A simple request for advice

Midweek youth activities end around 8:30 pm (later if it’s an off-site thing), with the kids getting home rather later than that.

And early-morning seminary classes require the kids to get up around 5:00 am (if not earlier).

So, ward and stake leaders, please inform me, since i need advice for my ongoing efforts to make sure my children get enough sleep to keep them generally healthy: Which one of these do you advise i not send my oldest to once she hits high school?

Weighing options

When i was in high school, i was heavily involved in extracurricular activities. Some of these, particularly drama, required me to stay after school until rather late in the evening. Since for me to attend seminary i would have had to get up at or before 4:00 in the morning, the only year of high school i attended seminary was the one year my ward offered it Wednesday evenings (and even then i missed several classes).

I’ve mentioned this to some members of the church over the years, and have actually been told by a few of them* how horrible it was that my family didn’t make the “sacrifice” to get me to seminary. For some reason i still think it was important that i got 7–8 hours of sleep a night, and i also think it was important for me to be involved in the activities i was involved in. (Sometimes the choice is between good and good, after all.)

* Usually folks without high schoolers of their own who would have had to get up at 4:00 am, of course.

Missing sleep

Can somebody explain to me how it’s healthy for our church’s teens to have weeknight church activities once a week that go until (in most places i’ve seen) 8:30 or 9:00 pm, and then have to get up early in the morning the next day for seminary? Seriously, what’s up with the logic? Have we decided our teenagers are superhuman, and don’t need sleep for healthy functioning?*

No, really—i don’t get it.

* And y’all in the Mormon Dominance Area, where you don’t have early-morning seminary, you don’t get off easy on this one. What i want to know from you is how it helps our youth to pull them away from their academics in the middle of the day, instead of putting gospel study in the home, where all the rhetoric we use says it rightly belongs.

The cult of the early riser

Can somebody explain why the church still does early morning seminary for high school students? I mean, we’ve known for years that teens really do generally need to sleep in later than those of other ages—but we make a big deal about getting up hyper-early to go to seminary classes.

So why? Why do we put our teens through something that is so clearly bad for them and call it a virtue?