bunsofaluminum wrote:great story, Ivy! my 15 year old daughter is a night owl and suffers with insomnia (and I"m not kidding...she really tosses and turns) The world is not set up for kids who can't sleep at night...in her perfect world, she would wake up at 1pm and begin her peak hours at about 4:00, and keep going strong until 3 or 4 in the morning. As it is, she has school which starts at 7:45, whether she was able to sleep last night, or not.
This is actually quite common with teenagers. I have a teenager who does the same thing. When I get up in the morning, she often hasn't been to bed yet. During the school year, she manages by taking a nap when she comes home from school...so she ends up sleeping in two shifts. For a long time it was a battle to get her up for school but she's now 17 and gets herself up and out the door.
I heard a piece on the radio about this recently. With computers, cell phones, i pods, tv. etc, there is much more to do at night and teenagers are collectively staying up.
Think about it. When I was a kid we didn't have internet or dvd players. No one had cell phones so you couldn't call someone in the middle of the night without waking up the whole house. Most tv stations signed off at 11....hard to even imagine now. Teens still stayed up but there weren't that many enticements. All night talk radio? Late movie? Kids would get together to do homework after school. They still do but now it's often late at night via of phone and internet.
The radio piece was saying that getting teens into school early has become such a problem that a few school systems have started scheduling them later.
Our kid is big on junk food too. I'd love to get her eating the healthy stuff....like your daughter, she eats the McDougall food in addition to SAD and she loves all kinds of junk food. We got custody of this kid when she was 12, so it hasn't been easy.