<p>We’ve always been strict about the kids getting to be on time, because we feel sleep is important for health and being a happy person the next day. This year, my older daughter has so much homework that it’s just not done yet at her old bedtime, so we’ve been letting her stay up until it’s done (an hour to two hours past her old bedtime). Result: tired and crabby the next day, with more homework to do, only this time while sleepy.
We’ve eliminated all TV and media during the week, scaled back her sports schedule, and limited other ECs.
How do other families balance getting a lot of homework done with kids getting the sleep they need?</p>
<p>This should answer your question:</p>
<p>nymag.com/news/features/38951</p>
<p>My kids are sleep deprived. Three nights a week my 14 year old gets home from dance and starts her homework at about 10 pm. However, the same sleep deprived kids are almost never sick…most years they have perfect attendance. Sometimes, you just have to lose sleep to get things done. </p>
<p>Not everyone agrees with this philosophy, however. There is a lady in my Sunday School class who turns down all social engagements that don’t allow her to get to bed by 9:30 pm. She’s even stopped singing in church choir because the rehearsal is too late at night for her. I don’t want to raise children who turn out like this lady.</p>
<p>My 6th grader had a school choir concert last week that started at 7:30 pm and ended at about 9 pm. A girl next to her was fading because she says she has an 8 pm bedtime. Amazing! My daughter has been getting home from gymnastics at 8 pm for about three years!</p>
<p>I gave up.</p>
<p>Toward the end of high school, and certainly in college, neither of my kids got the amount of sleep I thought they needed (although it often wasn’t homework, but ECs and social stuff that kept them up.) Their dad is a bad example, as he exists on about 6 hours of sleep a day. I don’t think it’s healthy, but then Americans aren’t very healthy, as much as we proclaim our health-consciousness. </p>
<p>Many studies have shown that 7-8 hours of sleep a night is the about the minimum needed to regenerate your cells, and be rested the next day. Cumulative loss of sleep is very hard to make up. If your kid has to be up at 6:30 to make it to school by 8:00, then 11:30 should be at the late end of the target. Try your best, I guess. I have never been very good at convincing anyone in my family that sleep is as important as I think it is. They all seem to have the “You can sleep when you’re dead” philosophy.</p>
<p>haha I got home from gymnastics close to 10 the last few years. </p>
<p>I wrote out a longer reply but somehow lost it: I’ll summarize. In my experience, if time management isn’t the issue (doesn’t sound like it is so much in this case) then it’s perfectionism. Prioritizing may be key to solving the dilemma. </p>
<p>She may be taking too long on assignments that are just meant to be a quick check of understanding. It might help to take a day or two and try coming up with a reasonable time period for each assignment. Then work on it for that time. Look at how far you got, and move to the next. (she can always go back later of course). Then she can get some grasp for how she is using time and whether she is overestimating the amount of work she needs to do. Plus, I find that going back the second time will usually make finishing quicker. </p>
<p>I am a night person, so it is better for me to stay up and finish. If she is a morning person, it may be better for her to wake up earlier and finish. If she is getting exhausted staying up to do the homework, it will take her longer at night because of that.</p>
<p>I think it depends on what time you want the kids to bed, and the frequency of the late night homework occasions. </p>
<p>I knew a mom who insisted all her children be in bed by 9:00- all the way through high school. If her son takes this approach with him to college, I can’t imagine how he will adjust to living with a roommate. I didn’t make a big issue over bedtime, but that’s because my kids crashed by 11 every night on their own. However, I would have started to intervene if my kids consistently were not getting enough sleep due to activities and homework. </p>
<p>My son grabbed moments throughout his school day to get homework done- 10 or 15 minutes here and there add up. He also would get in 15 to 30 minutes of reading over breakfast or upon rising in the morning. I’d guess he probably cut at least an hour off of each night’s homework by grabbing opportunities whenever he could.</p>
<p>It’s also not a bad time to start learning the concept of “selective neglect.” Not every assignment needs the same amount of effort. Sometimes skimming is sufficient, sometimes doing every other problem is sufficient (if the homework isn’t collected & graded). It is a useful technique to learn.</p>
<p>How old is your daughter?</p>
<p>At a certain age, it’s up to the student to start making these calls. As Chedva said, students need to figure out how to get most of their work done pretty well and get a reasonably good night’s sleep. It’s not all of one or all of the other. You need to compromise on both sleep and work if there’s not enough time to do everything. Finding the right balance is up to the kid, in my opinion.</p>
<p>I agree, Corranged. When considering next year’s schedule, one kid might say, “Those 3 AP classes left me exhausted. I think I’ll just take one next year” while another might say, “Those 3 AP classes really pumped me…I think I’ll take 4 next year…and try out for drum major.”</p>
<p>OP, you don’t say how old your daughter is, and I think that makes a difference. By junior year, we did not set any limits, and there were a few all-nighters with a big EC (academic contest). If kids are in reasonably good health, I think they’ll be OK.</p>
<p>A related consideration though, would come in if the student is driving. That adds a whole extra layer of concern, and I would excercise limits in that case.</p>
<p>I agree with all of the above. Most teens/adults are not getting enuf sleep. HS is a good time to supervise a transition between telling your kid what to do and letting them figure it out for themselves (imagine the potential disaster if you ran their life from a to z and then they were completely on their own away at college?).</p>
<p>That said, most hs schedules don’t sync with the kids biorhythms. Teens are biologically programmed to be up all night and sleep all day, yet the hs’s in our town start at the ungodly hour of 7:20 am. Due to the vestiges of ct-ordered busing, the bus arrives at 6am, which means getting up no later than 5:30am. If the kid routinely stays up til 2am cause of dance/piano/sports/whatever til 9pm, chaos ensues. However, at least with D2, if she wasn’t overscheduled she lost her focus and accomplished nothing.</p>
<p>Eventually they discover that it helps to turn off the tv and the computer (they will not believe you if you tell them, have a sibling tell them). When they get to college, if lucky, they will arrange it so no class starts before 11am ever, and then they can stay up til 2 or 3am routinely and still get enuf sleep. Then maybe one day they can get a job where they take the night shift (D2 would be perfect for a hospital position as she shows no sign of converting to a normal day time existence).</p>
<p>I think high schools should start no earlier than 9am as most of what the teachers do before then is lost on the students.</p>
<p>Agree to check on how daughter is doing HW. Found with my daughter that some of her friends were perfectionists. Their projects and posters had to be just so and they would spend hours on them. All papers were at the maximum words allowed. DD would look at what was being scored and produce it asccordingly. Did it look as good? No. Did she understand the material and have grades that were just fine Yes. With sanity and ECs and sleep.</p>
<p>Our high school starts at 8:35 am, because they use the same busses for the middle schoolers (so it’s the middle schoolers who are standing outside in the dark waiting for the bus every morning.)</p>
<p>Last year, the sophomores who were taking the pre-AP English/AP World History block had a major paper (50+ pages) that was due in early February. The due date coincided with the final week of rehearsal for the musical, which had the kids at rehearsal until 10 pm. DS did work a lot on the paper over winter break, but still had a lot of work to do in late January/early Feb. He’d get home and go straight to the computer to work on the paper; I’d make him hot tea with honey and lemon and a snack and go to bed and he’d stay up until 1 or 2 am. </p>
<p>This was going on in more households than mine. It kind of surprised me that in those final days, LOTS of kids stayed home during the school day to catch up on sleep. DS got up every morning (okay, I drug him out of bed.) It was a little slice of hell, but of the variety that made him feel very accomplished when it was over. (I don’t have a military background, but maybe it’s like graduating from Basic Training.)</p>
<p>I am a lawyer. Sometimes, a lot of work has to be done in a short amount of time. No one cares if I get any sleep or not. I think I am pretty good at time management and I started learning those skills during my over extended high school and law school years.</p>
<p>My daughter went through most of high school going to bed by 10:30, except on rare occasions (she had to get up by 6:10 to get to her school bus on time). Even with this amount of sleep, she was often tired. And the few times when she stayed up later, she felt terrible, physically, the entire next day.</p>
<p>Most of her classmates stayed up until 2 AM or later routinely, and still caught those early busses. My daughter still wonders whether they felt awful every day of their high school lives.</p>
<p>The only way my daughter could maintain this kind of schedule was by limiting her ECs, turning down a lot of social invitations, and devoting large chunks of weekend time to school assignments, rather than doing them on weeknights. But it’s what felt best to her. I would have allowed her to stay up all night if she wanted to (as long as she did it in her own room and wore earphones if she was using any electronic equipment). But she didn’t want to.</p>
<p>She seems a lot happier this year as a college freshman because she can get 8 1/2 to 9 hours of sleep a night rather than getting about 7 1/2 hours. I don’t know what will happen to her, though, if she ever has to have a roommate or an early class. This year, she lives in a single, and her earliest class this semester is at 10 AM. You can’t do much better than that.</p>
<p>My son, a college senior, is an entirely different creature. He says that you’re not really living the college life if you go to bed before the sun comes up, and his personal habits reflect this. But what happens to him is that after he stays up until all hours four or five nights in a row, he tends to fall asleep during the daytime, sometimes unintentionally, and he misses classes, meals, and other events. </p>
<p>I don’t know how the two of them ever communicate with each other (although I hear that they do IM). They’re never awake at the same time.</p>
<p>There is a way to do it. I’m a junior in college and have still never come close to pulling an all-nighter for academic reasons (only have done it for Dance Marathon and that does not count :)). I need several hours of sleep per night to stay functional. As a result, I’m a huge proponent for “selective neglect” (once I learn how my teachers grade and what is really important to know for my classes).</p>
<p>The only all nighter I’ve ever pulled was in college when a group paper was due and the rest of the group hadn’t done their part. I personally believe that all nighters are the creation of the person who is staying up all night. In my 22+ years in the practice of law, I had had successful partners who had at least one all night deals per year, and others equally as successful who have never had an all night deal.</p>
<p>I just got off the phone with WashDadJr. He said he actually had trouble with part of a Calculus test because, “I slept through my alarm a few times and didn’t make it to class.” This is pretty amazing since his Calc class is at 11am… He tells me that he has started going to bed earlier (“4am is just too late”) and not missing class anymore. I pointed out that his scholarship is based on maintaining his GPA and that his plan sounded like a good one.</p>
<p>We are living this scene at our home ourselves. Our daughter, unlike our older son, has never functioned well on little sleep. As a 10th grader with a full slate of honors/one AP course, she is not getting done in time to get to bed at a reasonable time. </p>
<p>Last night I paid closer attention to exactly what was going on. She is very inefficient, spending far too long on each assignment. I don’t want to sound like a fan of the “quick and dirty” method of doing assigned work, but learning to set time limits for each task and then forcing yourself to work fast enough to meet those limits is a valuable skill. Starting tonight, I will be encouraging her to work up a rough schedule and then try very hard to work at a pace that allows her to stick to the schedule.</p>
<p>I should add that she arranged to drop an elective advanced art class yesterday, thereby introducing a study period into her hectic day. I hated to see the fun class go, but life has not been fun for her when she is short on sleep and barely keeping up.</p>
<p>I have rarely had to tell my S’s to go to bed during their high school years but then I didn’t have a set bedtime either. Most nights they are/were asleep by 11:00-12:00 on school nights and whenever they want on weekends. I will admit that neither of mine have been slaves to homework, doing it in the school parking lot before sch. during lunch, during free time given at the end of their 90 minute classes, and sometimes (shock!) at home after dinner. </p>
<p>S1 is now in college and is is most certainly sleep deprived. He’s up half the night and then again at the crack of dawn. S2 is a varsity football player who goes straight from sch. to practice and gets home about 6:30 everyday. Many nights he is passed out before 10:00.</p>
<p>Our high school hours are 7:15-2:15. S2 gets up at 6 and leaves the house at 6:40 (drives himself). If he rode the bus, he would have to be at the stop before 6.</p>
<p>A few things that help around here–</p>
<p>No AIMing while doing homework at the computer. (You’d think this would be obvious, but…)</p>
<p>Trying to get a jump on the week’s work by doing what homework you can on the weekend.</p>
<p>Using a timer–to help keep to a certain pace. Helps with perfectionism problems.</p>