ADHD teens—what time does yours actually go to bed?

My son has to be up at 6am and we’ve been going back and forth about what a reasonable bedtime is. He swears he actually has MORE energy when he gets less sleep, and I can see why he thinks that. He’ll go to a sleepover, barely sleep, and somehow be totally fine the next day. It’s the day after that (and sometimes the next couple of days) when he’s a disaster.

I keep trying to explain that just because he feels fine the next day doesn’t mean he actually functions better on less sleep. It seems like he can run on adrenaline or whatever for a day and then the lack of sleep catches up with him.

His other argument is that all of his friends stay up late on school nights. And maybe they do, but that’s between them and their parents. Of course, from his perspective, that just means I’m being unfair and treating him like a little kid by telling him when he needs to go to bed.

The other thing is that when I do “make” him go to bed at a reasonable time, he falls asleep pretty easily. It’s not like he’s lying there awake for hours because his body genuinely isn’t ready to sleep. If that were happening, I’d feel differently. It’s more like he doesn’t want to go to bed yet than that he actually can’t sleep.

I know he’s a teenager and I don’t want to spend every school night fighting about bedtime or micromanaging when he goes to sleep. But 6am comes whether he goes to sleep at 10:30 or 1am, and I also know what he’s like when he’s been running on too little sleep for several days.

So I’m curious what other families are actually doing. What time does your teen have to get up, what time do they realistically go to sleep, and how many hours seem to work best for them? Do you still have a set bedtime, or have you mostly handed that responsibility over to them?