My oldest son has to wake up at 6:30 am on school days. It breaks my heart to not him sleep.
At the other end of the day, we’ve done everything we can to encourage him to get to bed by 10:00 pm. But he is a teenager, so some primal force keeps him awake long into the night.
Children today are facing a sleep crisis. Many kids — including my own — are not getting enough of it. Aside from school requirements, they spend too much time on screens and they have more stressors than any generation before.
52 percent of kids aged 6 to 17 in the United States are not getting the recommended 9 hours of sleep each night.
For some reason I must have forgotten, teenagers have a disturbing, romantic view of staying awake, and the energy to do it. Even when they aren’t trying to stay up late, they aren’t putting any effort into falling asleep.
It is up to parents to get them to sleep.
It was about two years ago — when I was 45 and my son was 13 — that our sleep lines crossed. He began staying up later than me.
There was a time when I stayed up later than my body wanted in order to provide proper paternal supervision. There was a brief period when his bed-time trend plateaued because we were forcing him to sleep sooner.
But time marches on and his ability to resist surpassed my energy to stay up. The shaded part represents the zone of trust. Or extreme risk.
Oh, how I look forward to the weekends. It’s been years since my body allowed me the pleasure of sleeping in past 7:00 am. But I find immense joy in seeing my kids sleep until 10:00 or 11:00 on a Saturday. I even enjoy waking them up just to let them ignore me and get back to snoozing.
This is a bit of a cosmic shift for me. My father’s father was a teacher, and later a farmer. Embedded in his cultural worldview was the maxim of early to bed, early to rise.
For my dad, waking up early was a moral imperative. The converse was true as well. To this day, I feel my dad’s subtle judgment if he thinks I have slept past 8:00 am.
Times have changed. I believe it is a moral failing to wake up my son unnecessarily. I feel bad enough rousting him on school days. Weekends are an opportunity to make up for the pain I have caused him.
Funny thing is, he doesn’t seem to appreciate it when I give him time for extra sleep. I know he doesn’t value it when it comes in the evening. We don’t plan anything after 8:30 pm, with the idea that he can be in bed by 10:00.
“I hope you remember how tired you are when it’s time to go to bed,” I remind him on days when he is struggling.
“But I’m not tired at night, only in the morning,” he says.
It’s logic difficult to argue with.
But the irrefutable logic is the logic of medicine and mental health.
Proper sleep — 9 hours or more for teenage boys — is associated with stronger immune systems, higher academic performance, and mental wellness.
The consequences of sleep deprivation can be severe. Sleep experts warn that our young ones, especially teenagers, are still developing their frontal lobe and decision-making skills. When sleep deprivation becomes chronic, it impairs the frontal lobe, leading to reduced mental function, akin to the effects of alcohol consumption. Decision-making processes slow down, attention spans shorten, and memory function declines.
One of the best things I can do for my son is allow him to sleep and avoid making him feel guilty for doing so.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Jamie Street on Unsplash
