Originally Posted by Val
For Meghan, a typical day begins at 7 a.m. She wakes, has breakfast, and gets to school. She then prepares to turn in homework and take a test or quiz in at least one course almost daily. After school, she participates in two hours of daily lacrosse practice. She then gets home, eats, showers and is finally able to begin her five-plus hours of homework. She starts at 8pm and goes to sleep at 1 am. (This isn’t accounting for the time for the entire week every three weeks that she doesn’t get home until 9:30 because she is working on her school paper commitment. Nor does this include any time she tries to have with friends socially, or downtime to just be with family and herself.) This schedule, Meghan says, is quite common for most of her classmates at [Palo Alto HS].

Tiger parents should really be paying attention to this stuff, but I suspect that denial runs deep in that crowd ("my kid would never hurt himself because....").
I will. But maybe one reason the homework is taking 5 hours a day is that she is starting it dead tired at 8 or 9:30 PM. The high school day typically ends about 2:30 PM, and I think many students need to cut back on their time-consuming extracurriculars so they can get much of their schoolwork done in the afternoon or at very least start it in the early evening.