What time did you have to get up for school? What time did you go to bed? These questions are at the forefront of the debate on whether or not middle and high school students in the U.S. are getting enough sleep on the average night.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that middle/high school age students need to get 8.5 - 9.5 hours of sleep a night. A lack of regular sleep can lead to weight gain, depression and anxiety, and the use of alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs...

I don't remember what "bed time" was for me when I was in grade school, but I do remember that once I got to grade nine, my dad would make sure we were in bed no later than 10:00 p.m. I am also fairly certain that school started at 8:10 a.m., meaning the bus picked us up at around 7:30 a.m. Now giving myself an hour to eat breakfast and get ready for school (not a hard task for a teenager) that means I could have realistically gotten up at 6:30 a.m. and still made it to school on time.

This also took into consideration homework, and extra curricular activities, of which there were many for me.

Full disclosure: I am not a scientist, but I can tell you from my experience that solutions to complicated problems do not need to be complicated themselves. STOP bubble-wrapping the world. The issue isn't school start times, it's all about daily life. It's about parenting, it's about discipline. You want your kids to get more sleep each night, send them to bed at an appropriate hour. It worked for me. It worked for my father. And it is working with my kids as I raise them to be adults.

Get off your devices. Get your kids off their devices. Really, why does your 10-year-old need a smartphone and a tablet? There is this place called "outside" that works wonders on a child's physical and mental health.

Contrary to popular belief, you as parents are in charge of your own children. If they need sleep, send them to bed. Unplug the television, run the Xbox/PlayStation over with your ride-on lawnmower. Do what needs to be done.

In general I believe that we are attempting to bubble-wrap the world that our children live in. Looking back on my childhood, it is completely different from the one that my children have.

We try and protect them from everything including themselves. We don't keep score in sports anymore because we don't want our kids to feel the pain of loss. We allow our children to quit if something gets to hard because we don't want them to feel strained. I could go on all day. The issue is, that once they become adults they are not going to have any idea of how to look after themselves.

There is no "one size fits all" solution to this issue. We teach our children that it is okay to be different, that it's okay to be yourself. So why don't we let them be different, let them make mistakes and learn from them? It's up to us as parents to find out what works for our own children.