Radical unschooling has been getting a lot of press lately. People are genuinely shocked to learn that we don’t boss our kids around about every little thing on the planet. They assume, unfortunately, that they must be wild animals with no sense of responsibility, hygiene or social skills. On an unschooling message board the other day, one woman (who arrived simply to bash unschoolers) was flying off the handle about the fact that the kids on TV had no bedtime.
I just thought she was so silly, going on and on about how children “need” a bedtime. What on earth was she so afraid of? Did she think the kids wouldn’t sleep? Did she think they’d stay up all night long and sleep all day? Did she think it interfered with Mom & Dad’s sex life? For the life of me, I can’t imagine what all the fuss is about.
Some of our family’s favorite bonding-times have been when the rest of the world is sleeping. Remember when we shared a basket of jellyfish? Being “connected” to our children means that we’re aware of their needs and treat them the way we’d want to be treated.
Heather from Swiss Army Wife recently blogged about her family’s bedtime ritual “Wise men Sleep when they are tired.” and she made a great medical and psychological defense against crib usage and forced bedtimes.
In the Nightline Story about unschooling, the reporter focused in on bedtimes as a unique aspect of Radical Unschooling;
In this household, there is no bedtime, no alarm clocks in the morning. Eleven-year-old Devin often stays up past midnight — and Martin does not object. “I’m so happy that he does, and that he has that time to himself because his sisters go to bed at 9 or 10. He can have a nice three, four hours with Joe or just me,” she said. Instead of waking up at 7 a.m. to go to school, Devin sleeps until around 10 a.m. “It’s the same amount of sleep,” he said.
How much simpler can it get? Our bodies don’t require a bedtime. We just need to sleep. Regular periods of wakefulness and tiredness ensure that humans WILL SLEEP. Period.
Ron Paul, who plans to homeschool his own kids, blogged about the Nightline special, too. his commenters bordered hilarious; one said
The only thing the reporter seemed concerned about was these kids weren’t going to be getting up at 5 a.m. to crank up their SUV to go sit in traffic to go work for the man.
The reporter was asking about what “jobs” they’ll be able to get.
WHAT JOBS !?!?!?!
The jobs will all be in China and Mexico by then.
The only jobs in the U.S. will be Homeland Security and prison guards.
Prepare to be shocked. My kids have stayed up all night before. Emilee and Meagan did this at the RE Conference last year because they were so eager to hang out with their new unschooling friends. But, they learned more from the experience a few months ago, when they were given laptops as gifts from their grandparents. Emilee actually threw her thyroid off balance for a few weeks because her sleep habits were such a mess. But she didn’t like the way it felt. She learned her lesson. Meagan learned the lesson without medical consequence. Gabriella (9) stayed up all night a few months ago and spent the next day tired, teary and regretting it. Would any of them have understood this if I’d forced them to go to bed, taken away their computers or bullied them into sleeping? Who knows? But why fight about such a trivial, personal thing?
I’m 35 and I absolutely love being up at night when the rest of the house is asleep. I can clean and an hour later, it STILL looks perfect. I can make a dessert and no one asks for a bite. I can dance around with my iPod and not bump into anyone. Do I regret it the next day? Sometimes, Sometimes no. I tend to plan ahead, and do it when I know I don’t have plans the following day, so I can nap if I need to.
The point is, I am in control of my body. I know that I need sleep (thankfully not much, I thrive on like 4-5 hours these days) and I know how it feels to be rested vs tired. I recognize my body’s needs and do what it takes to meet them. I don’t need the same amount of sleep every night. Since I’ve stopped eating processed foods and started getting more exercise, I require about half the sleep I used to. I’m aware of my body’s changing needs on a daily basis and so are my children.
And, in case you wondered, life without bedtime totally does NOT mean parents can’t have sex. The stork didn’t bring my babies.
The following comments were pasted over from my old site, sorry they’re not in comment format 
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Hi-I read your blog all of the time but have yet to comment.
I don’t understand why people give a flying flip about other people’s “bedtimes” and such. Are they afraid that if my children aren’t in bed by 9pm (or 7:30 pm as one teacher so intrusively told my daughter) that they are going to be running around ruining the world for the rest of them? Are they that content in their 9-5 lives that they couldn’t imagine a world where you did what you wanted to do when you wanted to do it? Or are they simply afraid to look within themselves and see what could be changed?
Just like your jellyfishing experience some of my greatest memories lately have been when other children are in bed. Staying up late learning about Easter Island on Google Earth…not because we had to but because we wanted to…reading for as long as we want without giving a care about the time…late night video game marathons or simply cuddling on the couch watching a favorite family TV show. I wouldn’t give that up for the world-even if it means sometimes not seeing my oldest daughter until we’ve all finished lunch or not getting out to run errands until late in the day!
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I typically announce that I’m heading to bed to lay down with my 2-yr-old until she falls asleep, and my older daughters usually follow along. Sometimes we read or listen to a rain CD and usually talk a bit. But some nights, my older daughters announce that they’re going to stay up with their dad and they seem so pleased that its their choice to do so. It’s a sweet thing. I feel proud to see them making their own decisions and feeling good about it. It’s a valuable experience, whereas making them stay in their beds for so many hours each night would undermine their confidence and growth. It seems obvious to me.
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Marci
Hello, we have been making a transition to the unschooling philosophy over the past month. I wanted to ask you about the bedtime issue and a few other questions. How do you get time alone with your husband? I mean we have never been uptight about an early bedtime, but we do have children settled usually by 10 or 10:30. Ages children 10,8,5,3& 7months. Our house is not large enough to afford us much privacy unless the children are settled and asleep. We look forward to the time alone together at night when all is settled. It seems very necessary to have this time together.
Also, can you give me some advice for the transition if you have time? We have homeschooled with a variety of curriculum from the start and we started about a month ago with allowing the unschooling freedoms. They are currently overdosing on Duck Tales and Atom Ant. They have also watched a lot of old Macgyver episodes since my older son is a little gadget man. I am trying not to stress over the fact that they are not out playing in the sunshine or sticking their nose in a book. They used to do that all of the time, but are not reading now. I’m sure that is because of the control grip I had on media. They are testy with each other too after watching so much T.V. Is this normal? Anyway, do I just start putting out a lot of open ended things and just ask them what they want to learn? Should I wait until they max out on media and wait for them to gravitate towards something? I am excited about watching them learn this way. Thanks in advance for any advice.
Allowing our children to sleep when they’re tired and not expecting them to sleep by the clock is not necessarily “a unique aspect of Radical Unschooling”. It was the norm for my now grown up daughter from birth and even through 13 years of school she chose her own bedtime – though of course she was obliged then to take the requirements of school into consideration. Certainly when there’s no school to accommodate, as has been the case with my now teenage son, flexibility is optimised and decisions supportive of our human beingness are easier to make.
In my experience, being attuned to our body’s needs is a more valuable “life skill” than knowing how to tell the time. Perhaps the world might even be a better place if more people refused to have their biological givens tyrannised by the factory mentality of clock watching. Especially in our own homes.
Good point, even a child in school can be allowed to follow their internal clocks. I should know this because my oldest two are in public school this year (by choice) and they’re still following their own internal schedule, without interference. Thank you, Bob
I could use your insight on a bedtime related problem. We don’t have bedtimes for our 4 kids but my 11 y/o daughter has driven us crazy at night for years at this point. We co-slept with her until she was fairly old and things weren’t really an issue then, but she is now phobic about being alone at night AND she’s a night owl. My husband and I currently co-sleep with our 4 y/o in our little bedroom. My daughter shares a room with her little brother and she’s okay as long as he’s awake. Once he’s asleep she gets lonely and worries about things. She comes into our room again and again all night long in order to have “company” and will wake us up even if it’s 3:30 in the morning. She also wakes up her older sister for company some nights, which absolutely infuriates my oldest daughter.
I’m 5 months pregnant and my husband is disabled, so both of us have trouble sleeping and deal with pain/sickness anyway. On top of things, we have a fairly small bed that we share with a child who likes to sleep sideways so it’s not like we get good sleep anyway. My daughter will wake either me or my husband up over and over again to complain that her stomach hurts, she’s hungry, she’s lonely, she’s cold, she’s hot, she’s not tired, she’s scared… One night a few weeks ago, the final time was after 5 in the morning and I finally just got up and was up for the rest of the day because I couldn’t get back to sleep any more.
Last night I went to sleep on the couch because our upstairs is quite hot (no a/c) and she was obviously overtired but still stayed up on her computer. I finally told her at 2 a.m. that she really ought to get to bed. She could barely keep her eyes open and was to that over-tired toddler stage. She started to cry that she couldn’t go to bed because she’d be lonely, so I offered to let her sleep in the living room with me. She cried that she didn’t want to because she liked her bed, and asked me to share her bunk bed with her (totally not an option for a million reasons). I told her I loved her and said she needed to just make a choice for whatever sounded best. She started wailing that she hates nights and she’s always scared or lonely, but every option I gave her just resulted in more crying.
I don’t want her to end up in some abusive relationship as an adult because of this hang-up about having to have somebody awake and in the same room all night. She wants to stay up really late (which is fine with me) but then she freaks out when she’s the last one awake and will literally wake up one or all of her family over and over again for the company. I’ve told her that she should go to sleep earlier so her brother is awake while she falls asleep and so she doesn’t get overtired (she becomes an emotional wreck when she’s overtired and doesn’t seem to have any concern about self regulating that). She says she can’t go to sleep early.
She’s also a Harry Potter fan and reads the books late at night, and then complains that they make her scared. She told me last night that she’s now afraid that her dad and I will die in the night because all the books she reads involve death and orphans. I told her that maybe she shouldn’t read those books then and that wasn’t an option as far as she was concerned. But at 3 a.m. I have to hear hours of complaints that keep ME up because she’s made the choice to read these books again and again.
None of our other kids have any of these issues. I have tried to wait things out but it’s frankly exhausting. She has stretches where she goes to bed fine (often staying up till 5 a.m. reading but eventually falling asleep fine) but then she has these stretches where suddenly everything is lonely and sad and scary and she wants *us* staying up till 5 a.m. with her. She totally freaks out and can’t be reasoned with about any of it (another result of being overtired in her case), and the rest of the family pays the price. Plus, once she’s overtired like that she’s really unpleasant to be around – she’ll tell you everything you’ve ever done wrong to her, complains about random things from years back, starts sobbing for no reason… she really is like an “ugly drunk” when she’s stayed up too late, but she doesn’t want to try to go to sleep earlier.
Even if someone is sleeping in the same room (or even bed) with her, it doesn’t count as “company” once they’re asleep, so she’ll wake up whoever is around every time they fall asleep.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Alicia, that does sound like tough spot to be in. One of my girls has trouble falling asleep sometimes and she finds that TV helps her. The only suggestion I can think of is to discuss it with her (but not when it’s the middle of the night) I’d really just ask her to be thinking of ways to “set up” the evening so that you & your husband can get the sleep you need. Point out patterns (“I notice that when you read Harry Potter you have trouble getting back to sleep”) and speak frankly without blame or anger, just looking for her ideas to help you solve your sleep dilemma. Even if she’s happy with her own sleeping habits, she may be willing to make some changes if she knows how troublesome it is for you to be woken up. Good luck
[...] here is a good post with comments on radical unschooling and bedtime to read. http://lisarussell.org/blog/radical-unschooling-and-bedtime/ [...]
I get a kick of out talking about my 2.5 year old son’s sleeping “schedule” with people. We cosleep and he goes to be when he asks to. Since my wife is pregnant, she’s usually in bed first, and I’ll do stuff with him until he says its time to sleep – usually sometime between 10:30pm and 1am. Sometimes he’ll fall asleep on our way home from somewhere if we’re late, and we may or may not be able to transition him into bed when we get home. Sometimes he’ll pop back up at 10 after a quick nap and say up until 1 or 2. I’m more of a night owl so that’s fine with me. He gets up when he wants, usually 9ish but can be as late as 10 or 11am. We run our business from home so we just roll with it. I’m intrigued to see what happens when the 2nd arrives in November.
I also enjoy it when the shocked people either ask “what will you do when he starts school?” or state “you’ll have to make some changes and get him in a schedule before he starts school.” I get a mischievous grin and say “school?”