More Kids Taking Melatonin

Jack found a story about how more kids than ever are taking melatonin to sleep. Could this be due to the incredibly high levels of anxiety in our kids?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Came across this story. Yes, they got my eye because
I give melotonin now and then to my kids. A
lot more kids are taking more melatonin than used to.
I don't remember every hearing about it until a few
years ago. It's a natural hormone that your body makes
to help you get to sleep at night, and then
so you can buy it in pills down give yourself
a little more that, in theory will help you get

(00:21):
to sleep and or stay asleep. I've tried it myself
and never had any reaction to it. So but more
and more children are using it. Nearly one in five
kids and preteens in the United States take the hormone
to aid their sleep. Many parents are regularly giving it
to their preschool aged children.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Preschoolers.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Yeah, they say it's not addictive and it doesn't do
any harm. I can't imagine how that's true. Doctors have
recommended it for my kids. Whenever you if you tell
your doctor your kids are having trouble sleeping, the first
thing they'll tell you if you tried melatonin.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Look, I'm the cross section of ideas that are not
good that I have done is a large cross section,
so goodness knows, I'm not criticizing people just because they're
trying their best. It strikes me that you're It's like,
you know, you tell your doctor I have blinding headaches
every day, and they tell you take this, you won't

(01:22):
feel a headache, as opposed to wait a minute. Sleep
is the most natural thing any human being can do.
If you are well, there's defecating. If you regularly can't
sleep as a child, there's something that we are masking
with melatonin we really ought to be dealing with.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
So I'm both a parent giving melatonin to his kids
and not arguing necessarily for it. I think it's a
bad idea. I know. It just doesn't make sense to
me that it doesn't. It's not addictive in the sense that,
so you started to give yourself melatonin, your brain is
going to produce less of it on its own because
it's getting that mount So you're gonna have to take

(02:11):
it because now you're not producing enough of it.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
That just sounds addictive to me.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yeah, exactly, how is that not addicted?

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Well, and again, I'm not sitting up here on a
high horse. I remember well enough though my kids are grown,
what it was like day to day. You would like
to do a deep dive slash drill down on why
something is happening.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
But in the meantime, we were doing Yeggermeister shots. That
worked for a while, right, yeah, but that's not very
good sleep, lots of them.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
So a third of kids and preschoolers getting melatonin. That's
just not right. That's wrong. Something is wrong here. The
canary and the Kimmel mine has crowked.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
But if we got so much anxiety out there, it's
probably not surprising that you know that many kids can't
sleep at night.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Why the anxiety? We need to get to root causes.
There you go, eventually, root causes.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Kamala.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Good one, Wow, did you call me Kamala? We're fighting
Armstrong and Getty.