My god. Just feed them and get them to bed at a proper hour, and turn off the blue lights. And while you're at it, maybe lobby your local school for a naptime if they don't already have one (I know it's problematic to change the school hours because of parent's work schedules).
> The older the child, the greater the dosage, with preschoolers taking anywhere from 0.25 to 2 mg and preteens taking up to 10 mg.
Those are extraordinarily high doses. I tried it for sleep in my 20s and 2 mg knocked me out and left me feeling groggy when I woke up. I can't even imagine how much habituation a child needs in order for a 10 mg dose to be necessary.
No, and I'm not going to. I won't make the decision to conceive a person who's ultimate fate is to die, not without knowing that they themselves would have chosen to have lived a finite life. I myself will not know whether life is worthwhile until the end, and at that point it will be too late to do things differently.
I have been a child though, and have had a younger sibling.
And I certainly know, beyond any doubt at all, that 20 to 30 years ago parents weren't dosing their children with sleeping pills. At least not almost 1 in 5. This does not have to happen.
> My god. Just feed them and get them to bed at a proper hour, and turn off the blue lights.
You make it sound like some easy accident of scheduling, but it's not: As kids get older there are documented and measurable physiological changes--especially in melatonin release--telling their bodies to stay up later.
It’s always kinda easy to just pick out the nonparents in these threads.
Parenting always looks like one of those “why don’t you just” things - the answers are so obvious and these parents are just idiots. Except, every human that has ever existed has had parents. Is every descendant a bunch of idiots that just needed someone to tell them “why don’t you just?”
When you become a parent you’re faced with impossible situations regularly. You feed your kids, get them to bed, they’ve got school at some scientifically proven harmful early hour, all the lights are automated for circadian lighting, you do a quiet story time, everything is peaceful, but your kid hasn’t slept more than a few hours a night for two weeks. They’re hysterical, you’re at your wits end, because you also haven’t slept, or really done any of the million grown up chores that happen once your kids fall asleep and if you don’t pay the bills soon your utilities will be cut off and then evicted - not for want of money but for want of time not consumed by your insomniac crazed child. You are doom scrolling parenting forums with parents posting horror stories of their life melting down and begging for advice. Throughout the forums are smug parents saying “yeah man, did that. Melatonin. Just saying, by the way it’s the hormone all vertebrate animals secrete to induce sleep since animals began.” But you really don’t want to be drugging your kids, and you remember posting on HN a bunch of “why don’t you just” threads before you had kids and feel the need to be intellectually consistent. Surely if you turn the lights down 10% 30 minutes earlier this won’t happen tomorrow?? Maybe the story you read is too over stimulating? Maybe they just need to run for five hours tomorrow at the park?? What else did I tell people to do???
Every time you are getting ready for bed at 4am after consoling your weeping child shrieking “why can’t I sleep daddy???” until they suddenly switch off like a light at 3:30am, three hours before they have to wake up for their absurd school start time designed to stunt intellectual development out of malice by school administrators that wish they had studied a different subject, you can’t help but see your bottle of melatonin.
Finally you can’t take it and you go to the pediatrician. They look at you like you’re dense. “Have you tried melatonin? It’s perfectly safe in moderation and can help reset a sleep cycle that’s been disrupted.” You shift uncomfortably and stammer something about drugging kids and hollowly repeat some “why don’t you just” advice you posted on HN a few years before your first child. The doctor shrugs and says “lack of sleep will clearly harm you and your child, and melatonin is a fundamental hormone in the sleep cycle of all animals - it is safe. Relax.”
Dejected and exhausted, feeling like a hypocrite, you get the smallest dose gummy you can find at the store. With a deep shame for destroying your child’s life, you mutter something about medicine and give it to your kid before you brush teeth. They’re shaking with fear about the upcoming struggle to sleep, but you guys go through the motions you know won’t work and you grind your teeth waiting for the struggle to finally break you. Then half way through the story, you hear it. A slight snore. You fold the book and rest your burning eyes. You consider revisiting all those threads you posted, maybe deleting the posts or adding edits apologizing. But you’re just too tired right now. The warmth of the bed, the blessed peace is too inviting. The next thing you know, you wake up fully clothed in their bed late for school.
Listen, you should NEVER judge a parent that hasn’t been convicted by a jury of their peers. There is nothing in life harder, and no one who hasn’t lived it can ever understand it. That’s not an insult or telling you to shut up or your opinion is wrong. But it’s a frame of reference so different from all other human experience that it’s impossible to judge from outside.
Listen, I understand that I prioritize children more than most parents do, because given my economic and philosophical circumstances I chose to not have children.
What I have read is people talking about optimizing their child rearing for their jobs (and other things). This is bass-awkward. You optimize, as much as you can, for the child. Because everything you are doing while they are a child is done DURING THEIR FRICKING FORMATIVE YEARS!!
Often I find it's not even just nonparents, but also parents who have lucked out by having their methods work on their kids, so assume that's all it must take, and why can't other parents just do this list of things that worked for them, so are obviously universally applicable to every child.
/rant, after having spent yet another day exhausted by my weird-sleep-habits 2 y.o.
Why naptime at school? If parents are having trouble with their kids not falling asleep in the evening, wouldn't that either hurt (less tired kids) or be ineffective (kids can't fall asleep at school either)?
I guess first we have to figure out exactly why parents are giving their children melatonin. If it's for not falling asleep at a particular time, then a nap time may not help. If it's because the children appear to be tired in the morning, then a nap time might help.
Children in general are growing, and need more sleep than adults. I don't know that it particularly matters how this sleep is distributed. I do know that my preschool had a naptime, and that I occasionally nodded off as an older kid on the school bus. I think extending naptimes from pre-school into later school years is an idea worth investigating.
> The older the child, the greater the dosage, with preschoolers taking anywhere from 0.25 to 2 mg and preteens taking up to 10 mg.
Those are extraordinarily high doses. I tried it for sleep in my 20s and 2 mg knocked me out and left me feeling groggy when I woke up. I can't even imagine how much habituation a child needs in order for a 10 mg dose to be necessary.