Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Predicament: Home And Not Alone

Leonard Pitts Knight-Ridder

I pulled a Stupid Dad Trick the other day. It was a grievous faux pas that, to hear my 12-year-old tell it, will have a dire impact on his social standing.

What I did was, I told him to go to bed.

It was about 10 o’clock. I went into the room where he was entertaining a couple of pals and told him to wrap it up because it was sack time.

Marlon came to me a few minutes later - stricken, embarrassed, pleading.

“Dad, next time, could you just call me aside? Don’t say ‘bedtime’ in front of my friends.”

Being the caring, nurturing parent I am, I offered to develop a code. “When it’s time for bed, I’ll just say, ‘Marlon, I need you to do a lube job on the car.”’

He didn’t see what was so funny.

To hear my son tell it, he’s the last child in North America to suffer the indignity of a bedtime. His friends, he says, get to stay up as long as they want to. Even on school nights.

He’s probably right.

It’s hard to make a late-night run to the supermarket these days without noticing sprouts much younger than Marlon tagging along after their folks. Bedtime has become an artifact of the past, a relic fully as quaint as grandma’s spittoon, a casualty of the lightning age.

“It’s a faster pace,” says LaVerne Turck of the North Andrews Preschool Academy in Fort Lauderdale. “With the kind of working hours parents have today, and with both parents needing to work, you don’t have a parent who’s at home at all times. Children are staying up later because (parents are) not able to provide them with the essentials until after they come home.”

Anneris Silva, director of the Christian Day Care and Preschool in Coral Gables, agrees. “Life isn’t as structured as it used to be. Things have changed so much.”

But you know what hasn’t changed? The human body, which, for all the advances of science and the miracles of medicine, still needs sleep to regenerate itself. Children, says Turck, need “anywhere from 10 to 12 hours” of down time. Parents often have trouble rousing their kids in the morning, she says, “but they don’t equate that with the fact that the children don’t have a specific bedtime.”

But you can hardly blame parents. They’re just trying to keep up. Talk to any parent and the refrain is the same: Adults are sleep-deprived themselves.

One reason is that life has never come with so many options before. Consider leisure time. What were your options 20 years ago? Read a book, watch TV, go to the movies, talk with friends. But now? We’ve got books online, books on tape, six major TV networks, up to 500 cable channels, pay TV, video, laser discs, chat groups in cyberspace, computer dating …

And we still have to find time to wash the car, do the shopping, play with the kids, balance the checkbook, do some exercise, get dinner, call your mom and get that memo done before the boss has a hissy fit that registers on the Richter scale.

Sleep? I predict major millions and a social revolution named in the honor of the person who finds a way to render that little inconvenience unnecessary.

In the meantime, here we sit in the land of the walking zombies, where the clock ticks too fast, and there’s never enough time, and life is completely unfair because Marlon Anthony Pitts still has to go to bed at 9 o’clock on school nights, 10 other nights.

The poor deprived kid. His mom hasn’t worked outside the home in five years. His dad works from the house as often as not, so his folks get plenty of time with him. In fact, by 9 or 10 p.m., they’re usually quite thoroughly sick of him.

The last thing that comes out of Marlon’s bedroom every night is a plaintive whine that Bruce and Nicole are “lucky” because their parents let them stay up till dawn if they want to. Of course, Nicole’s and Bruce’s folks also work punishing schedules that keep them away from home - and their kids - for long hours.

My son doesn’t know it, but he’s the luckiest kid on the block.

xxxx