Letting Teens Sleep In Is a Good Idea?

I say yes, DH says no. "The most productive time of the day is morning," which is why our school day begins at 9am at the latest. I have to agree that Wolfie has been very productive in the first hour study hall he has at the high school before German II.

However, my most productive time of day is noon to 2:30pm (second most productive time of day is 10:30 pm to 2 am), which dear DH, being a morning person, just cannot understand. Thus the ongoing battle at my house about bedtimes and school times.

Now it seems the head teacher (aka principal) at Hugh Christie Technical College, Tonbridge, Kent (UK) agrees with me. "[O]n Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays his 14- to 18-year-old pupils start lessons at 11.30am – because research suggests that that teenagers' brains work better if they get up later.

"Their punctuality and attendance has improved, their questioning and answering is better because they are more alert and the pace of lessons is often much quicker," Barker says."

I know such an experiment will not convince DH, but if there are any homeschooling families out there who need this bit of info to adjust your schedule more comfortably, you now have anecdotal research to support your decision.

Some Bona Fide Wisdom from the Voice of Ratatouille

You may only know him as the voice of a French rat or as Randy Daytona's first comeback opponent in Balls of Fury, but Patton Oswalt gave the commencement speech at his alma mater this last June and really told it like it is.

"And I remember, so clearly, driving home from that dinner, how lucky I felt to have met someone who affirmed what I was already planning to do after high school. I was going to roam and blitz and blaze my way all over the planet.

Anywhere but here. Anywhere but Northern Virginia. NoVa. You know what a “nova” is? It’s when a white dwarf star gobbles up so much hydrogen from a neighboring star it causes a cataclysmic nuclear explosion. A cosmic event.

Well, I was a white dwarf and I was definitely doing my share of gobbling up material. But I didn’t feel like any events in my life were cosmic. The “nova” I lived in was a rural coma sprinkled with chunks of strip mall numbness. I had two stable, loving parents, a sane and wise little brother and I was living in Sugarland Run, whose motto is, “Ooooh! A bee! Shut the door!”

I wanted to explode. I devoured books and movies and music and anything that would kick open windows to other worlds real or imagined. Sugarland Run, and Sterling and Ashburn and Northern Virginia were, for me, a sprawling batter’s box before real experience began."

Now I doubt the high schoolers get how true this is of them and how much their lives and outlooks will change in the next 15 years. I remember spending my entire senior year wanting to stand in the backyard and scream as loud as I could. Klaus is grumbling about feeling trapped, which I can certainly understand. I wish there was a way I could download this speech into his brain without his knowing I put it there. If he thought they were his own ideas, it would be great. Oh well. Make sure you click the link above to read the speech and find the advice Patton got and the lesson he learned about it.

Same Train, Different Track

An op-ed in today's EducationGuardian suggests that "Employers' attitudes towards today's teenagers mean that the mature, conscientious and smart are held back." I had hoped this would be a story supporting Robert Epstein's thesis that we are babying our teens too much.

Sixteen-year-old author Charlotte Lytton writes: "It seems that nothing is ever good enough in today's society; we're a nation obsessed by perfection and not even the best seems acceptable anymore. GCSEs are an example of this fixation. Not only are there news reports seemingly daily about how easy they are, but it seems they count for nothing when 16-year-olds decide to venture out into the working world." (links are mine)

But apparently Charlotte thinks we're not babying our teens enough. Colin Willman of the Federation of Small Business (FSB) says in the article on behalf of employers that "The skills that businesses need from school leavers are literacy, numeracy, punctuality, communication skills and an ability to be well-presented."

Charlotte fires back, "But when are we supposed to learn all of these additional skills for the world of work? From reading the papers, it seems pupils are working their socks off at school to be met with disgruntled employers who sack them because they turn up for work five minutes late or their shirt isn't tucked in. After a six-hour school day that can sometimes include double history and mathematics, when do they expect kids to learn the protocol of the work place?"

As much as I sympathize with her schedule, if she's taking double history and mathematics, she should already have the literacy and numeracy skills necessary to babysit or flip burgers. Showing up to work on time with your shirt tucked in should be common sense, something you learn at home, not an additional class. While I agree that many, if not most, teens are much more capable than we let them be, I don't agree that we should lower our expectations of teenaged workers.

Then Why Call Them "Young Adults?"

And I thought reading diaries and secretly drug-testing your own teen was bad. A couple of articles about the infantilization of human children crossed my desk yesterday. On the one hand, in the Mar/Apr 2007 issue of Psychology Today, psychologist Robert Epstein says, "Imagine what it would feel like—or think back to what it felt like—when your body and mind are telling you you're an adult while the adults around you keep insisting you're a child. This infantilization makes many young people angry or depressed, with their distress carrying over into their families and contributing to our high divorce rate. It's hard to keep a marriage together when there is constant conflict with teens.

We have completely isolated young people from adults and created a peer culture. We stick them in school and keep them from working in any meaningful way, and if they do something wrong we put them in a pen with other "children." In most nonindustrialized societies, young people are integrated into adult society as soon as they are capable, and there is no sign of teen turmoil. Many cultures do not even have a term for adolescence. But we not only created this stage of life: We declared it inevitable. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall said it was programmed by evolution. He was wrong."

On the same day, I read this in London's EducationGuardian: "A school uniform maker said yesterday it was "seriously considering" adding tracking devices to its clothes after a survey found many parents would be interested in knowing where their offspring were. ...

Clare Rix, the marketing director, said: "As well as being a safety net for parents, there could be real benefits for schools who could keep a closer track on the whereabouts of their pupils, potentially reducing truancy levels."

No comments on whether this would increase adolescent anger toward the parents, but common sense says it will. And I'm not sure I agree that teen angest is the cause of the high divorce rate, but are there really parents out there who have no idea who (yes, I mean "who") their "young adults" are and what they are doing? I suppose I may have been blessed with hyper-responsible teens, but it would never occur to me to put a tracking device in my child's clothing, nor would I allow the school to do it for help with "truancy issues." If we want children to grow up to be responsible adults, we need to give them responsibility (appropriate to their age, of course) and treat them with respect, not do everything for them until they're 30, then push them out the window into adulthood.

DH and I were just discussing this with regard to Klaus' first week at college. DH has emailed him half a dozen times and then got mad when he didn't get an instant answer. I reminded him we need to stop micromanaging the boy (although the boy does need more micromanaging than some because of the ADD). Then I told him there is nothing more demoralizing than being about to take some initiative or to handle something on your own, and then your parent tells you to do that very thing.

For example, "Hm, I think I'll take the dog for a walk to get some exercise," thinks Wolfie, feeling very grownup and responsible. "Why don't you take the dog for a walk?" yells Mom as he's hooking up the dog's collar in the other room. Now walking the dog is a chore and Wolfie doesn't want to do it anymore. The passive-aggressive thing to do is to pretend you didn't hear, walk into the room where Mom is and announce you're taking the dog for a walk and what did she say? But that just leaves you feeling bitter and untrusted. Better for Mom and Dad to follow up sparingly, if at all, and let the kids surprise us with their ability to be responsible.

Let's Abolish High School

Interesting commentary in EdWeek questioning the need for high school by Robert Epstein, a former editor in chief of Psychology Today, a contributing editor for Scientific American Mind, a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, and the host of “Psyched!” on Sirius Satellite Radio. His latest book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, was published last week by Quill Driver Books.

He concludes:

"A careful look at these issues yields startling conclusions: The social-emotional turmoil experienced by many young people in the United States is entirely a creation of modern culture. We produce such turmoil by infantilizing our young and isolating them from adults. Modern schooling and restrictions on youth labor are remnants of the Industrial Revolution that are no longer appropriate for today’s world; the exploitative factories are long gone, and we have the ability now to provide mass education on an individual basis.

Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults; to undo the damage we have done, we need to establish competency-based systems that give these young people opportunities and incentives to join the adult world as rapidly as possible."

[EdWeek is having an "open house" until April 15, 2007, so anyone can read this online through that date.]