Generally lights out at 10, but homework often keeps him up until 12. Up at 6. He has an alarm.
No weekend rules. He sleeps until about 930-10.
My kids did nap after school. My husband didn’t like that but I was ok with that. I napped after school when I was in high school.
D could not keep the hours some of your kids do. She just can’t. On a college tour recently that’s the lack of sleep she was getting-only 5-6 hours a night and it took her a month to recover. Her grades fell, he health was compromised and she was tired and cranky for days on end. We are lucky that she doesn’t go to a school with tons of homework, no AP’s or IB’s, yet still offers a challenge, because I don’t think it would work for her. I’m frankly worried about how she will manage her need for sleep at college, even though most schools she’s looking at have quiet hours. I may need to buy her some very good earplugs. As it is she sleeps with an eye mask.
I just graduated from hs a month ago, but I recall that my sleeping habits were pretty normal on school nights: 10PM-4AM. On Fridays and Saturdays, they were 4AM-2PM, lol. (
Through most of high school went to sleep 10-10:30, up around 7:45. Senior year roughly 12-7:15 during the busy fall. I can’t see how parents would permit a child to get less than 6 hours sleep at night.
The bus for my kids’ high school came at 6:10 AM. When my first kid was in high school I was fine because I fell asleep as soon as I got in bed. Getting up at 5 AM was no problem for either of us. Although I do remember a day when she was up and ready to go and school was cancelled because of snow. She went back to bed and slept for another 7 hours. But when Kid 2 was in high school I had lost my ability to fall asleep and I went through most of the last three years before he graduated on three hours or fewer of sleep every night. He was fine, I was a basket case. I still have trouble falling asleep but I’m retired now so it doesn’t matter. He gets up in the morning these days with no assist from me.
My senior year I went to sleep around 2AM or 3AM most nights and woke up around 6:15AM, though I could never get up on my own. I never went to sleep before 1AM at the earliest. I definitely don’t have the stamina to keep those kinds of hours anymore 
Average Weekdays 12pm-6am (take away an hour or two if I am loaded on hw)
Night before big test 10pm-6am (most kids lose sleep before big tests, but I knock out studying in the afternoon/evening and get a full night’s rest)
Weekend 11 or 12 pm-8 am (can’t sleep in much longer, and usually have busy weekends regardless)
Just my personal opinion, but I think that not sleeping much is the new Puritanism, and that it’s not actually healthy. Also, I am reminded of Nancy Kress’s novels about groups of people who were genetically engineered not to require sleep.
The immune system is most active during sleep, as I understand it. During sleep, the brain organizes new thoughts and new information that one has acquired during the day.
Just speaking for myself, I find that 8 hours of sleep is worth about 20 IQ points, in terms of the level of work that I am capable of doing, compared with my level on 5 1/2 or 6 hours of sleep. There were years running when I typically got 5 1/2 or 6 hours of sleep, and now I am getting 8 hours of sleep fairly regularly. My intellectual clarity is greatly improved. However, it took time for this to happen–I would estimate that it took about 3 months to catch up on the sleep lost over many years of the short-sleep schedule.
In some circumstances, “production” is most important. That can be done with the short-sleep schedule. I think the demands of many high schools fall into that category. Sometimes one has to live with that.
For anyone out there who is needs, wants, or is getting 8 hours or so of sleep a night, but feels pressured by the low-sleep crowd: Getting adequate sleep makes sense. There probably are some people who just need less sleep than average, but I suspect that there are more people who are “faking it” at some cost to themselves than there are people who genuinely fall into that category.
A long time ago, a friend shared with me her father’s aphorism: Those who rise early are conceited in the morning, and stupid in the afternoon.
I agree with you, QM. I’m not saying my kids never stayed up late and studied, and I’m the all-nighter kind myself (up until recently - as I get older, I simply can’t) but a schedule which means consistently not getting enough sleep means something needs to go. Whether that’s an EC, or simply expectations of perfectionism.
When it comes to high school students getting too little sleep, I think that one of the main difficulties is that the teachers and the adult sponsors of many EC’s do not have a clear picture of the time demands on the students. There was a report a while ago about a teacher “shadowing” a high school student and winding up tired. The thing that was foolish about this report was that the teacher did none of the homework and none of the EC’s that the students did in a typical day!
My Ph.D. advisor once suggested to me that the ratio between how long something takes to do, and how long one thinks it will take to do is pi. I think this also applies to people assigning homework, in general.
Personally, I think that if the teachers had to do the group projects that they are assigning to the students (and in a group of the same size), they would start to understand how long it actually takes to produce a 15 minute video. The same goes for elaborate building projects. Locally, there was tricky, large-scale multi-week building project that students had to do in 8th grade. The teachers in charge were young. When the teachers’ children reached middle school, the project suddenly became optional.
Also, I think that many of the adult sponsors of EC’s–e.g. band director, debate team coach, drama teacher–have an idea of students’ homework load based on their own high school period. But I think that homework demands have ramped up–at least, that seems to be true around here. QMP had a great deal more homework than I did. So the EC sponsors tend to underestimate the schoolwork demands on the students.
Meanwhile, the expectations of the EC participants have ramped up. In a lot of places, there is pressure to win at a high level, even state or national, or to put on near-professional level performances. On my high school’s debate team, in contrast, there was a student who walked into his debates with a single “evidence” card, instead of the rolling file cabinets that most teams now bring in. The card said “Smile.” He debated purely on logic and his background knowledge. It is true that the coach kept him at junior varsity level, but still . . .
I don’t think this is just our area, is it?
Well, I know that after MY day, the only EC I have the energy for is sitting with my laptop and surfing CC :-). I don’t have the energy to play an instrument or write an article for a newspaper or volunteer at the old-age home or whatever.
Mine is home from college for a few more days. Last night several of his friends came over at 10:30 PM and they played XBox FIFA til 5AM then went to bed. They were up at 9, played soccer for a while and are settling in to watch the women’s World Cup now. Ahh…to be 19 again…
I agree that many teachers have no clue as to what other teachers assign in terms of hw. I once asked my D’s 10th grade Eng teacher how many hours of HW she thought was given to her students overall. She replied 2. I told her it was 7 for my daughter, with 7 hours each night on weekends also. That year, sophomore year, I kept vigil with my kid each night. I was a basket case and unable to function due to lack of sleep. She couldn’t either and got sick and it affected her grades. Needless to say, Changes were made the next year. We needed to come to terms with the fact that she was traumatized and exhausted, and she could not continue on the “race to nowhere” path she was on.
That was then, though. In junior and senior year we had to drop the highest level classes, as high level equates with overwhelming homework in our district…a fact I completely don’t understand. (That wasn’t the case when I went to HS and I don’t know if it’s the case everywhere.) So, to answer the question about sleep in senior year…senior year was quite easy this year, as we stacked her schedule with only 1 AP. Even so, my D stayed up till around 1 a.m. on school nights, but she didn’t need to be in school until 9:45. So it was okay. Weekends tend to be up till after 2:00 a.m. And sleep till noon. Makes me crazy! But it’s normal, I think.
D1 goes to sleep at 9 pm while D2 goes to sleep at 10 pm. weekends they will stay up later till 11 or midnight.