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conscious effort. There doesn’t seem to be a “bogeyman” among us, a sinister force at work. No particular being,company, or entity bears responsibility for this. Philip Morris, General Mills, the all-pervading marketers and advertisers, the technophiles promoting cellphones to eight-year-olds—which among these can we blame? All or none, really. I don’t think there are any culprits who consciously equate what they’re selling or promoting with an assault on childhood.
    As a society, however, we’ve signed on wholeheartedly to the notion that more, bigger, newer, and faster all mean better. We’ve done so as a sort of survival mechanism. It is a very basic, primitive drive (albeit with its own particularly manic, modern, Western spin). At its most basic level it is understandable, though it no longer serves its original purpose, and we’ve taken it to the point where it actually threatens, rather than ensures, our survival.
    We cram more and more into our homes (even as we’re building them bigger) and our lives (even while suffering from busyness and lack of sleep) and our awareness (twenty-four-hour CNN, blogs, BlackBerries, constant online news updates). According to a consumer research group study, the average age at which American kids start using mainstream technology gadgets, such as cellphones, MP3 players, and DVD players, is now 6.7 years. 1 As our worlds accelerate to mach speeds, we not only pull our children along, we also project some of our anxieties about the speed onto them. Is there anything that we don’t feel the need to hurry? Anything that we don’t feel the need to enrich, improve upon, advance, or compete over? While we haven’t figured a way around the nine-month human gestation period, once that baby is born, its childhood seems to be “fair game” for acceleration.
    To look at our society’s assault on childhood another way, let’s take sleep as an analogy. Most of us acknowledge the need for a good chunk of it—seven to eight hours—nightly. Yet many of us would love to be able to function well on significantly less. Some feel that they manage very well on four hours a night. Thomas Roth of the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders Center in Detroit would doubt that, however: “The percentage of the population who need less than five hours of sleep per night, rounded to a whole number,” says Roth, “is zero.” Robert Stickgold, a Harvard cognitive neuroscientist specializing in sleep research, recounted how a psychiatrist in private practice called to ask whether he knew of any reason not to prescribe modafinil, a new wakefulness-promoting drug, to an undergraduate during exam time. “No—no reason at all not to,” Stickgold told the psychiatrist. “Not unless you think sleep does something.” 2
    Does sleep do something, besides mark the time between wakefulness? Does childhood do something, other than mark the time until adulthood? We die without sleep, which should render the question moot, but scientists still argue over which processes occur exclusively during sleep. Mental and emotional clarification and improvement of motor skills (a kind of mental “practicing” of movements) take place as we sleep, and some feel sleep helps maintain homeostasis in the brain. The immune system doesn’t work properly without sleep, and we know that lack of sleep impairs speech, memory, and innovative, flexible thinking. Rats deprived of sleep die in seventeen to twenty days: Their hair falls out and their metabolisms kick into high gear, burning lots of calories while the rats are just standing still. 3
    Scientists are learning the biological “purpose” of sleep by studying what happens when we’re deprived of it. Sleep deprived, people are much less able to retain or use what they learn while awake. They lose resiliency—mental and physical—as their immune system falters. Still we wonder, can we skip it? Can we do without it, or shortchange it in some way, to reclaim the third