People are struggling to get by. Overworked, underpaid, lonely.
Parenting is an extremely draining and time-consuming job.
Many households can not afford to have a parent stay home to do the full-time job of running the house and overseeing that the children's needs are fulfilled.
I'm not surprised to see shortcuts like this rise in popularity, however reprehensible.
If we want to turn these kinds of trends around in the Western world, we need to start by focusing on fixing our broken culture, and allowing the average parent the time, financial security, and social connections to cultivate a meaningful, fulfilling life. You'll get an increase in children's well-being as a downstream effect for free.
Less focus on work, less financial distress, more social services, more volunteering, more community building, etc.
My wife is a SAHM and I work from home. We are not overworked nor do I have a time-consuming job. My son struggles from anxiety and sleep loss. We tried in-person therapy, to which he did NOT take and instead had to go the medication route, which to its credit, has changed our son back into the happy-go-lucky kid he once was.
That said, after extensive consultation w/our trusted pediatrician, he still struggled with sleep and thus in addition to the anxiety meds, he's also on sleep inducing medication and takes 10mg of melatonin every night. It's not a shortcut for...reasons; it appears to help him get the rest he needs. We strongly preferred a more traditional route that did not include medication, but when those other avenues failed, we had to do something and trusted our pediatrician to help--which she did.
Sleep deprivation, anxiety, and depression are REAL issues for kids today and there have been numerous studies which have shown this is an ever-increasing, world-wide issue, regardless of available parental support and avoidance of social media and other triggers.
Let's not over simplify this as you appear to be; it's not simple and it's dangerous to think it is.
Sometimes it really is simple though. Anyone that is letting their child have drinks or foods containing caffeine, but then treating them for a sleep disorder with drugs or things like melatonin, is making a big mistake.
No idea; I'm not a doctor/specialist in this area so my opinions are largely irrelevant. I choose to lean on those who are specialists/doctors to give guidance on treatment of the symptoms while other smart people attempt to figure out the root cause.
Wow. You’re granting that complete deference a few centuries too early.
The corpus of medical knowledge available to experts is profoundly more rigorous that two centuries ago but nonetheless remains extremely shallow. Inventing a new culture of health management is an unfathomably large human effort and we’ve barely started.
And on the practical scale, the corpus that exists is informed by population averages not individual responses. When a study determines that a diagnosis or treatment is effective or not, it’s almost never establishing such as a universal truth, but instead informing clinicians as to what may most reliably help some statistical share of their patients.
As all throughout history, and for at least the next few centuries, yielding all care insight to somebody else is deeply irresponsible. You need to include your own curiosity, determination, and judgment if you want to take optimal care of yourself and your family as individuals.
This sounds like a lot of justification for "do your own research," and, in my case, I don't prescribe to that--at all.
Hey, by all means, you go ahead and use whatever tools you have available to you to make determinations about your and your family's well-being, but I'm going to trust the opinions of those who work with and treat these sorts of issues day in and day out for decades and avoid the opinions of those I do not deem to have appropriate credibility.
There are countless unemployed, underemployed, and reasonably employed adults who ostensibly have plenty of bandwidth for responsible parenting.
Two parents working four jobs between them is a tragedy of its own, that needs to be addressed, but it’s not the norm by any means. There aren’t even enough jobs for that.
What actually seems to missing for parents is insight into how to find wellness within what they have. Traditions that allowed for finding joy and contentment in modest lives with some discomfort have been supplanted by a fantasy that we should all have all the cool toys and do all the fun travel and never feel sad and that if we’re not receiving that life we should either feel ashamed or take a pill.
People are buying melatonin for their sleepless kids because they take pills for their own sleepless nights, and they have sleepless nights themselves because many of their parents forgot to teach them that it’s important to just chill the fuck out and quietly unwind without a lot of stimulation as evening comes on.
We do need social effort to rectify all this, but it starts with re-teaching people how to find ease and acceptance in their inevitably modest lives, an education that most can start to find by just looking backwards a few generations in their own family. Those lives didn’t embody aristocratic fantasies either, and included plenty of discomfort, but you don’t find the anxiety and chronic misery people feel crushed by now, nor the troubling and incorrect idea that all discomfort must have an easy remedy in the form of a pill or whatever.
> Traditions that allowed for finding joy and contentment in modest lives with some discomfort
Where is the scientific evidence for that claim?
To me it sounds like an un-rovably subjective rosy-tinted assumption of a idealized past, where Daddy always smiles because the depression mainly manifests away from home at the bar.
Much like how every aging generation in history seems to whine that "youth these days" don't have the manners they had when they were young.
> People are struggling to get by. Overworked, underpaid, lonely.
Well, maybe the last one.
I get what you are trying to say, but we still live in better conditions than humanity has for 20,000 years. Like people were literally starving to death, or being beaten to death by their neighbouring tribe.
Lonelyness - perhaps. There definitely seems to be less community now, less support, etc. But is that really the issue?
Would a tribesman 3000 years ago have given melatonin to their children to get them to shut and sleep? Probably. Would they have taken cocaine before battle? Probably. Would the women have taken contraception if it was available? Probably. (I bring up contraception because people seem to complain about not having children because they don't have enough money - yet people were way poorer and had many children for all of history).
Frankly, I think most of these things people are doing now are probably done just because they are available and they make life more comfortable.
But life definitely isn't worse in many many ways than it was before. So just because you're overworked and underpaid isn't a satisfactory explanation.
> I get what you are trying to say, but we still live in better conditions than humanity has for 20,000 years.
That is irrelevant. The situations are completely different.
The U.S. social support structure for the lower and lower middle class doesn't exist. There are many kids whose only meal is the potentially free but terrible meal at school. Many moms have effectively the same if not worse healthcare as a tribeswoman during pregnancy due to lack of insurance and affordable access to healthcare and reduced social support.
Times are very rough for a lot of people out there. Your comment is frankly flippant and removed from reality.
If I am a to-be parent working 2 jobs and can barely afford food and shelter and the first time I see a doctor when pregnant is at the emergency room when delivering and the only paternity leave I get is some paltry wage from the state, in what universe does it matter that some women died of childbirth in the past 20,000 years? Like I said, it doesn't.
The difference of availability of support between the lower class and even the upper middle class is staggering and probably the widest it ever has been in human history. That's the point. Take a look at child mortality rates. They are much higher for the lower class and are part of the reason why the U.S.' rate is so low compared to other countries.
If you're comparing the suffering of the lower and middle classes to any other time in the past 20,000 years, do you not understand how little that makes sense? Of course it's better if you set the bar so low. And again like I said, you really can't compare. The mental and emotional stress that people experience today is of a different nature that hasn't existed before.
> Not having social security is not the hardest humanity has had it. Get real
No one said that. And both the question and answer are immaterial to the discussion.
> If you're comparing the suffering of the lower and middle classes to any other time in the past 20,000 years, do you not understand how little that makes sense?
My point went completely over your head. That's why it doesn't make sense to you. The only lense you can see the world through is classes and oppression and inequality.
I think calling this reprehensible is a bit over judgemental. Melatonin is pretty safe.
For example, there's melatonin in both human and cow milk (more in evening milk, because infants don't have a day night cycle yet, and giving rise to the belief that smells like an urban legend that the old timey advice to drink warm milk if you can't sleep originally came from drinking night time milk fresh from the cow for the melatonin).
Also, you know what causes us to make less melatonin? Light. Blue light especially. Is it equally reprehensible to allow children to exist in houses with led light bulbs, which affects their bodies just as much as a pill?
It seems likely to me that the addition of a small amount of melatonin to replace that lost due to nighttime lights is a reasonable parenting decision. Of course there's uncertainty, but there's uncertainty about everything, can we please stop freaking out as much as we do, as easily as we do?
No, the vast majority of parents are and always have been lazy and willing to take the quickest shortcut to avoid the hard work of parenting.
Ipads for children took off because it lets parents avoid parenting for hours a day. Melatonin took off because it lets parents avoid enforcing bedtime and sleep hygeine.
It's not about stress, most people are just lazy af and this is a quick fix. That's human nature.
(And to be clear I'm not saying it's some novel cultural failing. If iPads had been available in the 1400 toddlers would have had screen addiction in the 1400s. We're setting parents up to fail by giving them "solutions" and then expecting them to exert superhuman willpower to avoid using them as a crutch. But it's dumb to pretend that this is because parents are more overworked now than throughout history.)
Reprehensible? Wow, that's a strong statement. I give my kids melatonin. Do I know for sure it doesn't harm them? No. But when I take into account the fact that most kids eat a ton more sugar than my kids, I see other kids their ages drinking caffeinated drinks, not eating vegetables, etc, I think I am way ahead. And sleep is insanely important for brain development. My kids get a ton of exercise, they eat well, but going to bed at night has been a problem for them. They have an insane amount of energy, but when they don't sleep well it affects everything they do.
Is it the easy solution? Yes. Does it work? Also yes. Do I worry about it? Absolutely, and I am open to suggestions for alternatives. Is it reprehensible? Not according to any doctor I have talked to, and maybe there are others like you up on your high horse, but none has said that to me before. But yes, let's fix all of society so I don't have to give my kids melatonin anymore. Great idea.
[ADDING MORE] My kids don't have ipads or phones. We limit their screen time much more than most. My guess is you don't have kids, or else you would realize that there is no perfect way to raise them, and you stop judging others for doing so the best way they can.
The warm hug my daughter greets me with in the morning, the giggles of my kids playing together in the afternoon, or the beaming smiles they wear as I toss them into piles of pillows at night are just the beginning. There are new stressful things to learn and deal with, but there are also unique moments you get to have. Having kids is by no means the only way to find joy in life, it can be one of many.
if you're not working or building something for the future then you're just living to get by. in that case, why chase a better paying job? why do anything?
the future belongs to kids, and their kids. if you're not having kids then you're tacitly agreeing to the future that they'll be creating.
> fixing our broken culture and allowing the average parent the time, financial security, and social connections to cultivate a meaningful, fulfilling life
why focus on parents? People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children). There are plenty others who are struggling without a partner (or children).
This appears to be the whole point. The think tanks agreed half a century ago that humanity poses the greatest threat to itself, and that the best way to save humanity is to drastically limit reproduction. The simplest way to do this is to make it unaffordable.
Unfortunately, this disproportionately discourages the most responsible people, with the best long term planning, from reproducing.
(At least, among those who are financially struggling. You could also argue that those who can't get out of poverty don't deserve to reproduce (and many in those think tanks appear to share similar views), but (1) that's reprehensible and (2) it doesn't work anyway since there's always a subset that just doesn't care and reproduces anyway.)
>People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children).
"Supposedly" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, as is your parenthetical note.
And we're focusing on parents because this article is about melatonin use in children.
I've suffered from insomnia for a long while now, and I despise taking Melatonin (300ug for the people asking, at least according to the label on it). It gives me unnerving dreams - not quite nightmares, but in some ways more anxiety inducing than a typical nightmare - and a lot of people report similar things. Without it I still have vivid, intense dreams but they're usually just very fun and nonsensical, a night on Melatonin makes them really terrible though.
It does help with actually physically getting me to sleep, but to be honest I can't really say it's good quality sleep. The feeling is almost 1:1 comparable to my usual bad days where I don't fall asleep until 6/7 and wake up 2 hours later, just extremely groggy and with a lot of mental fog, so I've stopped taking it altogether. This article is kinda worrying to me, can't even imagine what kinda weirdness external melatonin could be doing to a young mind if even tiny doses has such a strong effect on me, and I was a psychonaut in my younger party days.
There's a reasonable degree of evidence that all the commercially-available doses are too high, even 1mg. Cutting it way, way down may give the benefits without so many negatives.
I've had chronic insomnia since about the age of 13 and melatonin literally saved my life - long periods of little or no sleep can do really awful things to your brain. These days I take 1mg tablet about an hour before bed, takes me about 30 minutes to get to sleep after lights out, and I wake up feeling perfectly fine.
My wife though can take the same dose, same routine, and report similar symptoms to you. I wonder if her body technically doesn't need the additional melatonin but mine does.
Part of the potential danger is lousy control over the actual amount in the dose.
"Results show that melatonin content...with the actual content ranging from 83 percent less to 478 percent more than the concentration declared on the label."
> Further analysis with mass spectrometry also found serotonin, a much more strictly controlled substance, in 26 percent of the tested supplements. According to the authors, the presence of unlabeled but significant quantities of serotonin could lead to serious side effects.
wait, you can buy OTC seratonin? that seems wild given the seratonin syndrome risks.
edit: it looks like it's indirectly via 5-HTP [1].
"During 2017–18, only about 1.3% of U.S. parents reported that their children used melatonin. To get a sense of the current prevalence of use, Hartstein and colleagues surveyed about 1,000 parents in the first half of 2023.
Among children ages 5 to 9, 18.5% had been given melatonin in the previous 30 days. For preteens ages 10 to 13, that number rose to 19.4%. Nearly 6% of preschoolers ages 1 to 4 had used melatonin in the previous month."
Sleep hygiene is absolute shit. Acquaintances think we're weird for not having a TV in the bedroom. My kids friends have TV, game systems, computers, phones, etc... all in the bedroom and they're in elementary school. No wonder they need drugs to fall asleed. Parents are slamming Xanax and Ambien kids are chewing melatonin gummies.
I completely agree, I think sleep hygiene gets overlooked but that could be main culprit. Andrew Hubermin talks about this on his podcast but basically the blue light/high intensity light from phones, computers, and tv's blocks melatonin. The quality of my sleep is much higher when I don't look at any screens 2-3 hours before bed.
I did candle-only lighting and no screens at all after sundown for a couple weeks as an experiment one time. Candles (ones that don’t smell like a chemical processing plant, anyway) are expensive, inconvenient, and kinda dangerous, and demands of modern life make it hard to keep up, but my life-long “night owl” tendencies were cured in a couple days.
Why can’t we sleep? Because we keep an on-demand world-class carnival in our houses, and light them up super-bright at night. If you describe what we do and how we live, the cause of the overwhelming majority of sleep issues in our society is obvious. It’d be very surprising if that way of living didn’t cause widespread sleep issues.
It's not just screens, common lights produce too much melanopic light for evening use. It's definitely not trivial to pick light sources that are safe to use in the evening without interfering with our circadian rhythm, but it's possible.
And the same, in reverse, applies to workspaces/schools with not enough natural light (or a good simulation thereof).
Yes you're correct, I should have noted that. All light sources can affect melatonin production negatively. Its also vital to get as much light as possible during the day, especially light from the sun or overcast clouds.
> It's definitely not trivial to pick light sources that are safe to use in the evening without interfering with our circadian rhythm, but it's possible.
I won't suggest specific products (local availability is patchy), so I'm going to be more generic:
The main thing is that there are non-visual receptors in our eyes that are used for determining the level of "daylight", and they are most sensitive to light around 480nm [1]. To give the right signals, you want to match daylight's intensity in this part of the spectrum at day, but gradually decrease it to zero in the late evening.
You can look for lightbulbs or LED strips that come with a quantified measure of melanopic vs standard lux (it's sadly not common), or you can look for light sources that come with a graph of the emitted spectrum (a requirement for the new EU energy efficiency label!) and make an educated guess.
Generally, 1800 K or colder(/"warmer") LEDs will have little of the melanopic component, using "monochromatic" orange LEDs is also an option (both dimmed appropriately).
Physical activity at school has been dropping, too, for years—less recess, especially—and it’s hard to fix that at home in the winter when the kids get home at 4:30 and it’s dark at 5. No wonder they have too much energy to sleep.
Reading things like this to me has the same effect as reading that 1/5 (or whetever the current rate is) of people is now obese. But the article doesn't even stop there, the next paragraph:
> researchers analyzed 25 melatonin gummy products and found that 22 contained different amounts of melatonin than the label indicated. One had more than three times the amount on the label. One had none at all. In addition, some melatonin supplements have been found to contain other concerning substances, such as serotonin
It's almost as if humanity, with US often leading the way, wants to destroy itself. Well, or maybe somewhat more precise: one part of humanity is super selfish and only cares about power/money, and drags a large part of the rest with them.
That’s sort of a shocking statement. The primary use case is to feel drowsy and fall asleep. It’s the hormone that induces drowsiness that is readily absorbed by the gut unchanged and impacts systemic levels of said hormone. We not only know it’s effective by like billions of humans trying it trillions of times, we know it’s effective by like nearly every vertebrate animal in biochemical processes we kinda understand sleeping every single day for all of lifes history.
Cocaine isn’t naturally occurring in every vertebrate animal as the hormone responsible for not making you depressed. Plutonium is naturally occurring as well, but it’s not a part of the fundamental biology of all animals. Melatonin is as naturally occurring in animals as blood and its purpose we use it for as a supplement is precisely what it does in the body. It’s nudging the natural levels slightly higher to induce exactly what it does and we desire from it. There’s literally no debate anywhere in any context as to whether it does what it says on the tin, because it literally is the thing that does the thing on the tin.
But, you know, sure. Why not. Of course people did these studies because with positive results you’ll get published and it’s a bit of a softball, since it’s like, exactly what must be the result given the situation:
Results: Of 2642 papers, 23 RCTs met inclusion criteria. Our results indicated that melatonin had significant effect on sleep quality as assessed by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) (WMD: - 1.24; 95% CI - 1.77, - 0.71, p = 0.000).
Conclusion: We found that the treatment with exogenous melatonin has positive effects on sleep quality as assessed by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) in adult.
Certainly, if there's medical research indicating that melatonin is safe, all the better. As long as we're following the scientific process to generate a reproducible body of knowledge supporting the assertion that melatonin is safe.
Yeah. My point was though beyond random controlled trials we actually understand melatonin at a really fundamental level, and it’s not just that we understand it, but we identified it in as far as I can tell all vertebrates. That’s stronger than RCT’s. It’s like questioning we know whether blood infusions are actually effective at treating blood loss.
If you've ever had problems falling asleep and taken melatonin to fall asleep, you would have proven it works to yourself. I took melatonin for a couple of years, and without fail, it made me sleepy where normally I would be awake until all hours of the night. Sure, this is comment is anecdotal, but so many people wouldn't be spending money on it if it didn't do what it is known to do, which is making sleep come easier.
>> "Sure, this is comment is anecdotal, but so many people wouldn't be spending money on it if it didn't do what it is known to do, which is making sleep come easier."
"The proposed mechanisms for homeopathy are precluded from having any effect by the laws of physics and physical chemistry.[18] The extreme dilutions used in homeopathic preparations usually leave not one molecule of the original substance in the final product."
It remains a multi-billion dollar industry.
Whether melatonin is closer to medicine or nonsense can't be solved with anecdotes.
>Whether melatonin is closer to medicine or nonsense can't be solved with anecdotes.
I admitted my comment is an anecdote, but that doesn't cancel out the voluminous research and study done on melatonin. We know that melatonin is a hormone that is involved with regulating sleep cycles. I'm not sure what evidence you're looking for but internet trolls love to move goalposts anywhere they want to. Yes, millions of people use melatonin effectively every single night. You can call that an anecdote, but you've provided no evidence that melatonin does not do what it's being used for. All evidence and study points to one thing: melatonin helps people sleep. Just go google it yourself, don't have a pointless conversation about anecdotes.
We're talking about a supplement here, not the naturally occurring hormone. Of course the hormone works as expected and it's absurd to think I was talking about that. You accuse me of trolling while making a post like this. But I think you just misunderstood and aren't trolling. Moving on.
Supplements don't always work like the natural thing they're meant to supplement. Humans are really bad at knowing how inputs affect their health, and it's difficult to go through the long and laborious process of elimination to verify the cause if you've already convinced yourself of something. Self-reporting is notoriously unreliable for this and other reasons.
Please provide some evidence that melatonin does not work to help people sleep. Until you do you're not arguing from a position with any ground to stand on.
All available evidence does point to melatonin being an effective sleep aid. It is known to regulate sleep cycles, and it does so effectively for millions of people every night. It's no mystery or placebo. You can say it is all you want, but you've provided no evidence at all to support your feelings. And homeopathy has nothing at all to do with melatonin consumption as a sleep aid.
You admitted you were posting an anecdote and were under the mistaken impression people wouldn't spend money on something that doesn't work. I provided homeopathy as a very expensive example of how you were wrong.
The burden of proof is on you. Proof might exist, but I'm not convinced you have it. Otherwise, you'd lead with it instead of an anecdote.
"Research shows that a supplement may help people with insomnia fall asleep slightly faster and may have bigger benefits for those with delayed sleep phase syndrome—falling asleep very late and waking up late the next day."
I'm sure you'll try to move the goalposts anywhere you want before you accept that melatonin does in fact put people to sleep.
This is a blog where you'll also find posts taking homeopathy seriously, and this post is based on a survey. Not a study. No scientific research is indicated here. It is not in any way scientifically rigorous. I don't know what you're on about about when you say goal posts or moving them. You said:
>> All available evidence does point to melatonin being an effective sleep aid.
What evidence?
>> "It is known to regulate sleep cycles"
Anecdotally, as best as you've demonstrated. This is not, as you claimed, "voluminous research and study done on melatonin."
If we're going with your silly metaphor, you moved the goal posts.
Anecdotes are not "voluminous research and study done on melatonin." A blog with no standards is not "voluminous research and study done on melatonin."
Show the "voluminous research and study done on melatonin" that you claimed exists or go away. I've made no claims to support. I've only asked you to back your own statements up.
>This is a blog where you'll also find posts taking homeopathy seriously, and this post is based on a survey.
You're seriously trying to say Johns Hopkins Medical Center is just some rando blog to try to prove your pointless point? You're either clueless or a really bad troll.
>What evidence?
Yeah, where's your evidence that it doesn't work?? Crickets.
>Anecdotally, as best as you've demonstrated. This is not, as you claimed, "voluminous research and study done on melatonin."
"It is known to regulate sleep cycles" is not anecdotal. This has been known science for quite a long time, no doubt before you were born, kiddo.
>Again, the burden of proof is on you.
I've provided proof, from a reputable medical source. You've provided nothing but your feels.
PUT UP OR SHUT UP. Without any proof from you, this conversation is really over.
I'm sorry the state of science education is so poor and you don't know how to tell a ghostwritten SEO blog from a scientific publication. You deserved better.
Thanks for the ad hominem, but you've proven nothing, shown no proof of anything, demanded proof and then moved goalposts when provided with citation from a noted medical establishment, and you've argued disingenuously.
I hope you have the day you deserve.
The burden of proof is now on you, so you lose by default since you've provided nothing to back up your claims. And that's the end of this stupid, pointless "conversation".
I've experimented with Melatonin extensively. Different doses, different times, brands, etc. It has never caused an effect that I can notice. So - that's not to say it's not doing something, but to assume it has a noticeable effect on everyone is an incorrect assumption.
I dont want to devalue your experience. But this experimentation is usually not "(placebo) controlled" and not "double blind".
You could! Take a randomly selected real-or-placebo, that's marked as such but you do not know at the time. See if you can feel the difference, not your experience, repeat. Then look at your results. According to placebo science the results may shock you.
I guess there's an exception to every rule! Do you ever feel sleepy at all? I would wonder why someone would use melatonin if they didn't want to sleep, which suggests someone who isn't sleeping well, yet it had no effect. Extensive suggests it wasn't just one dodgy batch of melatonin either.
I hope you're sleeping well now regardless. Lack of good sleep is like slow torture.
When they make melatonin chewables with cartoons on them and sell them at Target, it's bound to have some level of popularity. Especially when they're placed near the front, on prime shelf space.
1. Stop allowing your child to have _any_ form of caffeine. No Coke, no chocolate, not even decaf tea.
2. Make sure they get at least moderate exercise, every day.
3. Take away the screens at least an hour before their bedtime, and stick with the same bedtime every day.
If you haven't done the above steps, and you have instead let the drug pushers that design the checkout lines at Target convince you to keep giving your child this stuff, you are an unfit and harmful parent.
Just tossing ideas out, but is it possible that structured mornings as a result of modern education might be part of why melatonin is used so often? Being generally a night owl, I slept like shit all through high school and parts of college. I'm just a sample size of one, but if instead of just "dealing" with it, I had looked for a solution to help me get to sleep faster, maybe I (or my parents) would have leaned on melatonin? I certainly had friends that couldn't sleep without nyquil in high school, too.
EDIT: To add another thought, I also had the blessing/good luck of a father who, noticing my difficulties getting to sleep gave me the sage advice of "don't worry about it. Grab a book, do some drawing, worst case scenario, you don't get up for school tomorrow. The world is not ending." How much stress to do we put on ourselves by our expectation of sleep and the perceived consequences of having a bad day the next day. Our life does not operate via step functions. It is continuous, and no one bad day can ruin the next unless you let it.
The doses you can buy in the drugstore are wild. I'm an adult and I take 0.5mg and it works great. You can't even buy 0.5mg where I live, so I buy the 1mg tablets and break them in half.
Also, no HN thread about melatonin would be complete without a link to gwern's writeup, so here it is https://gwern.net/melatonin
So adults have been slamming melatonin like crazy for decades. Now kids are taking tons of it.
Seems like we really should be trying to figure out if this is harmful or not. Seems kind of important.
I use it myself and have looked many times for solid research showing harm (or lack thereof) and see very little, which is kind of surprising to me. I use it to treat insomnia which is otherwise kind of stubborn. Yes I've tried no blue light, earplugs, turning off lights in the home, exercise...
Edit: this is one of the only articles I could find. Very basic stuff.
This just shows that there's nothing obviously alarming. The effect of long term use especially on younger developing brains is what needs to be studied.
Part of me wonders if it's the lack of physical activity and exercise among people that's causing us to feel restless before bed. Of course I'm not saying that a lack of exercise is the root cause of everyone's aliments, but worth consideration.
My god. Just feed them and get them to bed at a proper hour, and turn off the blue lights. And while you're at it, maybe lobby your local school for a naptime if they don't already have one (I know it's problematic to change the school hours because of parent's work schedules).
> The older the child, the greater the dosage, with preschoolers taking anywhere from 0.25 to 2 mg and preteens taking up to 10 mg.
Those are extraordinarily high doses. I tried it for sleep in my 20s and 2 mg knocked me out and left me feeling groggy when I woke up. I can't even imagine how much habituation a child needs in order for a 10 mg dose to be necessary.
No, and I'm not going to. I won't make the decision to conceive a person who's ultimate fate is to die, not without knowing that they themselves would have chosen to have lived a finite life. I myself will not know whether life is worthwhile until the end, and at that point it will be too late to do things differently.
I have been a child though, and have had a younger sibling.
And I certainly know, beyond any doubt at all, that 20 to 30 years ago parents weren't dosing their children with sleeping pills. At least not almost 1 in 5. This does not have to happen.
> My god. Just feed them and get them to bed at a proper hour, and turn off the blue lights.
You make it sound like some easy accident of scheduling, but it's not: As kids get older there are documented and measurable physiological changes--especially in melatonin release--telling their bodies to stay up later.
It’s always kinda easy to just pick out the nonparents in these threads.
Parenting always looks like one of those “why don’t you just” things - the answers are so obvious and these parents are just idiots. Except, every human that has ever existed has had parents. Is every descendant a bunch of idiots that just needed someone to tell them “why don’t you just?”
When you become a parent you’re faced with impossible situations regularly. You feed your kids, get them to bed, they’ve got school at some scientifically proven harmful early hour, all the lights are automated for circadian lighting, you do a quiet story time, everything is peaceful, but your kid hasn’t slept more than a few hours a night for two weeks. They’re hysterical, you’re at your wits end, because you also haven’t slept, or really done any of the million grown up chores that happen once your kids fall asleep and if you don’t pay the bills soon your utilities will be cut off and then evicted - not for want of money but for want of time not consumed by your insomniac crazed child. You are doom scrolling parenting forums with parents posting horror stories of their life melting down and begging for advice. Throughout the forums are smug parents saying “yeah man, did that. Melatonin. Just saying, by the way it’s the hormone all vertebrate animals secrete to induce sleep since animals began.” But you really don’t want to be drugging your kids, and you remember posting on HN a bunch of “why don’t you just” threads before you had kids and feel the need to be intellectually consistent. Surely if you turn the lights down 10% 30 minutes earlier this won’t happen tomorrow?? Maybe the story you read is too over stimulating? Maybe they just need to run for five hours tomorrow at the park?? What else did I tell people to do???
Every time you are getting ready for bed at 4am after consoling your weeping child shrieking “why can’t I sleep daddy???” until they suddenly switch off like a light at 3:30am, three hours before they have to wake up for their absurd school start time designed to stunt intellectual development out of malice by school administrators that wish they had studied a different subject, you can’t help but see your bottle of melatonin.
Finally you can’t take it and you go to the pediatrician. They look at you like you’re dense. “Have you tried melatonin? It’s perfectly safe in moderation and can help reset a sleep cycle that’s been disrupted.” You shift uncomfortably and stammer something about drugging kids and hollowly repeat some “why don’t you just” advice you posted on HN a few years before your first child. The doctor shrugs and says “lack of sleep will clearly harm you and your child, and melatonin is a fundamental hormone in the sleep cycle of all animals - it is safe. Relax.”
Dejected and exhausted, feeling like a hypocrite, you get the smallest dose gummy you can find at the store. With a deep shame for destroying your child’s life, you mutter something about medicine and give it to your kid before you brush teeth. They’re shaking with fear about the upcoming struggle to sleep, but you guys go through the motions you know won’t work and you grind your teeth waiting for the struggle to finally break you. Then half way through the story, you hear it. A slight snore. You fold the book and rest your burning eyes. You consider revisiting all those threads you posted, maybe deleting the posts or adding edits apologizing. But you’re just too tired right now. The warmth of the bed, the blessed peace is too inviting. The next thing you know, you wake up fully clothed in their bed late for school.
Listen, you should NEVER judge a parent that hasn’t been convicted by a jury of their peers. There is nothing in life harder, and no one who hasn’t lived it can ever understand it. That’s not an insult or telling you to shut up or your opinion is wrong. But it’s a frame of reference so different from all other human experience that it’s impossible to judge from outside.
Listen, I understand that I prioritize children more than most parents do, because given my economic and philosophical circumstances I chose to not have children.
What I have read is people talking about optimizing their child rearing for their jobs (and other things). This is bass-awkward. You optimize, as much as you can, for the child. Because everything you are doing while they are a child is done DURING THEIR FRICKING FORMATIVE YEARS!!
Often I find it's not even just nonparents, but also parents who have lucked out by having their methods work on their kids, so assume that's all it must take, and why can't other parents just do this list of things that worked for them, so are obviously universally applicable to every child.
/rant, after having spent yet another day exhausted by my weird-sleep-habits 2 y.o.
Why naptime at school? If parents are having trouble with their kids not falling asleep in the evening, wouldn't that either hurt (less tired kids) or be ineffective (kids can't fall asleep at school either)?
I guess first we have to figure out exactly why parents are giving their children melatonin. If it's for not falling asleep at a particular time, then a nap time may not help. If it's because the children appear to be tired in the morning, then a nap time might help.
Children in general are growing, and need more sleep than adults. I don't know that it particularly matters how this sleep is distributed. I do know that my preschool had a naptime, and that I occasionally nodded off as an older kid on the school bus. I think extending naptimes from pre-school into later school years is an idea worth investigating.
I’ve had insomnia for about 3 weeks and I bought some this week to try and break through. I had a couple restful nights and a couple nights where my wakefulness window was pushed back by 4h (instead of 11-3, 3:30-alarm)
From what I understand you should not use it for longer than 1-4 weeks presumably because you will screw up your body’s melatonin cycle even more than the insomnia has already.
Any chemical in the body that ends with -onin, in my experience, tends to be extremely pervasive with a complicated series of effects and should probably not be trifled with.
Another way to write this headline would be "no known risks", since the article does not supply a single shred of evidence that actual harm is being caused.
Giving this to children is kinda scary. This is something your body produces already, and by supplementing might result in a dependency (body stops producing because it is already present).
I will be very curious how these studies pan out. Hopefully I'm just flat out wrong.
This is a failure of governmental regulation agencies. Melatonin is a fucking hormone, and it has basically zero regulation. meanwhile they put allergy nasal sprays behind the counter
Certainly, but it is slow-acting, whereas Salbutamol is fast-acting. As such, Fluticasone is not useful during an acute asthma attack, whereas Salbutamol is.
I remember when the kids couldn't sleep, the problem was as often me being stressed and the kids picking up on that. If I was not relaxed, the kids could not relax.
Lots of things have unknown risks, like over the counter supplements, vaccines still in testing, mobile phones, social media, etc. At what point is the precautionary principle applied, and at what point do we say the potential benefits outweigh the unknown risks?
It sure does seem risky to give children something for which the long-term risks are unknown. I’d hate to think people have been doing that in recent years.
Parenting is an extremely draining and time-consuming job. Many households can not afford to have a parent stay home to do the full-time job of running the house and overseeing that the children's needs are fulfilled.
I'm not surprised to see shortcuts like this rise in popularity, however reprehensible.
If we want to turn these kinds of trends around in the Western world, we need to start by focusing on fixing our broken culture, and allowing the average parent the time, financial security, and social connections to cultivate a meaningful, fulfilling life. You'll get an increase in children's well-being as a downstream effect for free.
Less focus on work, less financial distress, more social services, more volunteering, more community building, etc.