Not too long ago, I wrote about Zombees. Yes, those whacked out bees who have been eaten alive from the inside out by flies who have acquired a taste for bee meat, turning ordinary bees into crazed, hollowed out zombies of the air.
The whole zombie problem has seemed to spread to teens as well. Researchers are claiming that it is no longer your kid’s fault that they can’t wake up in the morning, fall asleep in class and then suddenly get a burst of energy when it’s bedtime and play X-box until dawn.
The apparent cause: starting at puberty, your child’s sleep-wake clock goes on the fritz and their entire sleep cycle becomes convoluted to the point where they are more prone to take risks, have less self control, can’t perform well on their assignments and become depressed and even suicidal.
One of the kids mentioned in an article on the subject said if he doesn’t get 10 hours a sleep every day, he will feel exhausted. He stays awake for classes by shear willpower and is hanging onto a thin thread of sanity so that he doesn’t lose it entirely emotionally.
Supposedly, there is a reason for all this. Teens really should get 9 to 10 hours of sleep but only 7.6% do. Nearly a quarter of teens get eight hours of sleep, but the rest barely cram in six hours or less each night.
Then there’s the usual mumbo-jumbo about sleep pressure, the delayed release of sleep inducing melatonin and a lack of sensitivity to morning light.
I, of course, am not buying any of it.
Why? Well, I will tell you, since this is my blog and I can do a thing like that.
There is a simple antidote for all this Zombie Teen Syndrome. My mother.
Yes, my mother. It may even have been your mother for mothers have a way of compensating for any of this slovenly, self-reveling teen angst that researchers are now trying to put into a nice little box so that they can create a pill for it and make oodles of money.
When I was a kid and it was time to get ready for school, my mother would walk into our bedroom without saying a word and open the drapes. Light would poor in, spring, summer and fall. If it was the dead of winter, this obviously didn’t work, so my mother instead would turn on the lights in the room. Not just one light. All the lights. We felt as if we had gone from a quiet slumber to standing on the surface of the sun, all in a couple of milliseconds.
She would then announce in a slightly drill sergeant tone that it was time to wake up. With that she would turn on the TV to Sergeant Preston and depart. If we didn’t pull our sorry asses out of bed there would be a return visit, and believe me, you never wanted a return visit from my mother.
I can’t blame her for having this routine. First, she had four boys to ready for school. There was no time for that “good morning, honey, rise and shine” crap. We had a job to do. In exchange for going to school, we were allowed to have a roof over our head and food in our tummies. A pretty good deal by any measure.
There were no zombies in our house. My brother Brian came closest, as he was a bit of a laze academically. Though he calls himself Dr. Zerr now, I can tell you all that he never made it through high school. He had to take his GED somewhere down the road.
I’m not knocking a GED, as I’m still not sure what it is. Fault me if you want to, but it always seemed like a consolation prize for not being able to finish high school in the usual four easy years. As any college goer knows, high school was the easy part, like comparing kindergarten to third grade. Coloring all afternoon is a lot easier than learning your cursive, but I digress.
Back to the teen zombies. I was always an early riser. Whether it was biological and hidden somewhere in my DNA to be one is not for me to analyze. My mother’s morning ritual retrained me to embrace the morning. Even when it’s pitch black I still rise and shine at 5 a.m. On weekends it may be sixish. If I had an all night bender, eight tops.
In that space of time I have already dashed out a thousand words on a RobZerrvation. I’ve had some coffee, read through CNN, Google News, The Seattle Times and Zite. I’ve checked my email and Facebook.
I’m not bragging or pretending to be holier than now. If the early bird catches the worm, then I’m obviously not very fond of worms. I am fond of mornings. On the flip side, I can still stay out until 2 a.m. on occasion. I used to be able to do it with much more regularity, but like those teen zombies, I need to get my sleep.
Back to teen zombies. Rather than employ parents to fill the role my mother once did, researchers suggest we continue to adapt our world to slovenly, sleepy teens. They want us to change the start time of school in the morning so kids can go to school later.
Why not make the kids go to be earlier, like my mom did? Parents today are such a bunch of pansies. They are loathe to set a bedtime during the school year because their kids won’t like it.
Uh-huh. We didn’t like the blinding light of mornings in my house, that’s for sure. But I grew up in a benevolent dictatorship, something American households seem to lack these days.
I pity the day when these poor little teen zombies enter the working world. I can hardly wait until one asks if he can start at 9 instead of 8 because it’s more in step with his sleep-wake cycle. I will be glad to show him a couple steps, the ones that lead out of my office and back down to the lobby.
In the Emerald City, done with this RobZerrvation at 6:18 a.m.,
– Robb