Well, I was the kid who read comics and SF books under the covers with a flashlight, so I’m hardly one to talk. I don’t think it did me much good to miss out on that sleep, though. And there are studies that say you sleep better if you have some time away from electronics before bed.
Sleep is when our bodies grow so it’s really important for children to get proper sleep. The phone chatting can go on and on into the night.
Nah, I feel you, realistically. That was in part the genesis of my lifelong fascination with staying up late to my own enormous detriment. But I still really cherish the memories of those conversations and the friendships they forged. I still get together with a couple of the girls for a big annual cabin bash and at least one nerdy convention to this day :)
I think sleep is like a lot of other stuff in this thread. You can set appropriate, reasonable boundaries, make clear the reasons why, and then, on some level, hope for the best. Short of drugging them, you’re not going to force a kid to sleep when they don’t want to, so you ideally equip them with the decisionmaking tools to make better choices than, for instance, either of us did :)
Yeah but no kid cares about that.
I read books with a flashlight too. I mean you can only fight kids so much on this stuff.
Now, when I try to read at night, I fall asleep, even when I don’t want to.
Sure, but handing them an entertainment and social media device to take into bed with them or making them put it down outside the bedroom can make a difference.
One of the issues with sleep for kids isn’t that they don’t want to sleep – they love to sleep in. It’s that they are on a natural rhythm of wanting to stay up later and sleep in later. That’s just how adolescents are, in general. School really should be starting at 10 am instead of 8 am.
Ha ha – me too. I sometimes refer to my Kindle as my sleep device. I often last no longer than five minutes in bed with it before I get too sleepy to read.
Well sure but I guess my point is. We didn’t have cell phones when I was a kid. We had cordless phones but it was till just a single land line so, even without the fun stuff like that we still figured out a way to stay up until 1-2-3 in the morning. It’s not the device, it’s mostly the fact you’re not supposed to and you want to.
Sure, but there’s a difference between enabling it and putting rules in place. I stayed up late more than I should have, but I am sure that if I had had a smartphone with all of the features and options available today, it would have been worse. It wouldn’t have been just reading. It would have been games. It would have been social media. It would have been streaming shows and movies with earbuds.
It’s perfectly okay to disagree here but some of that was just rebellion, pushing limits. My parents gave me a bedtime. I didn’t agree with the bedtime. I broke it every night whether it was reading with a flashlight or playing with a Giga pet anything really. Kids will push back; that’s natural. The fact cell phones and tablets exist today, doesn’t really change or enhance it, just changes the specifics.
I think it is different though. When I had to go to bed my choice to stay up in bed was to force myself to stay awake in the dark or sneak some reading in with a flashlight. That was it. Some nights I did read but many I did not. I didn’t have the option of chatting with a friend on the phone from my bed, watching Youtube, playing a mobile game, etc. Somehow magically give me those options in my youth and I would have abused bedtime rules even more than I did.
The other thing is that social media can often create anxiety. What did that person mean by that comment, the kid wonders after reading it fifteen times? I posted something on Instagram and none of my friends gave it a like. Was it stupid? Do they think I’m stupid now? Etc. Dealing with that in the bedroom when preparing for sleep isn’t really anything like reading a book. Reading a book can be calming. Social media often isn’t.
Anyway, it’s just an opinion. Having a rule that the phone stays out of the bedroom isn’t a panacea for ensuring a child gets adequate sleep, but I think it’s helpful towards achieving that goal more often.
I had a computer in the basement. My room was in the basement. It was not difficult for me get on the computer without people noticing. There was also windows. It wasn’t actually that difficult to just leave the house either. It’s not just ease of use.
I think if a kid is sneaking onto a phone or using a tablet in the relative safety of their room and not climbing out of windows to screw around in the world at large, and the worse thing someone has to deal with is a tired child… that parent is in good shape.
If my kid would read for pleasure, flashlight or whatever, I’d let him stay up all night. He’s so like his parents in so many ways it kills us that the bookworm trait didn’t pass down. :)
Do kids in general even read for pleasure anymore? Books I mean, not social media posts. Paper or electronic doesn’t matter. Do they read books?
I don’t have kids, nor do I know many, so I’m honestly asking.
When I was young, I loved to read books. Whatever was appropriate for my age, and frequently some of my parents’ books as I got into my teens.
I looked forward to reading a book after school. This carried into my 20’s as well, when I could read an entire novel in one night if I stayed up until 3:00 a.m.
I had friends; I had girlfriends. And I went out and did things with them, like anybody my age did. But reading was just as great a pleasure for me, and I’d always find time to do it. After work, I’d stop by the bookstore and buy a novel. After breaking up with a girlfriend, I tried going to bars for a while, but I always regretted it, and I’d sit there wishing I was in my apartment in my chair, reading. So after a few weeks, I gave up on bars and went home and read books.
I admit that I was kind of extreme in “needing” that isolation and quiet, and that it was certainly unusual, in that I was the only one among my group that did that amount of reading, but I did have several friends that also read books, just not as many as I did. Hell, we’d exchange books sometimes. Reading was just a part of life; it was simply a matter of what degree you did it.
tl;dr: I’m just wondering if young people still read books for pleasure.
My nephews do, 4 and 9. They’re just a tad young to be on the social media train though, but they love tablets, phones and consoles. Dinosaur books and Paw Patrol is still a winner.
It’s hard to say what kids do, since I’ve only seen mine in their native habitat. All of them read a bit as kids, but my daughter was an avid reader. Since adulthood one of my boys has become an avid reader. I think the other two boys don’t read that much.
It’s hard to define what “for pleasure” means now. My kid loves to read, but I have get the wheels rolling. Most of the time he won’t just pick up the book himself, even if he likes it, mainly because phone and computer (which also means TV because Netflix, etc) are, well, easier. They can also be more inclusive. So while he may wake up and start checking soccer news right away, at night when we have time, we’ll probably watch “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” together, or when he’s at his mom’s he’ll watch “Glee” [this is a true story].
I got him a book many months ago that I loved as a kid called On A Pale Horse. That series of books (The Incarnations of Immortality) is about the only Piers Anthony I can stand, so I thought I’d raft it out there to him. He ended up loving it. But given his druthers, he won’t do it on his own. He’ll text with his friends, or watch dumb YouTube videos, or watch terrible TV. Unless I insist we read. But then, to be fair, I have to read too. Because he sees me on the computer all the time. And it doesn’t matter if I’m working on notes for a podcast or the latest chapter of my book or whatever, what he sees is me on the computer.
So when he reads, I read in the same room. And he totally gets into it. The greatest moments are when he says, as he did a couple weeks ago, “Dad, do you mind if I keep reading?” when I said we we’re done and it was time for bed.
-xtien
I’m guilty of that myself. I still love to read, but the computer is a huge distraction, and doesn’t require much concentration or focus, so it’s great after work to unwind just letting my mind wander and going wherever I want on the internet. I’ve become too mentally lazy to read a book after work. Hell, even playing a game requires too much focus sometimes. I think my attention span has suffered greatly in the last 10 or 20 years.
I’ve got tomorrow off, for instance, and I promised myself I’d sit and read a book for part of the day. But I’ve made that promise before, and I’ve still got the same backlog of books sitting here that I’ve had for months.
There was a book by Piers Anthony that I absolutely loved back then, and I wonder if that was the one. It sounds very familiar, as does that series. I know I’ve got several books by him, I just can’t remember which ones.
That’s adorable.
That’s the problem for all of us. Toss time spent gaming in there and time spent with family and before you know it, the day is done and it’s time to sleep.
People who are avid readers make it a priority to read, and that’s usually because it gives them a kind of pleasure they don’t get otherwise.
I sadly spent too many years as an adult not reading that much – maybe 3-5 books a year. Young kids, working more than 40 hours a week, gaming, listening to music, etc., got me out of the habit of reading. I am grateful I am back in that habit now and it’s probably my primary avocation now. I might feel a bit guilty spending three hours playing WoW, but I never regret spending three hours reading, even though it’s usually genre potboilers.
Yes. Toss in also the fact that I’m a slow reader, and that compounds it.
There was a time when I looked at my backlog of books, looked at my rate of reading, looked at the number of months in the year, and realized I would never read all of the books. Not ever. It made me sad, and made me want to cut down on my sleep hours so I could read more.
It takes me forever to read a book. It’s so annoying. I can’t skim. I read like every word has to be saved in my memory bank. Reading gives me pleasure, don’t get me wrong. I’m loving the book I’m reading now. It’s changing the way I view my everyday world. But it’s taking me months longer than it would take a normal person. And that annoys me.
My kid is better at this than I am, thankfully, but still, as you suggest, reading takes a certain active brain whereas watching TV or surfing the Internet lets you float. I watch movies like I read, that is to say, active, but I get that not everybody does that.
So when he gets into a book, he really gets into it. But still, I have to get the wheels moving to get the thing opened to the page.
In other news, he got his Instagram tonight. We had a family meeting to lay down the ground rules, many of which came from you all here. I have to say, your input was key in this decision, and how we are going about it.
I’m grateful for your responses in this thread. I cannot tell you how much.
-xtien