Thursday, May 13, 2010

Like a Lullaby to My Ears: For Happier, Smarter, *and* Thinner Kids, Add Sleep


Whenever I go to the pediatrician's, I pick up all the random handouts they have for parents. Aside from reading all their magazines (and sometimes leaving with them), this is one of my knee-jerk habits. I figure if they have a handout, it’s ‘cause so many parents have asked the same question they figured they needed to. There was a good one, too, titled “Effects of Family Meals, Sleeping and Screen Time on Obesity in Preschoolers”. Basically, the office had synthesized info from the March 2010 issue of Pediatrics' article, “Household Routines and Obesity in U.S. Preschool-Aged Children.” There were three household routines: “regularly eating family meals, getting adequate sleep, and limiting screen-viewing time” that were linked to lowered risk of obesity among children.

Now, this comes close to home for me. My older daughters are in the high end the BMI spectrum, despite pretty good eating habits and bodies that look solid rather than chubby, so I am on the lookout for Good Habits. I am a firm believer in family meals for a whole litany of reasons, both personal and general (I have seen links between family meals and a retinue of desirable consequences, including academic performance); I try to enforce TV limitations strictly (though I don’t eliminate it altogether and we’re in a culture where even limits are hard with screens everywhere you turn). But I love the sleep thing, especially—who’d a thunk it? Getting sleep helps you not be fat? How…affirming! It also taps into the second great chapter of NurtureShock, where the authors document a whole host of amazing (and somewhat disturbing) effects of our children’s loss of sleep. That chapter notes how throughout the country, children get an hour less of sleep than they did a generation ago. The same period has seen tremendous increases in child obesity. While physical activity is important and helpful to children, sleep is also key in keeping their bodies in balance. Children who get more sleep are thinner, as well as happier and smarter. Dr Marc Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child is particularly useful reading if you’re wondering about that happier thing).

Sleep appears to be hugely important for a whole host of important brain functions, including some that we’re only becoming aware of now. There are regulatory and memory functions that depend on sleep for their completion. Sleep is essential to processing things learned during the day, for example. So “getting a good night’s sleep before a test” is surprisingly sound advice (if only I had realized that in college...)
It’s giving me even more incentive to make sure my kids get some sleep. Maybe with time, I can figure out how to work that out for myself as well….

Monday, May 3, 2010

Could Machiavelli Be Right?



I read Machiavelli’s The Prince as an undergraduate and then again as a grad student; I have taught it a number of times as a part of a college curriculum. While I think Machiavelli is pretty clever, and it’s a great read for tons of reasons (how many manuals do you know that have a place in a liberal-arts program 500 years later?), I have a lot of issues with Machiavelli’s approach. Now most people (a bit boringly, in my troublesome viewpoint) complain about the man’s immorality. But my issues are, firstly, practical. Because Machiavelli is pitching himself as someone who tells brutal truths (he’s an *exceptional* salesman), we buy it. But how well do his prescriptions work? He is hugely inconsistent. Like when he goes on about the value of being feared without being hated. Which is all very well and good—but it’s not always so easy to do so. As a parent, actually, it’s a *bit* easier (though more for my husband than for me), since your kids are much more willing to love you than your average person. But, as I used to point out to my students, it’s not so easy for me to make myself feared by them...without also being despised.

I admit, though, that Machiavelli resonates with many of my smarter students. And there are places where he demonstrates real psychological acuity. One of the most famous bits of his is the whole discussion of whether it’s better to be loved or feared as a prince. It’s often misquoted or misunderstood, but essentially (while BOTH is his preference), Machiavelli concludes that it’s safer to be feared. I have to say that it often troubles me to see how most people are much more motivated by fear than anything. Tell your kids that you have some great stickers if they just manage to sleep the whole night in their own beds and they might do it. Tell them they will lose dessert if they don’t and, miraculously, they don’t leave their room. What a sad fact, thought I. Fear is simply more fundamental to human nature than (positive) desire. How unfortunate.

But recently I’ve found another way to think about it. I’ve read a couple of things lately (The Paradox of Choice and Sway among them), which address loss-aversion on various levels. Essentially, most people will go to great lengths not to lose something they already have. Those lengths are often disproportionate to the actual value we would normally ascribe to that object. While loss aversion isn’t a great thing for a lot of reasons, it does suggest an upside to our fear: we recognize that what we *already* have is tremendously valuable. We naturally hold most dear what is already ours. There is something both profoundly true, and profoundly beautiful to this. With all our competitiveness and envy and what have you, what we value most is what we already have; and we will go to ridiculous lengths to preserve it. So, somewhat ironically, our fear can point to a great source of gratitude. Recognizing that we’re afraid of losing shows us just how very fortunate we are, and how much we have to be grateful for. Our fear reminds us how lucky we are.

So yeah, I guess Machiavelli was right. Sort of.