We talk a lot about how to get our newborns to sleep…but what about our toddlers and teens? Neurologist and sleep expert Dr. Chris Winter joins Julie Lyles Carr for a special 2 part series on why our kids’ sleep habits are critical to their development and behavior, and how our own sleep patterns play a big role in our parenting and health.
Listen to “Leading Sleep Expert Dr. Chris Winter on Your Kids and Sleep (Part 1)” on Spreaker.
Interview Links:
- Follow Dr. Chris Winter Online | Twitter
- Get a copy of his new book “The Rested Child“
Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr: You’re listening to the AllMomDoes podcast where you’ll find encouragement, information, and inspiration for the life you’re living, the kids you’re raising, the romance you’re loving, and the faith you’re growing. I’m your host, Julie Lyles Carr. Let’s jump into this week’s episode.
Welcome to a special edition of the AllMomDoes podcast. Today you’re going to get to hear from Dr. Chris Winter. He is one of the leading researchers and neurologist on the area of sleep. Now, when I went into this interview with him, I knew the things I wanted to ask him. I knew the things that were definitely topics and issues in my own sleep cycles and with my kids and all the things.
What I didn’t anticipate was just how much information and how much more I wanted to know. And I wanted you to be able to know. One of the things that I really like about Dr. Chris Winter is that he knows that a lot of us worry about getting our babies to sleep through the night, but we aren’t often paying the kind of attention or have the kind of information that we need when it comes to our kids and our teenagers sleep cycles and sleep issues. And so I found his insights, his research his experienced to be absolutely incredible. So incredible in fact, that this is going to be a two part series. So this is part one with Dr. Chris Winter today, episode one. And then I want to invite you to come back next week and be sure and catch, part 2 of this very important conversation on the AllMomDoes podcast with Dr. Chris Winter.
Dr. Winter, thanks so much for being with us.
Chris Winter: Thank you so much, Julie. It’s an honor and a privilege to be on your podcast.
Julie Lyles Carr: Now I know that you’re going to be of a lot of help, a topic that is near and dear to many parents hearts, which is how on earth do I get these little children to go to sleep? How do I keep them asleep?
How much should my teens be sleeping? Very importantly, what should sleep mean in my own life. But I want to, I want to rewind things just a little bit, Chris, I wanna hear how you ended up going into a specialization in this area because you know, for a lot of people, when you hear them heading into medical sciences, you’re thinking, oh, well, they’ll deliver babies or there’ll be an orthopedist or whatever.
So how did sleep become something that you decided to chase as a passion?
Chris Winter: That’s a great question. It’s a fair question. And it’s a great question. Um, so I decided to be a doctor, I think sometime around third grade. And my guess is it’s because I grew up in sort of rural Southwest Virginia. And I’m assuming that it’s because every time I told my grandparents or something that I wanted to be a doctor, they probably gave me a quarter in some hard candy or something like that.
If I said, I want to be a pastry chef, they’re like, ah, I’m going to be a pastry chef. So I’m sure that it was some sort of bizarre feedback loop there, but absolutely. So I, I went to my undergraduate do get my undergraduate degree at the university of Virginia and was talking to my biology advisor and said, you know, if I’m going to be a doctor, I probably should do some research or something doctorly uh, so that when I apply, if that happens, I’ll actually look like, you know, I’ve done something and he said, well, that’s a good idea. There’s some doctors that, that are doing some research on sleep and, and, and other things. And they, you might, so I was looking through it. I found this doctor who was doing sleep research on these Yucatan micro pigs, which is really funny because somebody just wrote an article about sleep and pigs.
I was like, oh, I’m an expert. Why didn’t you consult me? Like, that’s the only thing I have any real expertise. I’m your guy. I wrote an article in the new Yorker about sleeping pigs and didn’t consult me. Um, so anyway, um, yeah, so I did research. I’d never really thought it would be a career Julie, but the field is so awesome and exciting and fun. And everybody’s got a great sleep story to tell. And then the people within the field, awesome. And I just never left. So I did my undergraduate degree. I went to medical school down in Atlanta, worked in a sleep lab down there for those guys, Don Blightwise, and Dave Ride just kind of, was always in the field of sleep and when it came time to choose a career, I didn’t really want to let it go. So I became a neurologist. That’s my medical specialty, but I just deal with patients who sleep too much or don’t sleep enough. Boys, the girls, adults, kids, and it’s awesome. It’s just the best career, uh, field to be in. And, and I, and I love it.
So it, so it was all kind of accidental if I’ve not spoken to myBiology adviser and undergrad, it never probably would have happened. And I’m guessing I would have been a Pediatrition.
Julie Lyles Carr: And then of course, you know, the micro pigs who would have ever stood up to them
Chris Winter: or a farmer, you know, it was funny. We would do sleep studies on these pigs and the biggest problems we had were, number one, they don’t have fingers to put that little red light pulse oximeter on so we had to put it on their tail. So it was constantly shaving their tails and flannel cozies for their tail to wrap it up. Cause if their tail got cold, we couldn’t figure out why we wouldn’t get a signal. Then they wouldn’t wear the masks. So I designed a C-PAP mask that had a little chamber inside full of lard and tortilla chips. So they were really excited to put there, but they could never quite reach the tortilla chips. So I’m not sure if anybody, if somebody out there probably made a million dollars on that idea of the large tortilla chips, tortilla, mass for pigs, but. That was my idea if they’re out there and I’m not getting credit for it.
Julie Lyles Carr: So I gotta tell ya, I mean, in the right situation, some large tortilla chip masks,
Chris Winter: I like that for me things, right? No, the larger tortilla you know, you put them in your kids AP US history books and they, you know, all they want to do is read the APU system full of lard tortillas.
Julie Lyles Carr: I think it’s actually a snack option for traveling by air. Now, since we need to continue where I’m asking on airplane, I mean, Chris, I just, that’s the problem.
Chris Winter: Keep your tortilla chips in your mask is you, cause you fly.
Julie Lyles Carr: You just your demographic too small. That’s the problem, but I’m here to help you with that.
Chris Winter: So, yeah, I am not a businessman that’s for sure.
Julie Lyles Carr: You know, when it comes to sleep, what’s so fascinating to me about sleep and particularly that you honed in on it as an area of research. You sleep just ubiquitous, like everybody does it, all creatures do it, all the things. And yet, in some ways it seems so counterintuitive because why on earth would we have this thing that we do so many nights that makes us very vulnerable. That leaves us defenseless in many ways and takes us into a completely different reality when we dream. And we go into all these other things. What’s one of the things that surprised you most in this career quest of sleep that you didn’t know at the time when you got started.
Chris Winter: That’s a great question. I mean, and that’s kind of funny because I never felt, you know, by the time my career started, I was 10 years in. Do you know what I mean?
It’s like, you’ve got this kind of hobby. You make soap for fun and your friends, and then 10 years later, as you’re making it, it didn’t start then it started 10 years ago when you figured out how to do it by looking at a recipe online. So, you know, the thing that’s most surprising to me, like you said, I think the easy answer is it’s ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. You know, if I sitting next to somebody on an airplane, they’re like, what do you do? I’m like, well, I’m a neurologist, you know, maybe they’ll say, well, I’ve got a grandma, who’s got Alzheimer’s or a friend who’s got migraines. If you introduce yourself as a sleep specialist man, it’s amazing what people will talk about. So yeah, I think that the one thing that’s surprising to me is just how common sleep disordersare and then the other thing that I think that’s the surprising thing is, is how little we pay attention to them and how little they’re taken seriously. So I, I would say with, with a lot of confidence that sleep disorders in kids and adults are probably some of the most common undiagnosed problems out there. In fact, I can’t think of one that would be more so. You know, in terms of the number of people who actually have the disorder versus the number of people who know they have, or they’ve been actually diagnosed for it. So they’re not only some of the most misdiagnosed things, but there’s some of the most commonly misdiagnosed.
Yeah. Your kid’s depression may not be so much depression. They may be hypersomnia like they’re excessively sleepy, but sure. The fact that they spend all their time in their bedroom sleeping and all they want to do is sleep and they’re tired and too tired to do soccer practice and do their own work could certainly look on the surface like depression, but if you dig a little deeper, No, there’s no fault there. Your pediatrician has seven minutes to spend with your kid before they have to move on to the next appointment. So these things are a little hard to dig up, but that’s why I think it’s important for people like you, you know, to kind of shine the light on these things, because this is a problem that will probably be solved from the ground up. Parents talking to their doctors, hey, I think it’s not depression. I think it’s something else versus working our way from the top down, which is we’ve been waiting for 20 years, so that dab and I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Julie Lyles Carr: Not happening. You know, I think that part of what’s interesting, particularly in the United States, and I’d be curious to see if this is part of your observation as well, I can remember traveling Europe and realizing the premium that was put on sleep in Europe. It felt to me there was a break in the middle of the day and everybody took a nap, but, is that even moral? I don’t know, like everybody just shutting everything down and going to sleep and you know, longer vacation times.
If you go to France, you, you know, you take off the month of August and you take out and people building in time for rest in ways that seem very foreign to the U S culture. I know for myself, given my experience in high school and college and my early career in media, sleep was for the week and my husband and I would say that about our career starts and what we expected of ourselves and our goals, and the way we were laying out our days was sleep is for the weak, sleep is for the weak. How do we begin to shift that narrative because I know obviously through so much research at this point through advances made in neurology, we understand now that it is critical, even though we had those studies in the past that said, if you don’t dream you could have these kinds of psychological impacts…if you don’t sleep in this way, it can actually do this to you long-term, but I feel like it’s coming more to the forefront now, but we have a cultural shift that we’re having to make to layer on top of that research. Is that something that you’re seeing?
Chris Winter: Absolutely. And, and you’ve got, you said so many interesting things there.
Um, Roger Eckert is a, uh, uh, a professor at there at Virginia tech. He’s not asleep doctor. I think he’s an historian or sort of cultural anthropologist, but wrote an amazing book called, uh, at, at day’s close, uh, sleep in, you know, yesteryear or something like that. Amazing guy to talk to. And he, you basically says, look, you know, the way we’ve evolved to deal with sleep, and the way we sleep is very different from the way it used to be in antiquity. And he argues that, yeah, we should probably have a break in our day that cultures that have a siesta and put value on those types of things tend, tend to do better. Um, and that’s something that we just haven’t really adopted. Um, and what’s really, and this filters all the way down to kids, uh, you know, there’s a whole debate about school start times. You know, should we be starting schools later for kids?
And the argument is, yes, we should. They need more time to sleep. They’re developing creatures. And if we don’t bad things will happen way down the line. And if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we don’t do well with actions that have consequences months or years later we do. Okay. If the consequences now, but not if it’s three or 10 years from now or whatever. So the other interesting thing about the pandemic is that it did the experiment for us. It basically forced kids to say, okay, swimming’s canceled your early morning jazz is canceled. You’ve got a 10:00 AM history lecture on zoom that’ll start and you can wake up at 9 55 if you want to turn on your computer and sit there and bed and listen to the teacher talk. So the counter-arguments always been well, if you give kids more time to sleep, they’ll just stay up later and sleep in later. If you just shift things. And study after study is saying, no, that’s not what happened during the pandemic. During the pandemic, the kids actually utilized more time to sleep.
And so what does that mean? You know, having that ability to sleep more during the day or having the ability to take a nap during the day, because you’re not in school, you have a 10 o’clock zoom meeting and your next one’s not till one, you can close your eyes and take a nap if you wanted to. And the results are showing the kids not only utilize it, but they absolutely benefit from it.
So the concerning thing about all of that is we’ve done the experiment and now everything’s going back to normal. Everybody’s happy to be hugging each other again, and traveling to Europe and doing cool things. But kids are about to experience a return to something that is probably not particularly healthy for them.
And so I think that the crisis that we had with kids sleep that existed before the pandemic is now going to be really bad as kids start to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning to catch the bus, to get to school and start at seven and all those things. So we’re kind of bracing for that. And even in psychological professionals will tell you right now that the emotional health of kids right now is probably at an all time low.
I mean, they’re overwhelmed with, you know, kids in their practices. So yeah, I mean, I think that our culture does, and I’ve worked with a lot of sports teams and it’s that same sort of mentality. Like I want to be the last person to leave the sports complex. The first one there in the morning, a cot in my office cause I sleep in the office, you know, two hours and awake for 22 and yeah, hopefully that premium and that idea is kind of dying out. I think people are looking at nutrition and, you know, mindfulness, and they’re thinking about sleep in those kinds of ways to where it’s not a trait. This is a modifiable variable that can lead to better health outcomes down the line.
So if we think about those things in those terms, hopefully we’ll start to kind of create better health outcomes for our kids.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. You know, I’ve seen people really elevated those who may be in their natural physiognomy are ones who really only need four to five hours of sleep. And we, we, you know, list the, the list of presidents who that’s their sleep requirement and on and on.
And we do seem to have some kind of work ethic tied into our idea of how much people sleep. I myself, I got to tell you, Chris, I’ve had a really bad romance with sleep for a long time. You know, sleep was this thing that would beckon into me and I would just resist and reject. And, and my mom would say that even as a little kid, I mean, nap time to me in a preschool setting was absolute torture. I had so many things to do. So many things I wanted to talk about and to make me rest in the middle of the day was terrible. Now, fast forward, however many years, eight kids later blowing through all kinds of what I call my sleep bank deposit by being in media and doing overnight stents on live shoots and all that stuff.
It’s like, now, I gotta have it. Like, I gotta have this thing in my life in a way that cursive youth, you know, you can do anything when you’re young and you can get away with it, right? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I actually kind of cashed in all the chips I had to cash back in those days of early career and parenting and college and all the things.
One thing that’s been fascinating to me though, is even as much as I yearn for sleep, even as much as it is now, the apple of my eye in many ways. There’s still that struggle to get that kind of quality sleep. And I’ve been really interested in a lot of the research surrounding by phasic sleep or diurnal sleep, and that’s the concept, in earlier times before we had electricity and screens and all the things, that we potentially would come in from the fields crash out for three or four hours, get up in the middle of the night, wander around, maybe have another meal, go back to sleep until the sun came up. How do you feel about the research that’s emerging on that and is that really even anything that we can embrace in our modern life today? I got to tell you, there’s plenty of times I’d love to have me a three or four hour nap in the early evening, but there’s this other thing called life and jobs and meetings in the morning. And apparently you’re supposed to show up to somewhat cogent.
So what do you think about that trend and the research that’s been going on and how on earth does that translate to our modern life?
Chris Winter: Sure I it’s interesting. You mentioned bank deposit because I think in my book, I, I talk about sleep debt is sort of a credit card and that, you know, credit cards are useful.
You know, you’ve got a deadline that keeps you up very late into the night. Your kids are studying for some sort of exam that’s super important and they’re not that great at Latin so they’ve really got to put the hours into it. So there may be times where you put a balance onto that sleep credit card.
And like, we always are taught with our credit cards, do not let the balance sit there for a long time, have a plan to pay it off. So there’s a, there’s a utility to it. Money’s a little tight now, but I’ll have it in the next few weeks and I can pay the credit card off, you know, and that’s the way we want to look at you in terms of sleep. You know, the research on buy phasic sleep or try phasic sleep or polyphasic sleep is interesting. I think that there is to some degree, potentially some truth to it.
If you, if we open the envelope and figure out that yes, we were actually designed to sleep in two different phases that, that wouldn’t shock me. For somebody says, look, I get home I tend to sleep for four hours here. I usually wake up, check my email, do a few things and go back to sleep for another three hours.
I don’t think that’s the end of the world. I think the problem comes. When you start taking this idea of sleep and dividing it into lots of pieces. So there’s lots of ways to get eight hours of sleep. You can go to bed at 11 and get up at seven. You could go to bed at 10, get up at two, be awake for an hour, or go back to sleep at three and wake up at seven.
Both of those are eight hours. You could sleep an hour, wake up for a couple hours, sleep another hour, wake up for a couple of hours. And that’s what we did when we were in call on call in the hospital. You know, Grey’s anatomy stuff. You’re like every time you lay down in the call room, somebody’s calling you to get up.
And back when I was a physician, every other day call was allowed. So you would go to the hospital five o’clock four o’clock in the morning, get up to date on the patients that were there around at eight. Be there all day and all night and leave the next day at five o’clock. Go home see your kids for two seconds collapsed and wake up five o’clock the next morning.
So the problem with polyphasic sleep is, and I would invite you all to try it if, if you have the guts, is to do that, like sleep for an hour, then wake up for a couple hours, sleep for hours. That’s what happened when we were on call and we felt like a train hit us. Yeah. So when you think about sleep, think of it like a Coldplay concert, and if you went to the concert and nine times during the concert, they took a 20 minute break, you’d be really upset about the flow of that concert. Even if your friends said, oh, they didn’t play your favorite songs. No, they played paradise and they played clocks and they did yellow. They did all. So what are you complaining about?
Well, yeah, every. 15 minutes, they took a 20 minute break. So there is something to be said for the flow of sleep, the continuity of sleep that you can, you can break it up maybe into two pieces, but as you start going more and more from that, you’re not getting the natural flow of sleep. And if you look at a patient who has something like sleep apnea, you know that young person who’s got massive tonsils and can’t breathe during the night, they’ll sleep, but they’ll awaken hundreds of times during the night. So they’re getting these little five minute periods of sleep. One minute, wakening, seven minute periods of sleep, two minute wakening all through the night.
They may have no recollection of any of the awakenings and they are absolutely destroyed from a physical and an emotional perspective because their sleep is so artificially chopped up. So if you’re somebody who says, look, Chris, my life is working great. I’m getting this period of sleep and it’s consistent in timing and schedule, I used to have an awakening period and did another period of sleep more power to you. But I think the more you can consolidate that the better. So I’ll let Coldplay take one break during the concert, but anything beyond that, I want my, I want my money back.
Julie Lyles Carr: It’s going to mess it up. That’s why I messed it up.
Do you find that there are individuation though within this sleep need? You know, it’s interesting to me having had eight kids, I can definitely tell you that I’ve had kids really required a certain level would put themselves to bed at night. I mean, it would be like, I’m tired. I’m done. I understand. I need sleep.
I had kids who would fight it. I had kids who I called gerbils. Their schedule just seemed, they just kind of came alive at 10 o’clock at night and were a lot dopey or during the day. And it’s even been interesting from a neurological standpoint and watching this play out, my grandmother and my mother, they passed away within three weeks of each other.
My grandmother was 102. Chris, she was up all times. All the time. I mean, ever since I can remember as a little kid, she would sleep for a little bit. She’d be up, she’d lay back down for a while. She’d be back up. And her mind was crystal clear until the end of her life. My mom who passed three weeks after her also did all this sleep stuff that was kind of, you know, up, down all the things. And we later realized that it symptomatic of Alzheimer’s and she ended up having a really tough battle with Alzheimer’s. Those watching those two women immediately in my matriarchal line was fascinating because if I had just taken a snapshot of their sleep cycles, I would have said exactly the same. And if I would have only focused on the outcome for my mom, I would have said, there you go, you see poor sleep patterns, Alzheimer’s seems to be a connection. But if you looked at my grandmother, we would all be like, wake me up 27 times a night for the Coldplay tour of the sleep, because she was amazing and crystal clear for so long. So how do you account for particularly for moms who got three little kids and it would be in their benefit from a schedule perspective to have everybody kind of sleep in the same way and get up at the same time, and yet you do have these individuations that can happen. How do you manage that?
Chris Winter: Yeah. And you’re, you’re hitting on something that’s very important, which is genetics and all think anybody is naive enough to not to think about it.
But I think sometimes we don’t think about genetics when it comes to sleep and, you know, just right off the bat, you can think of a bunch of different genetics that would influence a child. So if you’re a parent, have several children, you know, the, the genetics you think about are like number one, sleep need.
And you’re absolutely right. We get into trouble when we talk about, excuse me, eight hours of sleep and an adult. Eight hours might be the average. It’s some people think it’s closer to seven and a half. Let’s call it eight. That’s the middle of a bell curve distribution. So like grades on an algebra exam, there’s a middle point. And I guess ideally it would be a C that stands for average. So your kid comes up with a C you can guess that he beat as many kids as beat him. He was right there in the middle versus your daughter comes in with an a plus she’s on the far end of that bell curve distribution.
Both kids are lovely. Kids are exceptional. We’re just trying to figure out where they’re sleep or their algebra exam falls on a curve of other people. And the problem is, is when we start applying averages to individuals, uh, which we, we, we would never do in terms of eating, you know, how much food should my kid eat?
Well, tell me about your kid. Is he a Olympic caliber swimmer? Um, you know, where is he in his growth curve? You know, et cetera. There’s lots of variables that go into that and sleep the same way. So every one of your children has an inherited some degree of sleep need from either you or the biological father. Um, and, and you see that. And I can just tell from talking to you for 10 minutes and reading about you and all the things that you’ve done in your career and books and podcasts and all this stuff is that my guess is you’re probably somewhat of a short sleeper, meaning that you are somebody who either does not need as much sleep as the average person, your age, maybe never has. In fact that comes with it a whole set of problems when you’re little, if you don’t need as much sleep as other kids, your parents are getting mad at you because you stay up too late. You’re always up. You don’t go to bed when you’re supposed to.
Always a bad sleeper. You’re not a bad sleeper, you just don’t need as much sleep as other people. And those people will work you to death, you know? And when you look around a medical school classroom, I remember thinking these are nice people and smart people. They’re not geniuses, but what they all seem to share, we all kind of were, were these people who could outwork everybody else.
You know, my wife is way smarter than I am. She would have been a much better doctor, but man, you come into her trauma surgery suite at midnight and you’re going to die because at 10 o’clock she’s done. She’s done. You know, so when I look at my three children, I’m a night owl. Probably someone of a shorter sleeper.
My wife is a morning person, somewhat of a longer sleeper. You start to get these interesting mixes in kids of kids who need more sleep and kids who don’t. There’s also an interesting gene or set of genes that allow kids to get inadequate sleep, but still do well. And so if a kid is getting, you know, a short amount of sleep and doing well in school, Is it because they’re getting there, the amount that they need that just happens to be on the lower end of the spectrum, or do they actually need more, but they’ve just got, that would always call the horsepower gene that allows them to overcome inadequate sleep?
And these are difficult issues for parents to look at because that muscle through gene may be hurting them, but their report card looks great and they’re there. And everybody remembers them from school. You know, or wherever they do doing all night or, and then the next day they look great and you were literally struggling to figure out what shoe goes on, which foot. You know, like, is it, oh, and you know, and so these are things that parents have to wrestle with, not in the mention is your kid more of a morning person or more of a night owl? And these things are clearly inherited from parents as well. So if you’re a night owl, trauma surgeon, your husband’s a night owl, military guy or something, then chances are your kids are going to be kind of night owlstoo. And you know, the average, you know, night owls probably academically peaking at five o’clock in the afternoon, two hours after the school day is ended. So if that kid’s trying to take calculus one at first period, that might be a place where a parent needs to intervene a little bit because they’re not quite awake there. So it’s no mystery that schools favor morning people. And if you look at the average child their night owls, You know, grandma and grandpa living down in Sarasota, so they’re morning people. They got the NutriBullet out at three o’clock in the morning, waking up. Oh, where we get up at five o’clock now go to bed at seven o’clock after wheel of fortune because their circadian rhythm has shifted in their age, but kids are the opposite. So schools have not been traditionally great for them.
These kids probably excelled during the pandemic because everything got shifted either later or to their liking, which has been, uh, which was a huge coup for some kids. And there’s a big population of kids and parents are saying, we don’t want to go back to the building, our kids doing better than ever now, virtually because they can start their school day at 10:00AM if they want.
Julie Lyles Carr: Absolutely. You know, we, we have had kind of a radical approach to our kids’ education. We wanted them to be alongside us as we were building businesses and doing things and on and on. And so we started homeschooling years and years ago and we didn’t, I think initially I put a lot of pressure on myself to make it emulate a typical school day.
But with a couple of my kids in particular, they are such night owl oriented and I knew it was kind of mine and my husband’s fault, that I felt like, okay, how do we honor that? And so for some of my kids, it really shifted the way we did school because it allowed them, I didn’t care when they got stuff done, so if they were getting it done at 1130 at night, fine, I stopped pressing them into the sieve by which they had to try to perform.
However, that’s not a decision that every parent can make. It doesn’t work for everyone’s lifestyle. And to your point, we had this great experiment that has validated what some of us have found out by accident through the years. What do we do if we’re in a situation where our kids are heading back into the traditional classroom in the fall and we’re going, oh, wow, yeah, I’m recognizing through the pandemic that the kid that I thought was struggling with ADHD or was having some emotional things I didn’t quite understand, or was kind of foggy in the morning when I get them up, now I realize this is a kid who has a different sleep pattern, but I’m just about to have to put them back into a situation that does not allow them to operate at their best.
What do parents do?
Chris Winter: So that’s, that’s so fascinating what you’re saying. And I agree with everything that you said. So we, we, for some reason, even outside of children and put a value on the morning, and there were some books that are written by very successful people who happen to be morning people and they make it seem like if you’re not a morning person, you’ll never amount to anything, which there are equal number of studies that show that night owls are smart, they’re adaptive.
They have all kinds of great qualities and to see to your point, this idea that we are, and we see it in professional sports… Chicago Cubs used to have, they didn’t have lights in their stadium. So the only play day games for a long time at Wrigley field. And so what was interesting was they were self electing players that were more morning types because the night owls didn’t do as well for them because most of their games are during the day.
So when you see schools, the same thing is happening. There’s nothing inherently valuable about being a morning person or night owl. In fact, yeah. Being a night owl, if you’re cultivating kids through your homeschool to be night owls and kind of keep those tendencies, they’ll make great surgeons. They’ll make great airplane pilots, all kinds of stuff that value that, but not until later.
So you’ve got to survive the school to get to that place. Right. So if you’re in a situation, you’re saying, well, this is all great, Chris, but. I work, my husband works. We’re out of the house. We’ve got to get our kids on the bus at some ridiculous hour, or what even happens sometimes is we have to drop our kids off as grandma and they get picked up from grandma’s house.
So they have to get up early to get going. So, and these are just the initial realities of raising children in this time. So the key is number one, to understand that there is an issue going on, that you can help control. Um, and you can help control that in a lot of ways. You can say, look, is there any way we can get my kids set up for first period, study all second period gym, you know, and, and sort of escalate the day as it goes forward. Versus deescalating where they’ve got study all final period in gym, the period before that. The second thing is is that if you’ve got a the proper motivation, both with you and your child, there are things that can be done now, you know, today to really prepare your kid for what’s about to come in August. Um, one of my favorite sleep researchers is Roxanne Prichard up in Minnesota. She takes her entire family and kids camping the week before school starts.
So they’re exposed to natural light, they can get on a better schedule and there’s, you know, kayaking and hiking and all these things. First thing in the morning to really get them adapted. So that the message would be, and, and one of the reasons why I wrote the book, the message is there are practical things you can do that can be as simple as changing out the alarm clock that you use for an alarm clock that creates an artificial sunrise in your daughter’s bedroom, planning out meal timing.
What do you do on the weekends? Are you allowing your kid to sleep in until four o’clock in the afternoon? Or do you keep them on a relatively regular schedule? There are assessments you can do of your child. So when you walk in and meet with teachers and the administration, you’ve got research and assessments and things that I promise you they’ve never heard of that will give you a lot of credibility and say, look, my daughter is a night owl.
She’s got a delayed chronotype. She scored a 40 on a morning this evening on a Horne Osberg questionnaire, and because of these things, this is, these are the accommodations I need. And I don’t think they’re going to give you a hard time with it. And if they do then let me know and I’ll give the school a call.
Throw my five foot seven and a half inch weight around a bit. But this is, I mean, this is what schools are designed for, but they’ve got to know about the problem before they can fix it. There’s even interventions within the school… I need my child between third and fourth period to go visit the school nurse, sit there and check his phone and be exposed to a bright light that I will provide you, that will help him feel more awake during the day, or you provide the bright light where your kids having breakfast, waiting for the school bus and there’s even little glasses they can wear. So as they’re driving to grandma’s house to be dropped off, to be picked up by the school bus, that they’re getting this light therapy, that’s tricking their brain that even though it’s pitch black, outside, the sun is coming up and it’s time to be awake.
So these things can be manipulated, they just take some planning,
Julie Lyles Carr: Check out the show notes for all the links, info, and other goodness from this week’s episode, with a big thank you to our content coordinator, Rebecca. I’ve got a request… please go like and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It really does make a difference in helping other people find the show.
And I’ll see you next week here at the AllMomDoes podcast.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
