Your Kids Need Sleep

I often get asked about parenting. Maybe it's because I've been doing children's ministry for twenty years, been a teacher for twenty years, and been a parent for a combined total (if you add up my kids' ages) of 48 years. I see my own kids every day of course (at least the two that are still at home) and maybe a hundred other kids every week. So yeah, I get asked about parenting.

Not my kid (photo credit)

There are several obvious things parents can do to help their kids. Parents showing affection and respect for one another is huge. Another is setting aside time for the family to be together (not just co-location, but eye contact and words--food too. And prayer. Lots of prayer.

One less obvious is sleep habits. Kids (even teens) need eight to ten hours of sleep each night. A consistent, and early, bedtime helps in so many ways.

Mood: Tired people are grumpy. Maybe that grumpiness isn't adolescent hormones. It might just be sleepiness.

Health: Nagging coughs, digestive issues, headaches? Sleep a consistent eight to ten hours and watch the health improve.

Grades: Well-rested people can concentrate. Tired people can't. Memories get consolidated during sleep. Not enough sleep for good memory consolidation? Hours of study down the drain.

Study habits: Connected to "grades," when kids know they need to go to bed at the same time every night, there is no such thing as cramming for a test the night before. Space the studying out, and the material is learned more deeply.

Virtue: Not to judge night owls, but the kinds of things people do in the morning tend to be better things than the things they do at night.

Marital bliss! When kids are in bed before their parents, there is time for husband and wife to be husband and wife. Steep some tea, have some conversation, etc.

There are more benefits, but maybe you are already convinced and want to know how to put it into practice. I don't know what will work for you, but here is what we do.

The kids are usually fed and ready for bed by 8:30 or so. We pray together as a family. The kids (even the high schoolers) go to their rooms and lie down. That's it.

Well, that's not completely it. Computers, phones, all iDevices, stay in the living room. Also, no studying after bedtime, but pleasure reading is OK. We don't explicitly say that pleasure reading is OK. When our kids were young they felt like they were getting away with something by reading in bed until quite late. All three kids love to read now. (Sneaky us!)

Wonder

I collect quotes. I usually note my sources, but somehow I failed to get this one. Googling didn't help. It's someone quoting Josef Piper quoting Aquinas. If you know where it came from, please inform me.

facing the truth that we know in part allows a healthy sense of wonder to return, for it is only the one who does not fully know who “wonders,” as philosopher Josef Piper points out: "To wonder is not to know fully, not to conceive absolutely; it means not to know what is behind it all; it means, as Aquinas says, 'that the cause of that at which we wonder is hidden from us.' And so, to wonder is not to know, not to know fully, not to be able to conceive. To conceive a thing, to possess comprehensive and exhaustive knowledge of a thing, is to cease to wonder."

Study Followership, Not Just Leadership

Obvious, once you think about it. From page 276 of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

Robert Hogan, Robert Kaiser, and Mark van Vogt argue that leadership can only be understood as the complement of followership. Focusing on leadership alone is like trying to understand clapping by studying only the left hand. They point out that leadership is not even the more interesting hand; it's no puzzle to understand why people want to lead. The real puzzle is why people are willing to follow.

This is a good book! Although I don't agree with all of the evolutionary background, Haidt makes a good case for reason serving intuition, and not the other way around. In other words, people don't usually believe and behave based on pure reason, but we use our reason to justify the way we already believe and behave. (And this is often a good thing!)

He also shows that well-meaning people come to radically different moralities because they build from different foundations, as shown in the figures below (courtesy of the author's website righteousmind.com).

Discipline Children Forward

Tim Elmore, in a helpful article for parents and teachers about disciplining children in a positive way says this:

The idea is—this kind of discipline looks ahead at what you are cultivating, not behind at the immature act that just happened. This parent or teacher is always in a futuristic building mode.

Any number of discipline styles can work in the moment, but the truly effective parent or teacher sees today's discipline as the foundation for a joyful, purposeful life.

Read the article.