Your sleep and your kids' slumber time

If March Madness is making you lose sleep, chill. Make your own three-point play -- better focus, better grades, better health -- by helping your kids get the right amount of sleep.

The old guidelines insisted that teens need nine-plus hours of sleep. Apparently, that figure was established by seeing how much a group of kids would sleep if no one woke them up. Not good science.

What we now know is that 10-year-olds do better on tests with 9 to 9.5 hours of sleep; 12-year-olds do best with 8.3 to 8.4 hours; and 16- to 18-year-olds do better on about 7 hours. The older we get, the less sleep we need.

These aren't hard-and-fast rules, however.

Parents need to watch for individual signs of fatigue, grumpiness, depression and a falloff in academic performance. One trap for teens: the weekend, stay-up-late, sleep-late cycle. On early-to-rise Mondays, they can't snap back into a school day's routine. The result: They sag. You nag. Grades lag. What a drag.

For bright-eyed mornings and solid snoozes, feed them a diet with omega-3-rich foods (avocado, walnuts, canola oil, fish oils), 100 percent whole grains, very little saturated fat and lots of veggies; help them get plenty of physical exercise (X the Xbox); and encourage them to spend face-to-face time with friends. They'll sleep like a baby (although not for as long). So will you, at any age.