I am a night person. I have always been a night person. I will probably always be a night person. My husband is a night person. My son shows signs of being a night person.
There seems to be a fairly large percentage of people who think that there is something wrong with staying up late, and I don’t understand why. “Decent people” should be in bed by then… blah blah blah…
In a recent thread hereEquipoise says “…Of course, parents who would let their kids stay up that late wouldn’t care one way or the other…” pretty much directly stating that a parent who lets their child stay up late is a bad parent.
My son is in kindergarten now, and when he has school, he is in bed by 8:30pm. Before he started school, though, and during vacations, he often stays up until 2 or 3am with me. I don’t see anything wrong with this. We both stay up, we both sleep in. We aren’t doing anything different than day-people, we are just doing it later. Dinner at 10pm, cartoons at 1am, whatever.
So what gives? Why do some people think there is something wrong with being up late? Or am I the one in the wrong? Is there something actually wrong with it??
I know of a pair of very good parents that even in grade school did not have a set bed time for their children. Of course wake up time is fixed by a school schedule. The children learned to cope with this lack of rule just fine.
In many cases a set bed time is more for the benefit of the parents than for the children. Parents often set early bedtimes just to have a few hours free of the children each day.
I don’t really mean just about parenting though. Seems like if you stay up late you are viewed suspiciously. People act like there is something wrong with you. Somehow it’s more respectable to wake up at 6am and go to bed at 10… though I can’t for the life of me figure out how it could possibly matter to anyone.
Everyone knows that Early to bed and Early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
Now, obviously, this does not apply to our dear OpalCat herself, because she’s not a man. Evidently, a woman is perfectly capable of being healthy, wealthy and wise at 2 o’clock in the morning. But Opal’s husband is a man, and her son will be a man someday (barring a sex change operation), so they must watch out. Not going to bed and waking up Early will obviously make them sick, poor, and thick-headed. Like the guy in those A&W Root Beer commercials. You can bet he’s up 'til all hours of the night.
Which leaves our dear Opal with a conundrum: How can she keep this terrible fate from befalling her husband and her son without having to drag herself into bed at a ridiculously early goody-two-shoes hour along with them? I propose the following list of options:[ol][li]Hit them on the head with a large rubber clown mallet every evening. Sure, the cumulative concussions from being knocked out so many times will probably give them microscopic skill fractures and turn them into vegetables, but you can’t make an omelete without breaking eggs![/li]
Put sleeping pills in their dinner. A little over-the-counter drug dependency (and perhaps damaging side effects from chronic overuse) never hurt anybody! They’ll easily be able to support their habit later on when the “wealthy” part of healthy, wealthy, and wise kicks in.[/ol]
I personally look forward to a future where we don’t work on fixed schedules like 9 to 5. Benefits include less traffic congestion and reduced need for oversize road systems and immense parking lots.
Skinner’s Walden Two talks about this at length, where the residents have been raised without conformity conditioning to work schedules and whatnot. They still get the job done, but they’re not all doing it at the same time. Subesquently, common facilities like dining areas didn’t need to be as large or elaborate as, say, a corporate cafeteria.
I had a day off today, so I was up until about 3 a.m. playing Civilization and crashed until early afternoon. I can’t say this is the best way to live, since my irregular sleep patterns reduce my daytime efficiency, but I’m not exactly serving the hellbound cause of communism by not being a morning person.
opal, my wag would be that people assume that “respectable” people have jobs or other important places to be early in the morning. i would think that the majority of the kinds of jobs people aspire to require a person to get up in the morning rather than sleep in.
the other reason may be that for many people staying up late may mean staying out late partying or some such, and putting those things ahead of the “respectable” job-type things they ought to be doing early in the am.
on the parenting end, when people see little kids up late, i don’t think it occurs to them that the child may have gotten up late, too. they may be thinking that the child is being deprived of sleep. or they may be applying the “no job, partying all night” stereotype to the parents. or both.
i don’t personally subscribe to this. mr. cess works as an assistant sysadmin (fairly respectable job, yes?) and keeps a fairly unusual schedule – 3 pm to 7 am three days a week. since i’m a sahm, and the kids don’t go to school, we don’t try to force him to change his schedule on his days off. the kids go to bed at midnight every night and wake up at 10 am every morning. they get plenty of sleep and get to stay up with their daddy four nights a week.
I work from home, and do most of my best work in the middle of the night. I never go out partying (or otherwise, actually )… I think you are right about how some people may view it, though.
Another thing that really irritates me is how if I say at 1pm that I’ve just woken up, I get all kinds of remarks (joking and serious) about how lazy I am, about how they wish that they could sleep until 1pm, blah blah blah. As if I’ve just gotten some huge amount of sleep. Nevermind that I went to bed at 9am and only got 4 hours of sleep–no, I’m obviously very lazy because of the actual hours during which I got that sleep. Grr!!!
this reminds me of my college roommate. even then i kept odd hours, usually coming to bed around 7am and waking around 4pm. my roommate complained to the ra that my sleep schedule was keeping her from studying.
I remember years ago, me and my friends would hang out at a 24 hour bowling alley all night long after RHPS, and I would generally go home at dawn. It drove my Mom batshit because when she was a kid, there werent any 24 hour bowling alleys, if you were out at 3 in the morning, you were doing something bad.
I am a night person myself–and in fact, even though I have an job that demands I work regular daylight hours, I have put in some of my most productive dissertation work after 2 a.m. My son is also a night person. He often goes to bed after 10, later than most of the toddlers I know.
Some people’s clocks are just set that way, I think. As long as you get some daylight, I think it’s okay. However, I believe the reasons other people think it is “bad” are (a) if work or school forces you to wake up early, night-owl habits will mean you’ll be run-down or sleep deprived; and (b) if you subsequently need to sleep part of the day away, it interferes with the way so much of the rest of the world opeates (i.e. people can’t call you until a certain time, the cable guy can’t come in the morning, etc). I realize Reason A may not apply to many people and Reason B is obnoxious, but that’s how I’ve figured it.
My husband goes through periods where he doesn’t sleep through the night. He gets up and works for a few hours, then goes back to bed, then naps. That was fine but when we went on vacation it was hell because he’d need to go back to the hotel and crash-midday to nap and it cut into what we could enjoy.
For myself, my ideal work hours would be from about Noon until about 10. I’d gladly work the 10 hour days, if it meant I did not have to be up before 6 every morning to get to work on time. I do not think that this makes me an unbalanced person in any way shape or form.
Well, I am an unbalanced person, but not because of not being a morning person. My fiancee’s mother is always up at 4:30am, and in bed by 9:30pm, and she is at least as unbalanced as I am.
When I was at Uni, my friends thought I was odd because I would choose classes that started at about 11 (for full time students) as well as doing some classes that were generally for the part time students (such as those who were working “normal” jobs), but it meant that I was much more alert and responsive in those classes that I actually bothered to attend.
I generally arise at the crack of noon, even if I don’t have to go to work that day. My father cannot accept any other reason for this deviant behavior than the possibility that I am too lazy to get out of bed at a decent hour.
I work from 2 pm until 10 or 11, most days, occasionally later. Of course that doesn’t count, you know, in terms of being a decent person. Honest work is done by the light of the sun. The fact that my father gets up at five in the morning is most likely caused by the fact that he has to pee. He sleeps an hour or two longer than I do, most nights.
After thirty five years of this schedule, I have accepted the fact that getting up early in the morning causes delusional self admiration, and erodes the minds ability to accept things outside of the expected. Truly original thinking cannot take place until the sun passes zenith, and those who fear the unknown seek the safety of early morning.
Oddly enough, although I don’t like getting up early, I do like doing things early. I hate getting up at quarter to seven for an 8:30 class, but I actually enjoy being at the class. It’s weird.
Then again, I have a nasty tendency of staying up until four AM and getting up at ten AM when not forced to go somewhere early for some reason. I don’t think my work ethic is affected by it, although my irrational and unhealthy desire for sausage 'n egg McMuffins certainly is. I never get out in time.
I, too, am a night person, and I’ve had people telling me my entire life that I will come to no good end because of it. Really, I don’t see the problem- I work at home part-time, and I have classes later in the day, which I always get to on-time, and am not stumbling around in a daze like many up-at-6am people I see just as I am going to bed. Why this should be the case I have no idea, except to echo what others have said previously, and much more succinctly. I could add, however, a few biological maybe’s to this:
Humans are diurnal animals, as born out by our round pupils, color-sensitivity, lack of developed tapetum lucidum, etc. Early humans did stuff during the day when they could see well, and hid from predators at night- thus we fear darkness, and assume anyone and anything out in the dark is probably up to no good. BUT…
Our closest relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos do not sleep all night long- they are actually awake and resting in trees, sometimes even foraging for insects (need that protein!) after dark.
Also, field studies observing chimps and sleep studies on humans in which people are shut up in dark laboratories with no clocks or access to sunlight generally do not sleep for more than four hours at a stretch, taking naps regularly, but consequently staying up longer and being more productive. Our cycle is not a 24-hour one; more like 28-32. Has anyone considered it might actually be weird and unnatural to sleep for 8 hours at a time on a regular basis, simply because we have trained ourselves to do so? Parents of small children, take note- do your kids actually sleep on a 24-hour cycle like you have learned to do, or do they have sorta “off” sleep-wake cycles?
I am currently a stay at home mom, so our schedule is up to my son also. Sometimes he wants to stay up late and play…I don’t have to go to work, so I play with him. He’s usually asleep by 1 a.m. :eek:
I’m with you, Opal, when he starts getting near school age, I will most certainly start changing our schedule little by little (hopefully arriving at a “sane” schedule). I read that thread and I suspect that Equipoise probably did not mean people like you or I.
My preferred schedule is a little different: my best sleeping hours are in the afternoon. I like early mornings and evening/night the best and feel most productive and creative at those times. This may be due partly to the fact that I’ve lived in Arizona most of my life and, as we all know, “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.” <g>
It irritates me that the library, post office and most stores aren’t open early in the morning or late at night.
As for children being up late, I think that’s fine provided they’ve had enough sleep at other times; however, I’ve seen many an irritable, fussy baby/toddler who was obviously short on sleep and should have been in bed.
You live in a Cryopod? Does that mean you are… tremble KAI??? ::::swooooooon:::
I think the UofA library is open 24 hours btw. I grew up in Tucson and I did everything at night. I’d go for a bike ride at 2am when it was cool out, etc. Moving to Virginia was a shock. Things here close at night! No 3am grocery shopping here! It has taken a while to adjust.
Well I’ve always said it would be nice if people went to bed at 3am and got up at noon. That schedule would suit me just fine. As it is, I force myself to get in bed between 1:30am and 2am because I have to get up by 8:30am.
I have tried to adapt myself to a “normal” sleep schedule, and be in bed by 11pm. But then I’ll just lay awake for hours, so I don’t bother. I am most productive after midnight, it seems.
)… I think you are right about how some people may view it, though.
It has taken a while to adjust.