I’m usually suspicious of claims about “kids nowadays”. Ellen Shrager has presented on the change she has seen in the kids we teach and I was struck by how she dated it from 1996 or 1997. I found that strange and couldn’t think of any shift in the society comparable to, say, the sixties. But in the NYT Week In Review section of April 28th, I read the following regarding attention deficit disorder deriving from a sleep deficit: “Yet today’s youngsters sleep more than an hour less than they did a hundred years ago. And for all ages, contemporary day-time activities – marked by nonstop 14-hour schedules and inescapable melatonin-inhibiting iDevices = often impair sleep. It might just be a coincidence, but this sleep-restricting lifestyle began getting more extreme in the 1990s, the decade with the explosion in A.D.H.D. diagnoses.” So there.
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