10.30.09
Great Idea: Let Kids Sleep Later To Reduce Obesity
Let Kids Sleep Late on Weekends to Fight Fat: Study – Yahoo! News
Letting children sleep late on weekends and holidays might help them avoid becoming overweight or obese, a new study suggests.
Researchers in Hong Kong found that children who got less sleep tended to be heavier (as measured by body mass index, or BMI) than children who slept more. But among children who slept less than eight hours a night, those who compensated for their weekday sleep deficit by sleeping late on weekends or holidays were significantly less likely to be overweight or obese.
The study, which confirmed previous research linking sleep deficits to obesity in children, also found that, on average, children slept significantly longer on weekends and holidays than on school weekdays. However, the overweight children tended to get less weekend/holiday sleep than their normal-weight peers.
Or how about cutting some time off of the beginning of the school day? Does anyone seriously believe that half-asleep kids are learning anything? And get rid of most of the homework. When MJ was younger, he often spent his entire time after school working on homework. It was really frustrating, because he was so busy trying to do the busywork that he wasn’t learning anything. Once I started limiting his homework time, he started learning a lot more–although most of it was not whatever the class was covering at the time–and doing a lot of reading on his own.
The time after school can best be spent doing what we did: playing in groups with other children who live nearby with little or no adult supervision. This is where people learn to get along and especially how to deal with people who are not pleasant. We didn’t shoot each other, because we had already learned to deal with problems, generally without resorting to violence (although fighting was sometimes necessary). By not allowing our young to learn these things (because their lives are spent with school-related activities, complete with the constant presence of adult supervisors), they bring that dependence on adult supervision to arbitrate disputes, instead of learning to work through them.
I still remember my school years, even though many years have passed. That is why I oppose calls for increased time in school and increased school intrusion into the home. Just as you need time to unwind after a hard day of work, students need time away from schooling and its effluents, such as homework and school-sponsored day care / tutoring programs. One of the key reasons college students learn so much more than high school students is that college students are in the classroom much, much less. They learn to find time for themselves, even while scheduling an increased homework load. Personally, I think that starting the day at ten in the morning and ending it by two or three in the afternoon is likely to increase performance, if and only if schools don’t fill that time with busy work.
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