Yesterday evening I found my son sleeping on the floor near his desk. He had two AP tests this week, 4 hours of sport, a regular test or two, several essays due, had to get up at 6 for some volunteering stuff, and so on. At least the debate season is over, when the kids have to get up around 5am to travel to a competition every Saturday.
This doesn’t even sound too impressive relative to what some other kids are doing. I read quite a few posts from parents bragging about their kids who are recruitable athletes, who come home at 10-11pm from training every day and then do their homework for hours. These parents are proud of how hard-working their kids are. I would have been extremely worried if my kid had this kind of schedule. I’m trying to enforce at least 7 hours of sleep every night, but that’s not always working. There are tons of articles out there about research that says teens need 8-9 hours of sleep, but this doesn’t sound at all doable and just serves to make me worry more. And the culture of celebrating work at the expense of sleep doesn’t stop in high school, naturally. Are we setting up our best and brightest young people for a lifetime of health and mental health problems?
I am a big proponent of sleep. I feel people discount it way too much and look at it as a hassle or something that can easily be sacrificed. I think sleep is a basic need that people have. Like eating. A child or teen needs sleep.
If a child cannot get the sleep you think he deserves, then he is over-scheduled.
I hear the stories about these proud parents who drive their kids like oxen into the ground. Those parents are nuts to me. I know people say they can sleep when their dead but I am not one to subscribe to that. I want my kids to enjoy life and not be overburdened with activities that take away getting a good nights rest. It is so important.
Sounds like your struggling with how much sleep is good and what is not good. You just need to make a call.
Bottom line is nobody can predict the future with any certainty. You kid may turn out perfectly healthy or he could turn out to be less than that. Too many variables to know for certain.
My rant was more about the general culture. I really can’t make any calls at this point. DS is completely self-driven and resents nothing as much as us trying to make him go to bed at a reasonable hour. He seems to be OK for now and not excessively sleepy except for occasional hard weeks. Two more weeks until the end of the junior year…
I agree we have a culture problem in the USA when it comes to sleep. It will not help that the President is famous for not needing sleep. He is a role model for many young people.
I myself have had two extreme experiences with sleep:
In the '90s, when my kids were little, I got a great job that required an hour and 45-minute commute, each way. On weekdays, I’d have to get up at 5:15 AM and I’d finally go to bed around 11:30 PM. I was horribly, horribly sleep deprived. I’d make up some of it on the weekends, but every week, by Thursday and Friday, I felt horrible.
Now I’m more or less retired. I generally get eight hours of sleep every night, and most days I take a one-hour nap. I feel fantastic.
I’m sure a lot of highly successful and driven people get less than 7/8 hours of sleep a night. I know I was that way throughout most of my working life. I know my own kids got by on less sleep in high school and college, some partially due to not having ideal time management skills but also because they want(ed) to do it all - classes, relationships, friendships, ECs, sports. I know I didn’t set the best example either.
However, there are other ways, other tracks you can take. Plenty of good colleges that will take kids that aren’t super achievers, career tracks suitable for the same. However, to swim with the big fish, I think that is what it takes these days a lot of times.
I will say that online time is a big time suck these days (guilty of it but my time is my own now and I didn’t do it much at all back when juggling long work hours and raising kids). I bet most people could squeeze out at least an extra hour if they put down their phones more and weren’t on their other electronic devices.
Do you adults know highly successful people who consistently get 8 hours of sleep nightly?
Good to hear people here are getting sleep! Are you empty nesters now and if so, have you consistently gotten 8 hours of sleep per night throughout your careers? If so, I’m super impressed! For me, there just weren’t enough hours in a day to make that happen if I actually wanted to spend quality time with my family as well.
Completely anecdotal, of course, but the two students at my D’s HS that did the best admissions-wise last year (i.e., the only ones in their graduating class with more than one ivy admit (specifically, both were admitted to Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford; one was also admitted to Yale) managed to get to bed between 9 and 10 pm every night. My D continues this pattern of trying to get to bed early most nights in college.
One issue with not getting enough sleep is that your cognitive skills tend to decline. For me, homework that would take an hour if I was well rested would take two hours if I wasn’t, and so on. Depending on the subject (for me it was math), I would be totally useless if I didn’t get enough sleep, and basically every minute I spent studying was a complete waste of time. But it can feel like you’re working very hard.
I think overall our culture values sleeping less, and personally I saw this more after graduating high school than in high school, though my high school did not have many overachievers. If you do research into the effects of sleep deprivation, it can be very scary and depressing. I wish more people were aware of this.
My daughters both like to sleep. When they text me expressing annoyance with themselves for sleeping late in the morning, I tell them it’s good they slept a long time and it obviously means they’ve been tired and have to make up the missed rest. (Um, except when they miss early morning flights…)
My kid gets texts from classmates at 2am (and sometimes later) on school nights. Presumably it’s working for them, but it would not work for her at all. She and I are both people who need more sleep than average.
I have multiple sleep disorders, and have for years. While I can’t prove it, I believe some of it could have been caused by massive sleep deprivations in my 20’s. I went through a period of around 3 years where I was regularly pulling at least one all-nighter a week. I had a policy that if I wasn’t in bed by 5, I would just stay up, because it was too hard to get back up at 6:30 to get to class. I would drive the 35 minute commute through the country so asleep that I had to open the window and turn the radio up full blast when it was freezing out.
If I had to do it again, I would try to put my health higher on the priority list. You can screw up other body systems, why not that one?
I am amazed that my DD18 will get snapchats and texts literally all night.
She is usually in bed between 10:30 and 11 p.m. at night (up at 5:30 a.m.) and by the time she is up her phone has multiple notifications all night, that thankfully she has slept through. I asked her one time what the heck was up with those and she said the kids send them to keep themselves awake. My DD18 polices herself pretty well in terms of getting to sleep, but I wish she’d get a bit more.
My DD21, on the other hand, is famous for taking a 13-hour nap. She loves sleep. She also does very well in school.
@sylvan8798 My sleep schedule is seriously corrupted - anything can throw it off. I blame not being able to follow my normal patterns when I was younger. Night cops as a reporter nearly killed me.
Adults need about 7 hours of sleep and can get by on 6-6 1/2 from time to time. Growing teens need 9 hours until about 16 (it depends on kids) and 8 thereafter. Subtract 1/2-1hour for the “can get by from time to time” option.
In addition, teens hormonal system pushes their sleep time/wake time to later by a couple hours.
Add to this the effects of blue light from electronic devices and you’ve got a perfectt storm brewing.
First step is to require surrender of electronics at a fixed time, about 1-2hours before scheduled bed time. Second step is to recognize sleep as a productive, “battery charging” moment. Third step is to recognize how serious sleep deprivation is, in the same way anorexia is.
Sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture due to the hell it puts the body and brain through.
When high schools experimented with later start time (9:30 for instance), researchers found encouraging results such as fewer car accidents, and fewer disciplinary incidents in school, as well as more focused students and better academic results.
Yes, sleep deprivation during the teen years is setting them up for physical and mental health issues. I’ve always been a proponent for good sleeping habits for my kids (and myself). When they were preschool age, they were in bed by 7 pm and slept at least 10 hours, usually a bit more, waking sometime around 6 am. In elementary school, bedtime was sometime between 7:30 and 8:00, middle school was 9:00 and then they had to be in their rooms on school nights by 9:30 during high school, no television or other electronics. For the most part, they slept 7.5-8 hours all through their school years.
If they can’t get at least 7.5 hours of sleep every night, they are over-scheduled. Sleep is as important, or more important than down-time, which is something else I advocate for. Time management and prioritizing activities goes a long way in helping with both down time and sleep habits.
As the parent of 3 teens, I can certainly sympathize. Add to the mix that middle child, the current senior is like my mom and me: a horrible sleeper. So even when she’s in bed nice and early, she’s likely to be awake far later than she should be.
But as teacher, that first paragraph of the OP stood out: “Yesterday evening I found my son sleeping on the floor near his desk. He had two AP tests this week, 4 hours of sport, a regular test or two, several essays due, had to get up at 6 for some volunteering stuff, and so on. At least the debate season is over, when the kids have to get up around 5am to travel to a competition every Saturday.”
So much of life is about choices, and there were so many choices implied in that paragraph. For example, those 4 hours of sport. A choice. The regular test or two-- probably not assigned the night before, there was time over the weekend to prepare. Likewise the essays-- not assigned the night before, could have been tackled over the weekend. The volunteering could have been put off until the following week when the schedule wasn’t so tight.
I’m not criticizing, honestly. But the OP’s son sounds a lot like that same daughter. She allows herself to get caught behind the 8 ball. She’ll say she can cover someone else’s shift at work, when the correct response should be “Sorry, I can’t. I need to get xyz done.” She’ll volunteer when she can, when perhaps another date would be equally helpful to someone else, but a whole lot easier for her. She’ll enjoy a gorgeous Saturday at the beach, not stopping to think of the cost in terms of the upcoming week’s schedule.
I know they’re teens, and hopefully at some point what we’ve been saying for years will sink in: that she’s a happier person when she’s well rested. And that it’s up to HER to set the parameters where possible so she gets to bed (if not sleep) early enough to keep her relatively well rested.