Parents of the HS Class of 2017 (Part 1)

Parents of HS Class of 20xx
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QOTD: I have one of each. S17 basically shuts down at 10 PM no matter what he’s doing. He’s up on his own at 6:15 and ready to go in the morning by 7. He’s very disciplined and manages his time well.

D15 is a night owl but she seems to have lucked out with late morning classes in college. I keep telling her that her luck is bound to change eventually! Somehow, she survived high school on about 4-5 hours of sleep a night.

My experience has been that kids are wired the way they are wired. Before there was facebook, D read and wrote late into the night. S used to put himself to bed when he was young. College helps but they learn to cope on their own if they haven’t figured it out before then.

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DS goes to bed between 10:00 -11:00 PM and waked up around 6:15 AM. While you are on the topic, check out this website http://www.startschoollater.net/. I am a believer in that cause :slight_smile:

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D17 wakes up around 6:30. Leaves the house around 7:15. Comes home after field hockey around 6 for practice days, upto 8 for away game days. She has most of her homework/school stuff done during school time (including a study hall period). Only see her study at home when there is a major paper, project, or prepares for some tests. And it always involves netflix running in the background,and phone/pad next to her mac. I can never figure out how she multi-task like that. Lights are out normally around 10:30 to 11. The only time she went past mid night was during the 2 weeks prior to Jan’16 SAT. She decided to take it second time with only 2 weeks left till testing date. Since she was motivated (self driven) this time, she put all she had into it. She said these is no way she can do that longer than 2 weeks…On weekends, in addition to Saturday practice/games, she works Saturday and Sunday night shifts. Occationally fill in Friday night too. A little more than 2 weeks into the senior year, she is doing ok on her school work so far. But no additional progress on app side since we are stuck at LOR phase.

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Mine has classes straight from 7:55 to 1:55 with a half hour lunch. No study hall. All her teachers at BTS night said they strictly forbid other homework in their classes. They are to be actively engaged in discussion or in the lab.

She has 4-5 hours of homework, solid, every night. I’m honestly not sure how she’d do other homework at school without access to her computer and her textbooks.

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QOTD: I agree that kids (and adults) need to work within their natural schedules as much as they can. S takes after H and likes to stay up later but sleep in. D got my sleep schedule – early to bed and early to rise.

S gets about 7-8 hours of sleep per night, which is usual for him. He feels like he has to get up too early for school – I threatened him with a bucket of ice water to get him out of bed 10 minutes before we left the house when he was younger – and he’d be a huge proponent of later start times, or at least moving marching band practice from before school to after school.

D on the other hand has a natural nap time at 5 p.m. and has since she was tiny. Many of her dinners got cold on the table when we couldn’t rouse her enough to eat. She has learned to work around this “sleepy time” with college classes and work schedules.

Although I do see how it can be abused by my co-workers, I think flexible work schedules help counteract the fact that some are at their best at 8 a.m. and others definitely aren’t.

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4-5 hours of homework a night? Wow! She’ll be ready for college I guess. College may be easier

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^Agreed. With 8 classes (all AP/IB/DE) D has 3-4 hours per night during the week and more on weekends due to projects, papers, etc. I tell her she’ll be well prepared for college.

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Lot of home work and projects for DS as well. That’s IB world :slight_smile:

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Six hours of sleep,12:30-6:30, if he is lucky. He tries to make up for it on Sundays, or if there isn’t a meet or tournament on Saturday, then both days.

His peers are all doing the same. If he went to bed at 10 or 11, he would miss out on the group labs or essays or whatever they work on. It is crazy, but he is not sitting around wasting time. A little bit of time to check FB messenger, Slack, various blogs, but then shower, dinner, and HW. Home from school by 5pm a few days and 7pm another couple. The schedule exhausts me, and I agree that college will offer more free time. I actually found the wide open free time of college to be a problem, after having been so busy in HS and then having nothing but three or four hours of lecture a day.

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That actually sounds pretty miserable to me. I don’t think our family is wired that way at all.

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One problematic issue this year is that S has lunch at 10:30 am. He brings what is basically a second lunch for after school clubs, because he’s not home until about 5 every day.

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My son did come home from school and was just as shocked about his ACT scores as I was. He now believes he could have a shot at a good school!

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My kid has 4 to 5 hours of hw with only 4 classes. Don’t know what she’d have with 8.

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Thanks, all for the Naviance input. We can toggle between test types (SAT 1600, 2400, or ACT) but cannot choose GPA view. I had a meeting with D17 and GC today to discuss procedural stuff and go over D’s initial list (which GC gave thumbs up to!) and… naturally the one question I went in there with re: the GPA status is the one question I forgot to ask her. :))

D17 wakes up at 5:45 to make her 6:30 bus for school. She gets home most nights around 6pm. She keeps swearing “I’m going to go to bed early tonight” - but between one thing and another it’s rare that she actually gets to sleep before 11:00. She sleeps in on Saturdays when she can. I wish she got at least another hour a night more regularly, but she seems fairly resigned to the amount she gets now. I truly wish school didn’t start so early (7:40 is beginning of 1st period.) I cannot imagine most kids are at their best at that hour.

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QOFD2: Do you see sibling rivalries? Or a strong sibling impact the confident of the other? D17 has always been the smart/quick starter and took care most of S20’s chores. She is like the second mom in the house. S20 seems always under the shadow of his big sister. Several of his grade school teachers told me that he rated himselve medium when he was at top. He used to tell me he’s dumb from time to time. As he gets older and gets to know his friends circle better, he realized that he is opposit from dumb. But he still doesn’t tryout/volunteer at things the way D17 would…But I think secretly, he compares himself to D17 all the time…

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DS17 gets to bed between 10 and 11 every night, to rise between 5:30 and 6am… So between 7 & 71/2 hours of sleep nightly during the week…weekends at least 9 hours Sat/Sun nights.

Congrats to all with satisfying scores

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DS17 takes meds for his ADHD during the week. So it really doesn’t matter how much homework he has the side effect for him is that he can’t go to sleep until 12:00 -1:00 and then he gets up at 6:30. So on Saturday and Sunday he ends up sleeping more than he does during the summer…

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We deliberately cut S17 back because he needed his sleep & too many classes ramped up his anxiety. Class starts at 8am sharp & he usually isn’t home till after 4:30 with band stuff. Sophomore year he started at 7am and stayed till the same time. Most nights he goes to bed around 11pm & gets up at 7:15. I don’t monitor it. He has had at least 3 hours of homework a night since 4th grade. He really doesn’t think that odd anymore.

I just laugh at the ‘no screens’ in the bedroom comment. I don’t have a very large house so if we followed that rule we would be on top of each other all the time driving each other nuts. And there is no way I could get my DH to follow that. I do find I must put down WORK at least an hour before I plan to go to bed or I can’t sleep.

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@thermom Circling back to Naviance, our school appears to leave application date GPA in there. My S16’s wasn’t updated.

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Sleep: This is a big problem at our house. A big issue.

D17 is a night owl who is basically unable to fall asleep before midnightish but has painfully early (zeroth hour, literally!) classes; she gets 5 or on a good night 6 (on a bad night, 3 or 4) hours of sleep weekdays, between 9 and 11 weekends. Her doctor recently put her on early-morning light therapy to see if that lets her fall asleep earlier, but it’s too early to tell—but she’ll still only be getting 6 or 7 hours of sleep given her homework load.

D19 also has zeroth hour classes (hello to her fellow bandmates!), but can fall asleep whenever she wants to; she usually keeps herself awake late enough that she only gets 6 or 7 hours, but if we’re actively on her about it she’ll get 8 or 9. Weekends she usually gets 9 or so.

D23 has a lot of trouble falling asleep—not as bad as D17, but still pretty bad. She and her younger sister don’t have to get up quite as early, but we all have to get in the car at the same time (since we remain stubbornly a one-car family), and some mornings she has classes that start as early as her older sisters (more band!), so she gets between 9 and, after bad nights, 7 hours per night, with weekends generally being 9 hours.

D25 generally gets 8 or 9 hours of sleep a night. She’d the most morning-person of our whole family by far (which doesn’t actually make her all that much of a morning person, really, but still), and so she still tends to get up early enough on weekends that she’s getting 9 hours.

Sibling rivalries: D23 and D25 are already shaping up for a war for the ages. There may be hope, though, since D17 and D19 used to fight a lot (not helped by how competitive D19 is—our whole family’s competitive, but I believe hers is a few too many standard deviations away from the average once in a while), but now that they’ve branched off in different directions (D17 more of your standard educational path, D19 into design) things have cooled down a lot. (D19 also now appreciates the D17 is the dutiful daughter, and so takes a lot of the pressure off D19 to do household chores—I do think she’s dreading her older sister going off to college and leaving her with the responsibility of being the oldest.)

On the flip side, D23 utterly adores D19 and would defend her to the death, and D25 and D17 have an absolutely delightful relationship (though not to the point that D25 isn’t excited about the possibility of taking over D17’s room to get away from D23 next year, of course).