What You Win by Not Sleeping in on Weekends

Shortly after my husband and I became parents almost 15 years ago, we met some more veteran parents for a weekend lunch. In our pre-kid world, that would have been the first activity of the day. But as we bounced our baby around, we rued that we had already been up for hours. Didn’t we once get to sleep in on Saturdays? The other couple laughed. My memory is that one of them said, “Yep, that will never happen again.”

Fifteen years later, I’m seeing that’s not quite true. My teen and pre-teen children don’t want to get out of bed early, and even if they’re up, they’re often watching videos. This provides a glimmer of hope that once my littlest kid is a bit older, a new world will be possible.

That said, in the intervening years, I’ve seen that there are benefits to not sleeping in on weekends, even if there isn’t a little voice calling “Mama!” from a crib. Indeed, for many busy people, keeping about the same sleep schedule on weekends as weekdays opens up all sorts of opportunities that just don’t exist if you drowse the morning away.

I’ll start this post by clarifying that I don’t want anyone to be sleep deprived. People sleep in on weekend mornings for two reasons. One is that they’ve stayed up late on Friday or Saturday night. That’s great if it’s for a party, and maybe not so great if it’s just Netflix. But the more…