Back to School Time!
By: Michael Beiter
It's back to school time!
My feed is flooded with pictures of kids with their backpacks and grades displayed to show what school year they're starting.
This morning, I had a parent client whose teens were up at 5 am and won't get home until after 7 pm. I winced at the thought.
First of all, no one needs to be that busy. It is against our biology to keep people working, producing, sporting, studying, and the like for a long period without rest to digest and process their experience.
I always quote my favorite book, 'Why We Sleep' around this time of year, just to point out how we wake kids up, deprive them of essential sleep that sharpens their athletic abilities, lessons learned the day prior, and growth to pursue more work. It accomplishes the exact opposite of what we want it to. It makes them worse, not better.
"Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults and that they are biologically wired to obtain that sleep at a different time from their parents. It's understandable for parents to feel frustrated since they believe their teenager's sleep patterns reflect a conscious choice, not a biological edict. We parents would be wise to accept this fact, and embrace it, encourage it, and praise it, lest we wish our own children to suffer developmental brain abnormalities or force a raised risk of mental illness on them."
I remember being forced awake before dawn to lift weights. I felt drunk, uncoordinated, and incapable. It wasn't long before I quit and was penalized for skipping out on 'team lifting' in favor of sleep. Fifteen years later, we have the science to prove my gut instincts were right and my coaches were wrong.
Just this last week, a major media publication reported on the positive benefits across the board of later start times for kids in California.
Unfortunately, science hasn't persuaded the metro schools, and we're still crippling our kids with early alarms and stressing them out when they should be resting. Hard fail.
