Please. Think of the Crackbabies before printing this email.

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Is it just me, or is this a typically backward way of reading the results of a study? Like we’re supposed to conclude from this that parents should insist kids go to sleep before midnight, otherwise they might decide to kill themselves?

From the USA Today story:

“Teens whose parents let them stay up after midnight on weeknights have a much higher chance of being depressed or suicidal than teens whose parents enforce an earlier bedtime, says research being presented today at a national sleep conference.”

So now we’ll surely see all these alarmist, cautionary stories about the grave importance of reasonable bedtimes and sleep that ignore the obvious: that kids who are depressed don’t sleep well and parents who don’t enforce a decent bedtime are probably neglectful in many other ways, making their kids more prone to anxiety and depression.

I griped about this on der facebook, and my friend Rick (he hasn’t updated in a spell, but his blog is worth visiting anyway) posted this awesome Reason article in response: “The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years.” And I loved it so much that it inspired my first blog in how many months? The June 10 article that you really need to check out begins with a sniggering look back at a 1972 cover that warns of rampant Satanic cults then goes on to lampoon other scare articles about online porn, Columbine and of course, the crackbaby.

I was pretty young when the media began its hysterically giddy romance with the crackbaby, so I totally fell for it. I was so worried about the crackbabies in high school! I read a first-person essay about a woman who volunteered holding these doomed, troubled infants in the “crackbaby ward” of, I think, a Chicago hospital and wanted to comfort the crackbabies, too. I bothered countless friends with “Do we have a crackbaby ward somewhere in RI? Where can I hold some crackbabies?” But they were nowhere to be found and everyone just looked at me like I was nuts, as well they should have.

But seriously (not that I wasn’t serious, there), it’s horrible and ironic that the crackbaby hysteria provided justification for harsher sentencing for drug-addicted mothers, which only made the kids’ lives harder, as Jeff Winkler and Radley Balko touched on in that article.

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Tags: bedtime study, crackbabies, jeff winkler, kids and depression sleep, most absurd Time covers, radley balko, reason online, usa today teens and sleep study