As a baby, my second child was a terrible sleeper. 

First he had day-night confusion, a common but exhausting condition in which the baby sleeps during daylight hours and is alert and hungry all night, like a vampire. Then he settled into a schedule of waking up four or five times per night, always happy and excited, as though eager to find out what the rest of us were doing without him.

I spent his first year in a heavy haze of sleep deprivation, frequently fantasizing about injecting caffeine directly into my eyeballs. But this, I knew, was normal — I just had to wait out those early months, and then the baby would start sleeping and I would recover, if not my full faculties, then at least the ability to keep my eyes open for the duration of a day.

I am still waiting. 

My little kid is 3 1/2 now. He goes to preschool. He is learning to write his name. He still takes hours to fall asleep, frequently wakes up in the middle of the night, and is often up for good at 5 am. 

His difficulties are relatively common — up to 30 percent of children between 2 and 5, and 15 percent of school-aged kids, regularly have difficulty falling asleep or sleeping through the night, according to data from the National Sleep Foundation. That means that millions of American parents are lurching through our days like zombies, some of us going years without an uninterrupted night of rest.

There is a whole cottage industry devoted to children’s sleep, but much of it is focused on babies — I cannot, sadly, strap my 3-year-old into a Snoo. Moreover, I am constantly bombarded by reminders of the devastating health effects of sleep deprivation, and by expert advice for better sleep that fails to account for the person in my life who likes to wake me up with headbutts.

To the extent that I can formulate coherent thoughts in my sleep-deprived state, I’ve begun to wonder why my child, and so many other children in America, are like this. Have children always been such terrible sleepers? And what, short of waiting for adolescence, can save the millions of parents who are fighting to stay awake right now?

In my effort to answer these questions, I talked to experts who changed my perspective on my kid’s sleep troubles. And I talked to other parents who reminded me that, as lonely as the world can feel at 4 in the morning, I’m not really alone.

As Wendy Wisner, a writer and mom of two, put it, “you need to start with the premise that this happens and it’s normal.”

A brief history of sleep

As it turns out, children of past centuries were not magically great sleepers. “The default circadian rhythms of the human species change over the course of a life cycle,” said Benjamin Reiss, a professor at Emory University and the author of the book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Babies, for example, need more sleep than adults, but it tends to be more fragmented. 

Before the 19th century, families often slept all together in a single room, Reiss said. If a child woke up at night, a parent or other family member could respond relatively quickly, and then everyone could get back to sleep. Parents also didn’t have to deal with the added hurdle of separation anxiety, which can complicate efforts to get children to sleep in their own rooms. (We were once advised to put our older child to bed with a family photograph to ease anxiety. This did not work.)

Working-class people in pre-industrial times often lived in multigenerational households with many family members who could help out at night, said Jennifer Wright, author of Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them, and other history books. Wealthier people had hired help — lots of it.

Wet nurses often worked at night, allowing well-to-do mothers to sleep and recover from childbirth, Wright told me in an email: “But look, that wasn’t enough. By the 1700s people sent their children off for their infancy to live in houses with wet nurses so they could avoid doing diapers or listening to the baby cry. Jane Austen, for instance, was sent off to live in the village with the wet nurse for the first few years of her life.”

Schedules were also different before the 19th century, with much of children’s education and parents’ work taking place in or around the home, Reiss said. There was no need for everyone to be up and out of the house by a particular hour.

That changed with the Industrial Revolution, when adults, including many women, “were expected to work 14-hour days at a factory rather than laboring on their own rural land,” Wright said. Now parents needed to sleep on a schedule, and they needed their kids to get on one too. The solution, for some, was laudanum, a tincture of opium sometimes called “the poor child’s nurse.”

Giving your children opium does keep them quiet, but it can also be fatal, and the practice understandably fell out of favor. In its place came a raft of childrearing experts with advice on helping children sleep, Reiss said. At the same time, the increased wealth that came with industrialization meant larger homes, and the advent of separate bedrooms for parents and kids. Pediatricians began advising parents not to allow children to sleep in the parents’ bed, “because that will disrupt everybody’s sleep,” Reiss said.

This is, more or less, where we are today, with work and school running on strict schedules and parents stuck with the difficult task of getting children to comply. 

As Wright put it, “something that may come as a surprise to modern parents who feel they are dealing with infant sleep terribly is that they’re probably dealing with it more actively than any other parents in history.”

Kids need sleep, even if they don’t want it

And yet, deal with it we must. Most parents have work, most kids have school, and we all need rest; five to nine hours for adults and nine and 10 hours for young children, according to Lynelle Schneeberg, a sleep psychologist and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

Many parents know well the consequences of sleep deprivation, which, Schneeberg told me, has been used as a method of torture. In addition to problems with memory and concentration, lack of sleep can also affect mood, increasing the risk of anxiety and depression and making us more irritable. I, for one, find that I have less patience for playing with my child in the daytime when I’ve been up with him all night — except when the game is hide-and-seek and he lets me hide in bed.

Wisner, the writer and mom, told me that her older child struggled to sleep until she was at least 10. She often took more than an hour to fall asleep, and needed a parent to lie in bed with her. Wisner slept either in the same bed or the same room with her children for many years to make night wakings easier, but still, “I was very exhausted,” she said. “It was really hard.”

Sleep deprivation in adults also increases the risk of a whole host of ailments, from high blood pressure to dementia. And when a child struggles to fall asleep, parents often lose the small amount of time they have to connect with each other or relax after a day of work and child care. “I’ve definitely seen parents in my clinical work who will say that bedtime is the worst and most stressful part of their day,” Sarah Honaker, a pediatric sleep psychologist at Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health, told me.

I’d long assumed that kids were relatively unscathed by their refusal to sleep. I considered bedtime a fundamentally adversarial situation: I wanted my kid to sleep so that I could do dishes/talk to my husband/watch Pluribus/go to bed myself, and my kid wanted to stay up all night and play. Nor did my preschooler show any obvious ill effects from his chaotic nocturnal schedule — after a night of fighting bedtime until 10 pm, he’d often wake up on his own before 6. 

But talking to sleep experts made me rethink whether my child was really fine with his no-sleep lifestyle. Some children do need less sleep than average, but large deviations from the mean are rare, Schneeberg said. “Most kids who are sleep-deprived have some kind of daytime consequence.”

Those consequences can include difficulty learning and managing emotions, and even getting sick more frequently, Honaker said. She also described a vicious cycle: Children who have a hard time falling asleep lose the association between getting into bed and falling asleep, leading them to resist bedtime, which causes more conflict with parents and more stress around going to bed. “All of this makes it thus even harder for them to fall asleep,” Honaker said.

Hearing this, I thought about bedtimes with my kid. Sometimes he jumps out of his bed, and when I ask him to get back in, he moans, “I can’t!” Sometimes he stomps around the bedroom, threatening to wake up his older sibling. Sometimes he runs in circles. Sometimes he hits. We rarely get through a bedtime without threatening some kind of loss of privileges. This obviously sucks for me and my husband, but it’s clearly not fun for my kid either. 

Maybe, I’ve started to think, we’re on the same team after all. 

How to help everyone get some rest

Realizing that maybe my kid also wants more sleep doesn’t mean I know how to help him get it. We’re already doing the basics: no screens after dinner, consistent bedtime routine with reading, dark room, white noise. Most parents I know are already familiar with these tips, and yet many still struggle. 

Honaker recommends being strategic about a child’s bedtime to coincide with their natural sleepiness — even if it means pushing bedtime a bit later. She also mentioned a strategy called “bedtime fading,” in which parents note the time when their child actually falls asleep after the nightly period of arguing, stomping, and recriminations, and then put the child to bed at that time. If the kid falls asleep successfully, parents can then start inching bedtime earlier again. The goal is to show the child what a smooth, stress-free bedtime can look like.

Schneeberg, meanwhile, talked about “sleep onset associations”: the objects, people, or circumstances that kids learn to rely on to fall asleep. Adults have these associations too — “you probably like one side of the bed,” she said. But when a child’s sleep association is a parent sitting with them, they’ll need that parent every time they wake up in the middle of the night.

To fix the problem, Schneeberg recommends “gradually tapering away from needing your parent” for sleep, and replacing parental presence with an independent sleep association, like a book, a toy, or a drawing pad. 

Then there are larger-scale solutions. “Our society has promoted a very narrow conception of how we ought to arrange ourselves during sleep,” Reiss told me. “It’s that narrowness and inflexibility that I think is the problem.”

Reiss isn’t advocating that we all quit our jobs and homeschool our children (although plenty of people are advocating for just that on Instagram Reels, a platform perfectly calibrated for making parents feel bad about themselves in the middle of the night). However, he does believe there could be a role for intentional communities where school and work might take place closer to where people live, and where “some of the responsibilities of parenting can be distributed a little bit more broadly.”

Such communities haven’t entered the mainstream in the United States. But pandemic-era isolation and parental burnout have led to a renewed interest in community among many Americans. Gillian Morris recently wrote for the New York Times about an Oakland housing complex known as the Radish, where 20 adults and eight kids live in what sounds like a pretty enviable setup: “Once Phil and Kristen’s kids are asleep at 7 p.m., they can text one of their 18 friends next door, pass the baby monitor to whoever is home and head out. No babysitter, no preplanning — just an impromptu date night, like in the pre-baby days.”

“Any group that’s trying to think about communal living spaces is also thinking about sleep,” Reiss said.

Moving in with 18 friends isn’t actionable advice for most parents right now. My husband and I are more likely to work on our kid’s sleep associations than we are to explore communal living arrangements. Still, reporting this story did make me see myself less as my child’s enemy, trying to get him to do something boring and annoying every single night of his life, and more as a fellow resident of an imperfect society, trying to help us all adapt.

Wisner gave me a useful framework for thinking about kids’ sleep problems: “Knowing that it’s normal is very important,” she said. “That doesn’t mean like, it’s normal, so you have to put up with it.”

“It’s normal, but there are ways to make it better” feels like a helpful starting point for a lot of parenting struggles. But often the only way to internalize this message is to hear it from other people. Because when you’re up in the middle of the night, nothing feels normal, and nothing feels like it will ever get better.

It’s not necessarily the guys you might expect, Apollo Knapp told me.

These are 6-foot-tall high-school athletes, guys who are social and popular. “They’re the type of people that are friends with everybody, who get dapped up in the hallway every two feet,” said Knapp, an 18-year-old high school senior in Ohio and a board member at sexual violence prevention nonprofit SafeBAE.

But at his school, these are the guys using AI to help them talk to girls. They’ll paste their texts into ChatGPT for feedback before sending, he said. Or, they’ll send their own photos to ChatGPT and ask, “am I cute?” Or, they’ll simply ask for moral support when they’re “too scared, maybe, to confront women.”

Girls and nonbinary teens don’t need to lean on ChatGPT as much, Knapp said; they’re more likely to have a circle of friends ready and willing to workshop their texts. But guys are more isolated, socialized to believe it’s weak to talk about their feelings.

Worse, they’ve grown up on a steady diet of media telling them that “if you say the wrong thing” to a girl, “she’s going to accuse you of something,” Knapp said. Even if those messages aren’t accurate, they get inside teen boys’ heads, making them feel like they have to screen everything through ChatGPT to make sure it’s okay.

The drift of boys and young men away from everyone else in American society has been an enduring theme of the last few years. The fear is that guys, especially straight guys, are getting sucked into manosphere podcasts and becoming more and more alienated from the girls and women they, in theory, want to date. This is an oversimplified narrative, and there’s reason to hope that boys and men are more connected, and more interested in connection, than their most unpleasant listening material might suggest. 

But in talking to teens and experts about AI and relationships, I did get the sense that boys need better outlets for their feelings than we’re giving them. And while ChatGPT might help some kids in some circumstances, teens of all genders need a more reliable support system — one that doesn’t require an electricity-guzzling data center to answer a question.

After all, Knapp said, “what’s going to happen if you don’t have power, and you have a girlfriend?”

Teens are using AI for dating. The question is how.

It’s hard to know exactly how many young people are talking to ChatGPT about relationship problems, since research on youth and AI is in its infancy. In one recent Pew survey, 57 percent of teens said they had used AI “to search for information,” while 12 percent said they’d used the tools “to get emotional support or advice.” It’s possible to imagine dating inquiries falling in either category.

Anecdotally, experts and teens alike say young people are turning to ChatGPT with everything from low-stakes questions about texting to serious concerns about what might constitute sexual assault. 

Val Odiembo, 19, mentors their fellow college students about healthy relationships. As a peer educator, they’re used to getting questions like, “what do I do when my girlfriend says this?” or “is this consent?”

But recently, those questions have been tapering off. Odiembo, a nursing student and SafeBAE board member, thinks students are now asking ChatGPT, instead. 

“I’ve had my students say to me, ‘I asked Chat what I should say to this boy,’” Odiembo told me. When that happens, “I die a little bit inside.”

Some young people are using chatbots “to test out being flirty or being romantic or being a little bit sexy and seeing how the chatbot responds to that,” Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin Madison who studies technology and adolescent health, told me. 

That kind of experimentation may be more common among boys, who generally engage in more risky behavior online than girls, Moreno said.

Using technology to experiment with flirting and romance isn’t new. Millennial teens turned to chat rooms and AOL Instant Messenger for this purpose. This could be risky — my classmates spent a lot of time catfishing each other avant la lettre — or outright dangerous if teens ended up chatting with adults. 

But, as Moreno points out, at least the people you were chatting with online were real humans who could tell you to go away if you said something too gross.

Chatbots, by contrast, “are programmed to be incredibly receptive and sycophantic,” Moreno said. “Even if you say something incredibly inappropriate, the chatbot is going to respond in a way that reinforces that.” 

That’s even more problematic when the subject is sexual violence. Young people are increasingly turning to chatbots after sexual encounters to ask if they might have committed assault, Drew Davis, director of strategic initiatives at SafeBAE, told me. The responses he’s seen have sometimes been unhelpful, he said, emphasizing legal defenses or providing reassurances instead of discussing accountability.

SafeBAE is developing an interactive tool that helps young people think about sexual situations that may have been confusing for them, such as those in which both parties were drinking, and connects them with resources to help them take responsibility and apologize if needed. 

The goal is “giving them language, giving them tools to be able to do this, that’s not coming from AI,” Davis said. “It’s connecting them with other people.”

Why teens are going to AI in the first place

It’s possible to imagine AI pushing young people even farther apart from one another than they already are. The big question is whether kids are using AI to practice having human relationships or to replace those relationships, Moreno said. In one recent survey, one in five high-school students said they or someone they knew had been in a romantic relationship with an AI.

It’s not hard to see why teenagers (or adults, for that matter) might be drawn to a voice that always has answers but never criticizes. When talking about thorny issues like sex and consent, “I think there’s a lot of shame,” Odiembo said. Teens “feel comfortable going to AI, because AI won’t judge them.”

But some teens also see value in the inevitable challenge and friction of human relationships.  

“You need to be called out occasionally,” Knapp, the Ohio senior, said. “That’s how humans evolve.”

Some experts believe that with better guardrails — like a willingness to say, “hey, don’t talk to me like that!” — AI could still be a helpful partner for teens learning to talk to each other. For example, a chatbot could be trained to help kids with social skills. Part of me wonders how much less awkward my adolescence might have been if I’d been able to workshop my jokes with a bot before taking them to the crucible of middle-school homeroom. 

It’s also worth noting that AI models are constantly changing and, in some ways, improving. After I talked to the SafeBAE team, I tested ChatGPT and Google Gemini by pretending to be a teenage boy concerned he’d crossed a line with a girl. Both models did a decent job, at least on first response, posing follow-up questions about the situation and encouraging me to take responsibility. 

But the young people I spoke with for this story don’t want better chatbots; they want to see humans get better, instead. They want teachers who are better-trained to discuss difficult issues like consent and assault. They want coaches and other adults who can model healthy masculinity for boys, rather than reinforcing stereotypes. And for all teens, they want supportive places to open up about feelings and relationships, some of the messiest and most important aspects of human life.

“I wish people were a little more comfortable having uncomfortable conversations,” Odiembo said.

What I’m reading

Families continue to report disturbing conditions at the Texas immigration center where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was held, including a worm in a child’s food, water that causes rashes and stomachaches, and staff withholding medical care.

Teens and tweens want to see more depictions of “fathers enjoying parenting” and “fathers showing love to kids” in movies and TV, according to a recent UCLA survey. In this, as in all things, the answer is Bluey.

The New York Times did a deep dive into AI slop videos aimed at kids. It is unclear as yet whether endless clips of adult mammals hatching out of eggs are harmful for children, but they are certainly bizarre.

My older kid is currently obsessed with the Ham Helsing series, graphic novels about a pig who hunts vampires.

From my inbox

After I wrote about kids’ recent obsession with the phrase “chicken banana,” one reader wrote in to let me know about a much earlier coinage. “Perhaps it’s my age (almost 80), but as teenagers, my age group regularly heard a jingle for Chiquita Bananas,” he wrote. “We naturally corrupted Chiquita banana into ‘chicken banana.’”

“Sorry to crush the illusion of today’s uniqueness of Chicken Banana, but we ancient folks were using the term ‘chicken banana’ a l-o-n-g time ago,” he added.

As always, if you have a question or want to share a story about kids today or in the past, you can reach me at anna.north@vox.com.

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

My husband was picking up our older kid from school a few weeks back when he overheard a teacher issuing an exasperated directive to her class:

“No more chickens! No more chicken banana!”

Though it might sound absurd to the untrained ear, my husband knew exactly what she meant, because the words “chicken banana” have been reverberating through our apartment for months.

It’s not just us. When Gabe Dannenbring, a teacher and content creator in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, asked his seventh-grade students about the phrase recently, “Every single one of them harmonized ‘chicken banana’ at the exact same time,” he told me. 

“Just last week, I was walking around a mall here in Los Angeles, and a small kid was hopping around and singing it to himself,” said BJ Colangelo, a media theorist and analyst, in an email.

“Chicken banana” hasn’t quite reached the ubiquity of “6-7,” the Gen Alpha catchphrase that has made it all the way to 10 Downing Street. But I wanted to write about it because it’s in the middle of what’s becoming a common trajectory, from novelty song to TikTok trend to all-purpose adult-tormenting meme. The rise of chicken banana shows how social media influences culture even among kids too young to have social media. It reveals the growing overlap between AI-generated content and wholly human silliness. And it’s a reminder that if kid culture seems absurd — well, it’s supposed to.

The history of “chicken banana”

The juxtaposition of “chicken” with “banana” calls to mind AI-generated brain rot icons like Ballerina Cappuccina, a smiling coffee cup with a dancing human body. One of Dannenbring’s students even described it as “like AI slop but for words,” the teacher told me.

But in fact, the catchphrase stems from a techno-inflected earworm of the same name, released last February by a Swedish (and human) production team working under the name Crazy Music Channel. 

“It just came up in one of our talks,” Michel Petré, CEO of the label MTM Music AB, told me. “You know, let’s just put the chicken and banana together.”

A video released at the same time features a chicken head on a banana body, a chicken pizza with banana slices spinning on a turntable, and — why not? — an alien hand dialing a phone. 

“With all the bad things happening all over the world,” Petré said, “we wanted to do something funny that people could laugh at.”

The song soon inspired a global dance trend on TikTok and Instagram, with everyone from 60-something Englishwomen to Bollywood stars joining in. Like so many social media fads, it might have ended there — “I tried to just wave my hand at it as one of those flash-in-the-pan trends,” Colangelo said.

Instead, “chicken banana” spread out from TikTok and down the age ladder. One New York City fourth-grader became familiar with the phrase because “the boys kept saying it” at her school, she told me. She’s never seen a TikTok featuring the song, but today she will utter the phrase “if I’m excited, or if I hear somebody say ‘chicken banana,’ or if I just want to,” she said.

Like “6-7” or “skibidi,” “chicken banana” doesn’t really have a meaning, but it can be used to express a variety of emotional states. “I heard someone say it in a really sad voice, like, Aww, chicken banana,” Dannenbring said.

Explaining the term’s appeal is almost as hard as defining it. “It’s just funny,” the fourth-grader said. “Chicken and banana are, like, two totally different things.”

How trends spread through Gen Alpha

“Chicken Banana” is far from the first novelty song to become a hit with kids. Petré pointed to “Baby Shark,” the 2010s song-and-dance phenomenon that dominates day care playlists to this day (here I must recommend “Wedding in the Sea,” the spinoff in which Grandpa Shark renews his vows with his “old shark bride”).

Nor is it unusual for a single phrase to come loose from its context and enter kids’ cultural lexicon. Kids in the 2000s loved yelling “WASSUP” even if they’d never seen a Budweiser commercial, Colangelo points out.

Now, however, the pathway from source material to classroom chaos is faster and more efficient. Before social media, “if your friends or family didn’t think something was funny, you’d probably stop repeating it faster because you didn’t have anyone who shared that sense of humor,” Colangelo said. “Now, you can look at a phone and see thousands, if not millions, of people across the globe who do find it funny enough to repeat ad nauseam, which then validates your own sense of humor.” 

Dannenbring worries that the speed and ubiquity of social media trends can put pressure on kids to jump on or be left behind. A lot of kids may not know what phrases like “chicken banana” mean, he said (if they mean anything at all): “They just say it because they know it’s in their world. It’s what it takes to be cool now.”

But there’s also a more joyful, anarchic side to “chicken banana.” It’s silly, it’s bizarre, and yelling it out in class allows kids — not adults — to control the narrative for a minute, even if that narrative begins and ends with a barnyard animal teaming up with a fruit to make techno music.

“Chicken banana” is a spiritual sibling of “chicken jockey,” the niche Minecraft character whose appearance in the recent movie became young people’s cue to cause mayhem. That movie succeeded, Colangelo told me at the time, because it was truly made for Gen Alpha kids, not for grownups — and screaming and throwing things when the chicken jockey appeared was one way those kids made the viewing experience their own.

“Children are a marginalized demographic and are denied autonomy in so many aspects of their lives, in favor of what their parents want for them,” Colangelo said this week. “As children come into their own personalities, they become desperate for anything that feels ‘theirs.’”

If adults are befuddled or even mad, that’s part of the point. “Their goal is, honestly, just to confuse older people, and they wear that as a badge of honor,” Dannenbring said. “It’s like their own language.”

Brain rot springs eternal

No one I spoke with for this story could predict with any confidence what the next chicken-banana-style trend would be. “A year ago, if you would have said ‘chicken banana’ would be the trend — like, what?” Dannenbring laughed. “It’s like a mad lib.”

Crazy Music Channel, however, is hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time with “Techno Duck,” released just last week. The accompanying video is even more absurd than “Chicken Banana,” featuring a fish playing a sax solo and a camel floating on a cloud. The clip also includes a notable image: two cat heads flanking a keyboard, which sails through a background of stars and galaxies.

The lip-synching felines recall Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat, two iconic millennial memes known and prized for their absurdity (Nyan Cat, for those too young or cool to remember, had the body of a Pop-Tart and blazed a rainbow-colored trail through space).

Adults, myself included, often associate brain rot with Gen Alpha “iPad kids” coming of age in a pandemic-scarred, AI-addled, post-meaning landscape. But in fact, the brain rot aesthetic has always been with us, and was a defining feature of the early-2000s internet. It’s just that millennials aren’t in charge of brain rot anymore. Our children are, and all we can do is sit back as they shout “chicken banana” in our faces.

What I’m reading

Liam Ramos, the 5-year-old boy detained by immigration authorities last month in Minneapolis, has been released with his father (for now). But the Trump administration is sending an increasing number of children to immigration detention, where some detainees say they’re being held without proper medical care.

It’s looking like another very bad year for pediatric flu cases, and experts say declining rates of flu vaccination are likely driving the spike.

Cursive is making a comeback, with about two dozen states adding the fancy writing to their curricula in recent years.

My older kid is revisiting the Notebook of Doom series, about a team of kids who identify monsters in their town, including vicious living inflatable tube guys.

Outside of this newsletter, I recently wrote about the prospect of universal child care in New York City, and about Gen Z men who want to be dads.

If you want to share a story or suggest an idea for a future newsletter, you can always reach me at anna.north@vox.com.