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Are you Sleeping Enough? Here’s a Cheat Sheet

What time did your 12-year-old go to bed last night? How about your kindergartner? How about you?

We’re willing to bet, it wasn’t early enough.

While many schools across the country are posting flyers for after school activities, rehearsal schedules, test dates and reminders for money due, one school in Illinois is making a plea: put your kids to bed.

The elementary school has posted a chart of not just recommended hours of sleep, but a handy guide for what time your child needs to go to bed, based on the time they wake up in the morning.

And when you think about it in those terms, no one in your house is sleeping enough.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that school age children through teens snooze nine to 11 hours each night. Adults need seven to nine hours, at a minimum.

If your seventh grader is at the table studying until 9 p.m. and wakes at 5:45 to catch the bus at 6:45, they are not meeting the minimum. And it is just not your child.

A National Sleep Foundation poll found 59 percent of sixth through eighth graders and 87 percent of U.S. high school students were getting less than the recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep on school nights.

Throw in there several recent national studies that show teenagers’ brains do not function better until later in the morning and you have the makings of a very long, exhausting day for school kids across the nation.

And it shows.

The same poll found that 20-30 percent of high school students and 6 percent of middle school students fall asleep in school each day.

If your kids don’t hit the sack until later, you are up after them picking up, finalizing details for the next morning and trying to quell a mind that is turning with a very long to do list.

You are probably up earlier than everyone to prep breakfast, lunches, make sure shoes are by the front door and prepare for your own day’s work.

You have to stay up. You have things to do, right?

Nothing will go well the next day if you do not sleep.

Check the schedule put out by this elementary school. What time do you need to hit the hay? When that time comes, do it.

Homework is important. A clean kitchen every day is nice. But sleep is necessary.

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