<p>My sons routinely get no more than 6 hours of sleep per night, often less. DS11th grade - a night owl - routinely starts his hw at 10pm, and continues until 2-3am, only to sleep and board the bus at 6am. DS2 - 9th grade - is willing to work as soon as he arrives home from school, which means generally between 7-8pm, getting to bed around 11, except when there is a great deal of HW; recently, to complete the group project neglected by the other group members, he finished at 2am…</p>
<p>I do not police either child’s bedtime, and have not done so since about 7th grade.</p>
<p>My Junior DDs are up sometimes until after 1:00 am doing AP work. It isn’t every night but there have been weeks when it’s been the rule rather than the exception. I was worried initially but they seem to be handling it OK. On the other hand the amount of homework has really eaten into our family time. I find that even though they are right here at home, I miss them.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is healthy for anyone to be in a constant state of sleep deprivation. An occasional short night is ok, but if this is regular situation something needs to give and in my opinion high school coursework and ECs are not worth risking your health for. So when this happened to our daughter jr. year we sat down and looked at all her commitments, looked at the class assignments, talked about what was most important to her and she ended up moving one of her AP classes to regular.</p>
<p>But our aim has always been a meaningful and balanced life, not one that is successful by our culture’s standards and we were all willing to take the chance that dropping that class would mean her class rank might be lower and that might mean no acceptance to Harvard. We just really didn’t care about what might happen since we can’t control that kind of stuff anyway!</p>