Great Piece About Kids and Sleep, Thanks Rolfe!

. . .and a frisky cock of the snook for it:

Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure the impact . . . Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.

The surprise is how much sleep affects academic performance and emotional stability, as well as phenomena that we assumed to be entirely unrelated, such as the international obesity epidemic and the rise of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. A few scientists theorize that sleep problems during formative years can cause permanent changes in a child’s brain structure: damage that one can’t sleep off like a hangover.

It’s even possible that many of the hallmark characteristics of being a tweener and teen—moodiness, depression, and even binge eating—are actually symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation.

which in turn led to

OMIGOD! Legally Blonde!

I just watched “Legally Blonde: the Musical” featured on MTV.

I haven’t had this much fun wire to wire with a Broadway musical since I saw “Grease” alone in NYC in the 70s (the first and only show I’ve EVER seen live there) as a teenager sitting alone because that’s the only ticket we could get, and loving every single minute. Amazed that adults ALLOWED such stuff!

“Omigod you guys!”

Don’t miss it, it starts again in SIX MINUTES!!!!!

Home Education Real Because It Can “Break the Chains of Childhood”

As proud unschooling mom of singer-dancer-actor kids to whom I seldom give answers much less orders, I couldn’t wait to share this excerpt about home education, but maybe the REAL story is further down and harder to define, so keep reading:

. . .If you meet Ryan Gosling in person, you will immediately notice that he is mature beyond his 26 years, focused, engaged, very present in the moment. His parents, working-class, were Mormons, though the young Gosling rejected the faith early, as he rejected school.

“I didn’t really want to be a kid,” he says. “I didn’t like the idea that people could arbitrarily tell me what to do because they were adults and I had to listen. I was very anxious to start working and take care of myself.”

This attitude, predictably, did not endear him to school officials, and by the time he was 10 or 11, Gosling was being given home education by his mother.

He initially trained as a dancer . . . moved to Florida, then to Los Angeles, and lived for two years with Justin Timberlake’s family.

Performing, it turned out, “was a way to break the chains of childhood.”

. . .”It had never occurred to me that you could have a job that you liked. My father never had a job that he liked. He worked in a paper mill, then in sales.”

His success, Gosling says, is finally enabling him to take on assignments that are meaningful to him, and “to get to a place that will allow me to make my own decisions.”

“Just as you wanted to do as a kid?”

“Exactly.”

. . .but the real power comes to life in rest of the story, about his hot new film, “Lars and the Real Girl”

– in which his quirky definition of his own life is so meaningful and real to him that the whole community accepts it, and him, AS real (homeschoolers definitely could learn something about supporting each other’s reality from this kid!)