I’m the kind of mom who is uneasy - at best - with the tenuous truce I’ve struck with public elementary school.
I’m the kind of mom who doesn’t just swallow consensus culture wholesale.
I made a pact earlier this summer about sleeping. Specifically, my children’s sleep.
I have a thing around sleep and how important it is. It’s important for certain detoxification processes the body only undertakes when asleep.
It’s important for brain health and brain development.
It’s important for stress reduction, access to joy, access to energy.
It’s important for trauma processing, stress metabolization, and for integrating learning and memory. It’s also important for the unconscious to have its time to do its thing, through dreams and more.
Sleep is sacred in my family.
And as such, we have important rituals around sleep. Falling asleep is taken seriously, and treated with dignity, for their little bodies and brains to fall asleep cozy and fulfilled.
Waking up is also taken seriously and treated with dignity.
Usually, they wake up *naturally* - that means, they wake up according to their rhythms - no alarm clocks or parents waking them up.
I don’t want their mornings to feel rushed or stressed.
And if they sleep in, and it means we won’t get to school on time, I have a pact with myself to fully permit - guilt/shame free - the lateness. I’ve come to relish the quiet rebellion of it.
What are they missing for 15 minutes or half an hour here and there when they will be going to school full-time for the rest of their childhood? 5 days a week, 7 hours a day, for 12 whole YEARS? That’s longer than any career I’ve ever had!
A morning missed here and there - it matters not in the grand scheme of things. I refuse to let such an archaic, colonial structure as the public school system - have such power over me.
Yes, there are times when I’ve let one sleep in till about 10 minutes before we have to leave, and I will gently dress them while they’re sleeping, throw their shoes in a bag and their breakfast in a to-go bowl, but even then - I try not to distress them or rush them - and definitely NOT blame them or panic them.
The stress of school/work is enough without this added stress of punctuality.
I imagine creating my son’s IEP and adding: slow burn mornings. He comes into school and he is able to take a large, luxurious stretch of time to just orient, settle in, do something relaxing and fun. And then, and only then, after he feels safe and relaxed in his environment, does the work begin.
Don’t get me wrong - I don’t like being late. I don’t like keeping someone waiting. But I also don’t like sacrificing my children’s wellbeing on the altar of arbitrary punctuality. So I’ve made my decision.
It feels good to take back some authority and some decision-making instead of letting a dinosaur system affect our well-being and just mindlessly letting it happen.
I realize I might have catalyzed some opinions with this petit article and please know - YOU are your own authority. Make decisions different than mine - we all have different values/priorities! As long as we’re conscious and clear instead of operating according to unconscious and unexamined conditioning.
You’ve seen the Frog and Toad memes going around maybe? I want more of THAT lifestyle - simple, relaxed, prioritizing joy.
I’ll end this on this note: yes, this might make the lives of teachers and school admin harder. To that I say, fund schools better. Staff schools more abundantly and redundantly.
Give teachers and admin enough support so that we can take better care of our children’s authenticities and particularities instead of forcing them all to fit an increasingly rigid and small mold - the kind that in order to fit, you have to cut off a lot of parts of yourself.
Yes, to be able to be late, to have schedule flexibility, is a privilege. I acknowledge that, I wish everyone had it, but I believe the answer is to extend it to those who don’t have it, rather than shame those who do.
Let’s radically reimagine what school could be like. And in the meantime, let’s do what we can to make present-day school feel even 1% more liberated and evolved. For us, that means a radically amoral approach to “lateness.” Reconceptualizing “lateness” or - even worse - “tardiness”, as prioritizing and honoring the importance of individual bio-rhythms.
Yes, it makes life more complicated and I am actually not interested in making life easier and less complicated. I think that’s actually led to a lot of the global, ecological and psychological devastation and destruction we’re grappling with today.
I am actually very interested in reclaiming and restoring the complexity of living, of life, of being human, of being in community. So, for me the added complexity is actually a plus, not a minus.
Last but not least, I’ll add something that can be its own future article. Sleep is important for so many mythical and mythological reasons, the most obvious of which might be dreams - in the worlds of animism and magic and even in Jung’s psychology, dreams carry importance, clues, and are a vital thread, an orientation device, of our lives.
Could we choose to live in a world where it would be enough to prioritize sleep just for the sake of dreaming?
tl;dr: we wake without alarms, and may this fortune stay with us.
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What a wonderful way to see it! My kids would have benefited from my learning from you.
As far as the shame of lateness--schools have known for a long time now that students thrive more and do better work if mornings start later! The fact that so few have adjusted this says a lot about priorities.