Super short post today, directed to parents and guardians. Teachers should feel 100% free to pass this URL on.

CHILDREN SHOULD NOT “SLEEP” WITH SMARTPHONES. Bedrooms need to be media-free zones. That requires pulling the tablets and laptops, too. Please, please shut the screens down before bedtime, with transition minutes built in.

Social media, texting and playing games can effortlessly eat up a whole night. When that all-night phone trend first popped up, I sometimes wondered if my middle-school students were on drugs. Repeat offenders had ALL the signs except for the smell of smoke: frequent tardiness, red eyes, vacant expressions, difficulty communicating, and an unfortunate tendency to nod off. Sometimes a kid smells like smoke, too, and then it’s anybody’s guess what mix of factors led to the latest nap.

Eduhonesty: They will plead and even beg. They will complain vociferously. You may end up locked in snotty dramas as bedtime approaches. Nevertheless, please, pull the night phones. In the parenting game, unplugging those nocturnal distractions is truly one of those hills worth dying on.

I understand this fight can be exhausting, not to mention tough to monitor. Today’s little supercomputers are small and easy to slip under the covers. However, sleep is essential for learning.

Cognitive function depends on sleep. Sleep helps with memory consolidation, brain repair, and the retention of new information. Lack of sleep compromises focus, concentration, logical reasoning, and complex problem-solving. Missing sleep especially affects the functions of the prefrontal cortex, which manages complex thinking along with emotions and behavior.

Admittedly, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t even mature until the mid-twenties. Parents and teachers can’t do much about that immaturity. We can try to help children learn organization and impulse control, we can teach strategies to help them plan, make decisions, solve problems and focus. While doing this, we will hopefully work a fair amount of math, English, and other academic learning into the picture.

In the meantime, though, as we struggle and too often bog down in the myriad issues interfering with learning in US education today, I’d like to again emphasize today’s message: This is a hill we have to hold.

We can’t control the proliferation of electronics, but we can turn off the lights and create boring, dark bedrooms — black spaces devoid of phones and any other electronic nightlights.