I usually enjoy Dr. Spiesel's columns, but I think he missed the boat on this one. To my mind, there is a more likely explanation for the link between sleep and obesity. He said the shorter sleeping kids usually had less sleep due to a later bed time.

I suspect parents who let their kids stay up till all hours of the night are the same parents who are more likely to let their kids play hours of video games or watch TV while eating junk food and getting no exercise.

Seems more likely to me than some voodoo physiology involving serum leptin levels.

Mystery solved?

Wow. I was going to write the exact same thing. Setting a consistant early bedtime for your children takes the same kind of foresight, determination, and health-consciousness that fixing healthy food for your kids takes.

Letting your kids go to bed late, or having erratic bedtimes for them is certainly more convenient for the parent and takes less discipline to enforse. And of course, junk food is also convenient, and a sing of lax discipline.

I would wager that kids who have erratic or unreasonably late bedtimes are also at risk for a whole host of other problems, too.

Couldn't agree more. I rushed over to the boards to post the same thing, but it's nice to know that someone with common sense beat me to it.

Too much homework? School starts too early? Um, no.

Mnemon apparently is Greek for "jumps to spurious conclusions." How about kids who are up later because they are more involved in activities like sports, Scouting, or other worthwhile extracurricular activities? Many of these force kids to be up later than parents would like them to be, but the inherent value of the activity seems to offset the cost in lost sleep. Perhaps studies of this type will sway that cost-benefit analysis more toward sleep - further research will hopefully define causative factors beyond the strong correlation detailed here. I guess it is much easier and less intellectually taxing simply to blame bad parenting and dismiss a reasonable causative factor like leptin as "voodoo physiology," but the fact that it is easy to do so certainly does not make it right. Stereotyping parents doesn't solve problems, though it does expose your own shortsightedness.