Distractions May Shift, but Sleep Needs Don’t

[groovedaddy]

For a long time, children used to go to bed early, and not just in Proust. Think of Robert Louis Stevenson:

In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer, quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree.

Well, not my children. Clearly, I did this wrong.

When I read that Barack and Michelle Obama had set their daughters’ bedtime for 8 p.m., I asked my oldest (now 25) if he remembered having a bedtime when he was little. He just laughed at me.

When he was a preschooler, I was a pediatric resident (before the limits on work hours), and evenings tended to start around 7 p.m. And mind you, these were 1980s evenings, free of e-mail and cellphones and texting and all the other distractions that make it harder and harder for a child — or an adult — to say goodnight. I’m not sure any of my three children ever had a regular bedtime before 9:30 or 10.

Even at that, I’m afraid, we were pretty ad hoc: oh my, it’s almost 11 and the kid is still awake! Time to read him a story and put him to bed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/health/10klas.html?th&emc=th