I have sleep on the brain this week.
I am a big believer in the importance of getting enough sleep, probably because I've never (not even when I was much younger) been able to function well after missing it. I'm highly assertive about myself going to bed on time, taking naps, and resting extra on weekends. Also, I'm a morning person. But for the past six months or so I've been having a sleep problem: not insomnia exactly... more that I start getting tired in the afternoon, and by the time 7:30 or 8 pm rolls around I'm absolutely ready for bed. And then I do go to bed, leaving the teenagers to clean the kitchen (no problem there) and Mark to send the youngest two to bed all by himself (he's rather good at this, but I don't blame him if he would like me to do my part sometimes), because, well, see above: highly assertive.
And then I pop awake at two or three in the morning... if I manage to get back to sleep again, I'll pop awake at 5... and my alarm really goes off at 6.
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Long story short, I bought one of those light therapy devices, the wearable kind, which makes you look slightly like a cosplayer fan of Geordi LaForge* and shines bright LED light down at your face for 20-40 minutes. Most people who buy this are putting it on first thing in the morning, when they wake up, because most people who buy this thing either have difficulty getting up early in the morning, or they live somewhere that's too dark for happiness and they need to trick their brain into thinking they get to sit outside and enjoy a beautiful sunrise. But if you fall asleep too early and get up too early, you might be eligible for a diagnosis of Advanced Sleep Phase Disorder, which sounds like "Long-Untreated, It's Gotten Extra Bad Sleep Phase Disorder" but really means "The Opposite of Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder." And that sort of person is supposed to wear the thing shining down upon them in the evening. So that's what I've been doing for the past few days. No improvements seen yet, but I'm hoping that at least the placebo effect will start kicking in soon.
(No, I haven't gotten a diagnosis. Yes, I have sought the help of Doctor Google, M. D. Why? Because as far as I can tell there aren't any unpleasant side effects, and buying the thing and trying it out is significantly cheaper than seeking a diagnosis first. If it works, I'll come out way ahead; if it doesn't work, I'm set back by way less than the cost of a specialist visit.
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The homeschooled teenagers who live with me also have inconvenient (to me) sleep schedules, but it goes the other way. They stay up late (ok, that helps with getting the kitchen cleaned up; I drowsily noticed plate-clattering noises from downstairs when I turned over in bed at 11:45 pm last night). If left to their own devices, they sleep in well into the morning and sometimes even the afternoon.
The 16yo boy has, after a couple of years of trial-and-error, adapted his schoolwork routine remarkably well; he rarely, now, misses turning in his homework assignments on time. This morning, as I often do, I came down for my coffee to find on the counter the algebra book and a sprawl of mostly-finished homework; he'll have time to complete it before it's due early afternoon. I saw a similar pattern in his older brother, who's now doing fine in college as far as I can tell: given the freedom to set his own schedule, he adapted early to a routine that's not all that unusual among college students.
NOTE: I mean, I didn't do that when I was a college student. I preferred 9 a.m. classes; I badly needed to go to sleep by 11 p.m.; and I successfully avoided all-nighters for my entire undergraduate education except for twice (thank you, enforced group projects with assigned partners who did not share my self-care priorities). But I can see how it can work.
The 13yo girl has only just been given control over her schedule this year, and is still in the trial-and-error phase. Occasionally I need to firmly suggest that what she is exercising is procrastination rather than Scheduling Work To Happen At A Time More Convenient Than Right Now, Namely Later, When I Will Really Be Motivated. But I am also seeing some creative problem solving; lately she's initiated a daily trek to the public library branch, where she has the opportunity** to do her homework in an environment of enforced quiet.
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I mentioned that I really believe in sleep. I especially believe in sleep for teenagers: quite literally, one of the benefits of homeschooling that I always tick off when asked to explain myself is that we are free to find a sleep schedule that suits our bodily needs, instead of conforming to whatever schedule the school district imposed upon us in order to marshal its transport resources. So I'm inclined to (mostly) let them sleep when they want to sleep. Occasionally the outcome of this plan, confidently prescribed by Erin-the-believer-in-getting-enough-sleep, is a little shocking to Erin-the-natural-morning-person.
I didn't really expect, the other day, after a late scout meeting, that when I said "Tomorrow, since we had to stay up late, you can sleep in," that one of the teenagers would actually not come downstairs until 2 p.m. Who would voluntarily miss the whole morning?!? What is this sorcery?
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So, here's a question that I think is open: Is it a problem if a teenager, able to set their own schedule, chooses to sleep as late as 2 pm on a regular basis?
Note that it's not just homeschoolers. Around here, high school juniors and seniors can be dual-enrolled in college courses that might not start until late morning or afternoon; and of course there are some young people who are in vocational programs, or not in school for whatever reason and working jobs for now. Is it a problem?
I think I'm a little privileged, as a natural morning person. The class of American morning people seem to have been able to take a position of power in which they have set expectations for early starts to all kinds of businesses, including many that really don't have to have early starts. So I think there's a prejudice against sleeping late and going to bed late, a prejudice that implies moral laxity or sinful sloth, when it's really just a matter of timing.
Some people have trouble getting up in the morning. I'm not much good by dinnertime and am almost incapable of staying up late. It's not that hard for me to imagine an alternate world where school starts at 3 pm, where bosses expected all employees to do productive work late into the night and didn't let you start until after lunch. This would be a world that would fail me and call me lazy. So I'm sympathetic, and I try not to assume that sleeping past an arbitrary clock time = dangerous malingering.
And nobody denies that sleep deprivation is bad for your health.
On the other hand.... we live in a scheduled time, and one day the sleepy teenager may be a sleepy adult who is required to be at a desk, or on a line, or at a post, by 8 in the morning. In the winter. Is it better to train them to be able to ignore their body's needs, so they can meet their economic needs? Will the teenager who is allowed to sleep regularly from 3 in the morning to noon, develop a sense of entitlement? (The same entitlement, because aligned with the world, that I feel to keep my schedule of sleeping 11-to-6?)
Is it a good idea to practice the flexibility needed to keep a variable schedule ("OK, on Tuesday and Friday mornings you can sleep as late as you want, but Saturday there's a 9:30 class and on Wednesday I need you to be up in the morning because I've got something to do in the afternoon")? Or is it better to be consistent, getting up at the same time every day aligned with the earliest regular appointment, preferring regularity to getting, on average, enough?
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The whole point I am trying to make here is that I think it's obvious that this is an open question. The answer here is "It Depends." Different families, with different schedules and different needs, are going to approach the question in different ways and come to different conclusions. They may change their policies from one teen to the next, as well.
It's also obvious (to me) that a large number of people will have strong opinions that only one answer is correct. I say those people are wrong.
Third obvious thing: Even the parents who make the decision that is the best choice at the time, with all the available information, and carefully and selflessly choosing for the good of their individual children... well, some of them are going to find out later that maybe a different choice would have led to a better outcome. It turns out that they were missing information that would have helped them make a choice with a better outcome.
(Missing information, because they can't see into the future. But I digress.)
Like, maybe they pick the get-up-early-every-day option, because they truly are convinced that sleep schedules can be shifted. Maybe with the help of dark shades on the windows, special sunrise alarm clocks, melatonin pills, and light-therapy devices like the one I just bought. They expect that the child is going to need to learn to get up by 8 AM eventually, so they do their very best to enforce it. And then maybe their child turns out to have some kind of sleep disorder that they couldn't predict, one that's very resistant to all the light therapy, and maybe losing sleep turns out to have awful consequences later, like exacerbating a tendency toward depression or anxiety. Maybe in the end, after years of bad grades and employment struggles, the now-grown-offspring finds their niche working in an industry with late nights and late starts, or works remotely for people in a different time zone. Maybe it becomes obvious in retrospect that, if everyone had only respected the teen's needs early on, they would have thrived under those expectations all along.
But at the time, it didn't make sense.
Or, well, you can write the alternative. I'm living it now. I'm letting the kids take naps if they say they're tired, and rarely wake them up before ten-thirty, and occasionally sleep as long as they want even if that's through lunch. It seems best to me, because I think sleep is important for health, near the bottom of the hierarchy of needs. And I do wonder if someday they're going to come back to us and say, "Mom, Dad, I really wish you had forced me to get up in the morning and drink some coffee or Mountain Dew or something and start staring at my books and papers by 8:30, like all the other kids, because now I have to get to work on time and I still haven't learned to accept it and sometimes I sleep through my alarm and people get angry at me."
(You can write the alternative, because I just tried to write that one, and I'm fully aware I can't do it in a convincingly parallel fashion.)
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What's my point here? SO MUCH of parenting is like this. SO MUCH is doing the best we can, with the information we have at the time. And SO MUCH of the answer to the question "is this good? are we doing things that are good for our kid?" is not going to become clear until YEARS after it's too late to change our trajectories. Should we train this teen to work WITH their body or DESPITE their body? We... don't... know! It could go either way!
We might choose poorly, and not know it till later!
I'm talking about sleep. That's important, but... there are even more serious parts of parenting. Homeschool, private school, or public school? What sort of food should we make freely available, and what sort should we restrict, and how much? How should we help a young person who, we discover, is engaging in risky and perhaps illegal or addictive behavior: leap into assertive action and require immediate treatment and behavioral change before it's too late, or move carefully and prioritize a message of acceptance and unconditional love? Should we give our children lots of freedom and plenty of responsibility for their own safety, or should we take steps to protect them from foreseeable hazards; and which hazards, and for how long?
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If serious outcomes do befall our young people, experience (see: media) suggests that someone, somewhere, will confidently say it's all our fault***, as if we had that crystal ball. When easily it could have gone wrong the other way, and then there would be just as many someones, somewhere, who would confidently say that that would be all our fault.
Much better not to listen to those someones.
You know what's even better than that? Not to make decisions coming from a place of fear of those someones. I confess that I have a hard time with that one.
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I picked that .gif up there, "He chose... poorly" for a reason. In the movie referenced, the villain had a bad outcome because he chose poorly. It wasn't the other way around, the way the someones often reason: the bad outcome didn't make his choice poor.
And what did "choosing poorly" mean, in the Spielbergian spirit?
Not the choosing from a place of fear; not the choosing from a place of reduced choices; not choosing from a place of inevitability of bad outcomes; not choosing from a place of ignorance, even.
No, what was wrong here was that the villain chose from a place of extremely misplaced priorities. The villain chose from a position of moral poverty.
That---unlike the other ones---is the kind of poverty that we, we parents, are bound to avoid, and all of us competent to avoid if we wish.
FOOTNOTES
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*I had to seek the help, once more, of Doctor Google (D. F. A.?) to get this character name correct; my first guess was "Data"
**I'm no fool. There, she also has the opportunity to play computer games we don't have at home and read books for fun, and also to sit in comfy deep armchairs. I will judge this tree based on its fruits. But I'm not going to say NO, either.
***Let's be real. It'll be the mother's fault.
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