FamiLee Life

Getting More Sleep (for our kids' sake!)

Drawing by Tamara Shopsin, from NYTimes

I was always an early riser as a child. Too early, in fact. Add in that I was not much of a reader (except the sports and comics sections of the newspaper which was not delivered early enough) and you had a kid that used to sit in front of the static waves of the television until the first program began around 5:30 am. Yep, I got up early. I was the energizer bunny back then. By high school, my body started to slow down and I was getting up a bit later. Still, I was never one who needed lots of sleep. Today, I get an average amount (8 hours) but can operate fine on much less (or so it seems to me).

That all said, I never really appreciated the beauty of sleep until I began to conduct research on it after college. It was my first "real" full-time job upon graduation and it lasted about 10 months before I left for graduate school. In that time working in a sleep research lab (at the esteemed Brigham and Womans Hospital/Harvard Medical School), I learned to read/score EEG waves, hook up people with electrodes, run cognitive performance tests, and watch people take naps repeatedly throughout the day. It was pretty fascinating stuff (and boring for long stretches of time because watching someone sleep is only so enthralling). I learned quickly how much our quality of sleep determines the quality of one's waking hours.

In a nicely written NYTimes op-ed, Nancy Kalish makes a case for having later start-times for high school. It's worth a read. It's nice to see UMN research cited and to see Minneapolis has been at the leading edge of making the switch.