The Sleep We Stole from Our Children

Part 2 in the series The Brain, the Screen and the School

In the previous part I wrote about how tech companies design their products to trigger the oldest structures of the brain, and why the mobile phone ban in schools is right. But there is an arena where the battle for children’s brains takes place every single night — and where we adults often do not even know we have already lost.

It is about sleep.

One in four lower secondary pupils sleeps six hours or less

When Sissela Nutley presents her sleep data from Det Syns Inte , the room goes quiet. The programme is now active in 350 schools across Sweden, and pupils fill in anonymous surveys about their habits. The data covers pupils from year 7 through to the third year of upper secondary school.

The numbers are hard to take in. From year 8 onwards, one in four to one in five pupils sleeps six hours or less on weekday nights. More girls than boys. Nutley notes that this level of sleep deprivation is associated with a doubled risk of developing anxiety or low mood within a year.

Six hours. That is far too little time for the brain to rest and process the day’s experiences. When this goes on week after week the risks are serious. It is a chronic deficit that is especially alarming while the brain is still developing.

Phone in bed: 2.5 times higher risk

Nutley asks a simple question in the survey: where is your phone when you sleep? There are three options: in the bed, in the bedroom but not in the bed, or outside the bedroom.

About one in four pupils answers that the phone is in the bed. One in five among boys. And those who sleep with the phone in the bed have a 2.5 times higher risk of ending up in the group that sleeps six hours or less.

A third of girls say they scroll on their phone for at least an hour after going to bed. Among boys it is about one in five.

Nutley draws a conclusion that should make every parent think twice and take a closer look: “Many parents believe they say good night, sleep well, and that is that. But the time is half past eleven, midnight, one in the morning. Because there is a habit and a reward system that has been hacked.”

The staircase effect

Nutley’s data reveals a clear staircase pattern. In each year group — 7, 8 and 9 — pupils sleep less the closer the phone is to them. Those with the phone in the bed sleep the least, those with it in the bedroom but out of reach sleep a little longer, and those who leave the phone outside the room sleep the longest. The difference averages an hour or more per night.

An hour short. Every night. Throughout all of lower secondary school.

That is the difference between a pupil who can keep up in class and one who sits fighting through a fog. Between a teenager who can handle a difficult situation and one who falls apart. You are not your best self when sleep-deprived — every adult who has woken at four in the morning and failed to get back to sleep knows this. Yet we expect children to cope with it, night after night.

What schools can do

On 9 April 2026 the Public Health Agency of Sweden published new sleep recommendations for children and young people, commissioned by the government. Teenagers need 8–10 hours of sleep per day. Screens should be avoided before bedtime. The phone should be left outside the bedroom. It is the same message Nutley has been delivering for years, and now it carries official backing.

This is not schools’ problem alone. But schools have a unique role, because they are one of the few places where all parents actually meet.

Nutley describes how Det Syns Inte works with exactly this: take 15 minutes at a parent evening. Show the sleep data. Let parents split into groups and talk it through. What rules should we have at home? What do you do? It sounds simple — and it is. But the impact can be significant, because the problem with screen habits is that they are a network effect.

If everyone else is allowed to have the phone in bed, your child is the only one who is not. And no parent wants to put their child in that position. But if the parents in a class talk it through, if there is a shared stance, it becomes easier for everyone.

That is what Nutley means by rigging environments. Not pointing fingers at individual families. But building structures that make it easier to do what is good.

The role of pupil health services

Nutley also highlights the role of pupil health services. Within the remit of health promotion and prevention there is scope to work with sleep issues, to spread knowledge, to offer self-assessment at school level so that schools know how pupils are actually sleeping. Det Syns Inte provides anonymised group-level summaries, allowing schools to see the picture and direct their efforts accordingly.

I think about this in relation to Örebro. We have pupils who arrive at school tired, unfocused, irritable. We spend resources managing the symptoms. But do we ask ourselves often enough what is happening between ten in the evening and seven in the morning?

Sleep is not glamorous. It does not sound as exciting as AI in the classroom or new digital learning tools. But if Nutley’s data is right — and I have no reason to doubt it — the phone in the bed is one of the most concrete risk factors we can do something about. Without it costing a single penny.

All it requires is that we adults talk to one another. And that we actually listen to the research.

In the next part I look at how Sweden digitalised its schools without any impact assessment, and what that has cost us.