Liz Atwood talks about her boys getting enough sleep in this week's Tween Tuesday:

The countdown to the new school year has started. My boys are frantically trying to finish their summer reading assignments and I’m desperately trying to get them back into a reasonable bedtime routine. As they grow older, this gets harder. I miss the days when they were babies and I could put them to bed at 8 p.m. and they would sleep until 7 the next morning.

Now it’s a miracle of they go to bed at 10, especially the teen-ager who wants to stay up watching football games, movies and late-night comedy shows. That doesn’t even factor in the time he spends looking at his iPod before he falls to sleep.

Lack of sleep is a chronic problem for tweens and teens, health experts say. And sleep deprivation leads to all sorts of problems, including poor school performance and bad tempers. Parents of tweens and teens know their kids already seem like a keg of dynamite ready to explode at the smallest spark. Failing to get enough sleep just exasperates those problems.

According to kidshealth.org, kids 10-12 need a little over nine hours of sleep per night. Teens need 8.5- 9.5 hours a night. Next week, my older son starts high school and the bus will arrive at 7:15 a.m. Even though he can dress and eat quickly, he will have to be up before 7 a.m. For a kid who has grown used to sleeping until almost noon, this first week is going to be rough.

Do you have any suggestions for how to get the older kids to bed on time?