HEY, MOMS AND DADS:  MAKE SURE YOUR KIDS GET TO SLEEP
It helps their brain development, for one thing:
"Across the country each morning, groggy teens are dragging themselves out of bed and trudging sleepily off to school. These bleary-eyed young people are often too tired to take in much of what’s being taught in their early morning classes.
But that’s not the only downside to a nation of chronically tired teens — researchers now worry there may be other, more serious consequences. As part of the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams series "The Teen Brain: A Work in Progress," Dr. Nancy Snyderman examines the toll sleep deprivation can have on our kids.
Young people are sleeping just seven-and-a-half hours on weeknights, a full two hours less than experts recommend for adolescents, a new poll by the National Sleep Foundation has found. Such sleep deficits may interfere with brain development and increase the chance that a teen will develop attention deficit disorder and other cognitive problems, along with heightened risks for obesity, immune problems and depression, scientists now believe.
“Our 18-year-olds need at least as much sleep as our 10-year-olds,” says Dr. Mary Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University and director of Chronobiology and Sleep Research at Bradley Hospital. That’s because this is an age when major construction is going on in the brain, Carskadon explains.
New research, including Carskadon’s, has shown that the body uses sleeping hours to hook up critical new circuitry in the developing brain."

And those of us with Moebius know--we want to develop our brains as much as we can...


"Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or
else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and
development of the spirit." -M. Scott Peck