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Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice. It is the only way to improve her concentration and the path to health.
They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.
How to address this? It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents. You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club. Most said that they would respect their parents' decisions over peer pressure. Now most kids don't even understand the concept of their parents having a say at all. Kids need security in an unconditional relationship, and that relationship is with their parents, not with the teenage totem pole.
Small-n and possible bias due to typical-minding, but this was not at all what I observed in my environment growing up (and I would expect the schools I went to to be biased for some measure of well-adjustedness if anything).
What was the exact survey question/setup? Did it come with a guarantee that if you join, your parents will never find out? Otherwise, this would have been confounded by fear of consequences. (Many people are not confident that they can maintain a lie in front of their parents, which could be internalized like "I wouldn't want to live with the guilt".)
More than 50 years ago, Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman asked American teenagers this question: "Let's say that you had always wanted to belong to a particular club in school, and then finally you were asked to join. But then you found out that your parents didn't approve of the group. " Would you still join? In that era, the majority of American teenagers responded No. They would not join the club if their parents did not approve.
These figures are provided in Edwin Artmann's doctoral dissertation, "A comparison of selected attitudes and values of the adolescent society in 1957 and 1972," North Texas State University, 1973.
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True, but there is a difference between 'address why she isn't sleeping' versus 'ignore her goals and just issue a decree'.
That would not have been my first guess: I would have suspected either the standard circadian-phase differences¹ or bedtime procrastination².
If someone finds 'loss of social status from not responding to messages quickly enough' to be a worse outcome than 'lack of sleep leading to poor concentration'; the answer isn't to force her to endure the former, but to find a way that she can avoid both. (Note that when she is fully grown, she won't have parents there to limit when she can respond to messages.)
¹There has been much research showing that adolescents tend to function on later time-zones than other ages (possibly as an evolutionary adaptation ensuring that someone would always be awake to tend the camp-fire and watch for hostile mega-fauna), and that later start times for secondary schools would be beneficial.
²A phenomenon in which someone stays up late because they perceive that that is the only time that they have to themselves.
Personally, I think that the answer is to take the phone away so that the child can see "oh, actually this isn't that bad". Fears about ostracization like that are almost always severely overblown, in my experience. But I think what is clearly not the answer is for the parents to refuse to parent (putting limits on the phone) because "oh she'll be mad if we do that".
Like I can respect that one might not want to turn to taking the phone away (and damn the consequences) as a first resort. But if it comes down to it, your One Job (TM) as a parent is to put your foot down when your kid is doing something self-destructive. Whether or not they will have teenage moodiness about it doesn't even remotely factor in IMO.
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