself prone to shouts of "I hate you" and everything is "so unfair!"
Now it turns out that Harry Enfield's depiction of Kevin is scientifically accurate. Numerous studies now show that at the onset of puberty adolescents do indeed prefer later bedtimes and wake times, and neuroscientists have even pinpointed that the reason for their love of a lie in is that the brain continues to develop until the early twenties.
Today, in the Journal of Adolescence, a new report details the sleep patterns of 310 Australian school students, including information surrounding their sleep quality, mood, daytime functioning, grades and sleep patterns.
By comparing patterns for their "natural" sleep preference in holiday and school-term, Drs Suzanne Warner, Greg Murray and Denny Meyer of Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria, believe they have captured a teenager's ideal sleep schedule and, for the first time, linked the effects of deprivation to performance in school.
Students get significantly less sleep when they are in school term - roughly one hour and 17 minutes less a night than when on holiday. They also have to wake up considerably earlier - about two hours and 30 minutes sooner. In contrast, the students - particularly boys - tended to adopt a later sleep/wake routine during the holidays.
The research showed that students believe they need about eight hours and 45 minutes of sleep, although during the holidays they tend to get about nine hours and 12 minutes. During school term, they typically get less than eight hours, so they should start around an hour later to feel fresh and ready for the day ahead.
They concluded that the resulting typical morose and sulky 'Kevin the teenager" is someone who suffers a considerable "sleep debt" and deserves our understanding, sympathy and help more than an early morning alarm call.
"With the impact of school schedule, students accrued a significant sleep debt, obtaining insufficient sleep for their needs and reporting lowered mood and daytime functioning," they conclude. The team adds that there is evidence that this affects school grades.
Sleep scientists know that due to genetic factors some people are "larks", who like to get up early, and others are "owls." Adolescent owls face particular problems and perhaps should be allowed an even longer lie in, since they "are particularly at risk of being even more ''out of kilter" with the arrangement and demands of the school day."
Dr Murray tells the Telegraph: "If you want, you could add the idea that parents are often frustrated by their adolescent's late night habits (internet, TV and phone), which they blame for their child's difficulty waking on time for school.
"However, there is a biological reason for adolescent's midnight arousal - they are programmed to this phase delay in their body clock. In fact, a biological marker of the end of adolescence is a shifting earlier of the phase of the body clock back to a more adult orientation."
And Dr Warner adds: "The concern for young people is that with increased curriculum offerings at schools they are tending to start lessons earlier and earlier for senior school students. Some schools in Australia are starting classes at 8 am or earlier and our research would question the value of this if young people are there in body, but brains are still fast asleep."
"The tendency for many teenagers to go to bed late and get up late has been dismissed for years as just laziness. These results add to the growing body of evidence that there is something about the sleep/wake timing system of teenagers that is genuinely different from adults," comments Prof Russell Foster, an Oxford University chronobiologist.
"These results should inform the way we structure education and the organization of school and college time-tables".