The foundation

Dr. Daniel Lewin, a clinical psychologist with the National Institutes of Health, views good sleep as the foundation of physical, mental, and emotional health. It's really everything, the backbone that holds our worlds together.

"The first time when a child separates from parents is at bedtime," Lewin says. "The process of going to sleep at night has a lot of complexity and beauty, loss and separation. Right around six months of age, as an infant learns to crawl, separation anxiety or stranger anxiety develops. That's also the point at which sleep can really go awry."

He specializes in child development, working with little babies as well as teenagers. He also teaches at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. His work documents something that we all know from experience: when you don't get enough sleep, you get a lot stupider. Kids in his study do much worse on cognitive tests when they've been deprived of sleep the night before. And kids who already have sleep problems "fall of a cliff" on the tests afterward.

bedtime: 12:05 waketime: 7:13 out of bed: 7:44 snooze tally: 7 h, 8 m score: not enough!