Easing Into a School Sleep Schedule

July is winding down and August is coming up fast -- and for many families that means the start of the school year. Even here in New York City, where school usually starts later than most places, teachers report on September 3rd, although religious holidays push back the start for students until September 9.

Adam Inglis

One important way that parents can help students of all ages get ready for the upcoming school year is to think about sleep We've written before about the importance of sleep and how sufficient, high-quality sleep is crucial for optimal academic performance. When we work with students and parents we inquire about sleep and look at how inadequate sleep, or sleep disruptions, may impact student performance.

During the summer, it's easy for families to put aside strict bedtime rituals and for children to go to bed later than usual, or to sleep well into the morning. Teens who find summer a great time to socialize without the demands of homework may be up later than they would during the school year. And parents, who have enforced bedtimes during the school year, may themselves want a break from arguing about when it is time to go to bed.

Unfortunately, moving from the pace of summer to the more demanding days of school, and the need for a reasonable amount of sleep before leaving home at an early hour, can't happen the night before school starts. Families need to start at least a couple of weeks in advance -- more if possible -- to ease into the schedule they will follow in the fall. It's also important to think about whether your child's regular school year sleep patterns provide sufficient good quality sleep to help make their upcoming year a success.

Court Bars Limits on Physician Gun Counseling

Unless you spent your summer in an isolated locale with no news broadcasts, newspapers, or internet (is there such a place anymore?) you know that this has been a summer punctuated by devastating, deadly gun violence. So we were particularly pleased to see an article in the August issue of AAP News noting that U.S. District Court Judge Marcia G. Cooke has ruled that a 2011 Florida law which restricted pediatricians from asking about whether there are firearms in a home is unconstitutional. Judge Cooke has issued a permanent injunction which blocks enforcement of this law.

We had previously written about our concerns with this legislation, noting that it was intended to counter an initiative on the part of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and others to make sure that families were aware of the need to keep guns away from children and to counsel patients and families on the need to store guns safely. As we noted in our prior blog on this topic, this was not an effort to limit gun ownership, only to improve safety.

The judge's ruling followed a lawsuit brought by the Florida branches of the AAP, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American College of Physicians, as well as several individual physicians. The plaintiffs argued that the law limited their right to free speech under the First Amendment because it did not allow them to exchange information about gun safety with their patients. The judge agreed and also noted that the law prevented patients from hearing preventive health information from their doctors.

There are several other states in which similar legislation to the Florida law has been proposed, but not yet enacted. We hope that the ruling in Florida gives those in other states pause before they push ahead with limiting the rights of physicians to try to keep their patients safe.

Photo: flguardian2 / Creative Commons

KidRex Lets Kids Roam The Internet Safely

KidRex is a useful search tool for parents and teachers worried about letting children run loose online.

Users can type any search criteria into the field on the appealing homepage, and the resulting pages will each be screened by Google SafeSearch for adult content before they are displayed. Sites geared towards children are emphasized in searches; for example, a search for “Africa” turned up several pages by PBS Kids first before listing denser results like Wikipedia farther down.

Set KidRex as your kids’ homepage to allow children to explore their online world in safety.

A Father's Story

The online home of the National Center for Learning Disabilities, LD.org, published a beautiful article this week by the father of one of our patients at The Yellin Center. With Father's Day coming up this weekend, we thought our readers would appreciate this story of perseverance, resilience, and love of family helping to dramatically transform one young man's learning experience.

"One of the greatest challenges that I confronted was when I realized one of my children had a learning disability. Throughout my life, I have been strong, resilient, confident, and maintained a “nothing will get the best of me” attitude. The day I understood the extent of my child’s disability, my leg trembled, my heart raced. I initially did not know where to turn or what to do to help my son to achieve a bright future. For the first time, I truly knew what fear was: fear for the future of a child that lives in my heart, my soul, and my being...

...my son is now receiving A’s and B’s when he used to receive C’s, D’s, and F’s a year before. He is beaming with self-confidence, which his teachers additionally notice."

You can read the inspiring article here. 

Our thanks to Mr. Rahamatulla for sharing his story and for giving us his blessing to repost it here. Happy Father's Day!

Four Sons, Revisited

We've never before repeated a blog entry. Even when we mention or link to a blog entry, the blog itself is newly written. After more than 250 posts, since 2009, we are breaking with that practice. In part, we are repeating this blog from February, 2010 because your blogger is up to her elbows in cooking for the Passover holiday, which begins with a seder this evening and continues for eight days. But more importantly, we still find this discussion a timely one and want to make sure that our new readers get a chance to share it and our long-time readers are prompted to think about it again. -Ed.


We've written before about how labels can be unfair to children and how they are insufficiently descriptive of what is really going on with any individual. We recently encountered a discussion of how labeling can be detrimental in a very unexpected context. Robert Dobrusin, a rabbi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, writes about how labels have unfairly limited the characters encountered in the traditional telling of the Passover story. The story of the exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt, a familiar part of the Old Testament, is told in a ritualized form as part of the Passover celebration. One key part of this ritual telling is the story of four sons, one wise, one wicked, one simple, and one who cannot even ask a question. Every year, at the Passover meal, families read about these same sons, and tell the story of the exodus to answer these children's questions.

Rabbi Doursin notes, "I am troubled by the fact that we don't let them change. Throughout history they will always be wise or rebellious or simple or unquestioning... How can we set them in stone the way we do? There is one simple reason. They don't change because they each have been given a name: wise, rebellious, simple, unquestioning...How much wiser it would have been [if these children had been described] as the one who asked a wise question, the one who asked a rebellious question, the one who asked a simple question, the one who did not ask at all?"

He goes on to explain that when we label individuals we can be too quick to jump to conclusions about their actions. Only when we eschew labels and keep open the possibility of change can we then open the door for individuals to move beyond the roles their labels describe to growth and change. Whatever our beliefs, and whatever holidays and traditions we celebrate, it is excellent advice. Indeed, there is strong evidence that labeling or defining children by their limitations can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because they tend not to see past their label to the possibility of their own change and growth.