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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

There's also an argument that's been made that kids go to school too early in the day and school start time should be postponed to later in the morning, because they need more hours of sleep.

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How is that even an argument? Does someone really argue that getting them up early is good for them?

Especially for high school kids (maybe 14-18 ish?). No one could possibly think that sending them to a school that starts at 7am is any way good for them. In our distract the high school starts at 7am and the small kids start at 9am. This makes no sense to me at all. (I'm not a kid complaining, I'm a parent)

Yes, a lot of people like to argue that getting up early is good for everyone, kids and adults. It's silly, but the "early bird catches the worm" people seem to run the world.

If the early bird people run the world, isn't that proof enough that it is good to be an early bird?

The problem is that whether you're an "early bird" or "night owl" is a matter of biology, not how early or late you choose to wake up (https://www.livescience.com/16334-night-owls-early-birds-sle...).

Because of the way school and work schedules are structured, you're right that it can give you an edge to be a morning person (I'm fortunate enough to be one). However, waking up early doesn't make a night owl an early bird - it makes them tired. The fact that people are split along these lines makes it questionable to enforce schedules that suit part of the population but leave the remainder strained and underutilized.

>In our distract the high school starts at 7am and the small kids start at 9am. This makes no sense to me at all. (I'm not a kid complaining, I'm a parent)

I was always under the impression this staggered start rate among school tiers was because they all share the same buses. If they all started at the same time they would need ~3x as many buses and bus drivers.

It would make a lot more sense to have the small kids start at 7 and the high school start at 9. Elementary school kids are naturally larks while teenagers are notorious owls.

It would, but people start panicking because they don't want their six year old standing alone on a deserted street corner in the dark waiting for a school bus. Seattle changed it to do that last year, but honestly what the fuck makes sense about a 7am school start time for anyone? In Australia I didn't know anyone who started school before 8.30am, ever. And that start time was basically consistent for 12 years of schooling, public, private, elementary, high school, whatever. It is like discovering aliens to see how the US school system is arranged.

6 year olds don't stand alone waiting for the bus anymore, there's always a parent waiting with them even though it's safer today than when we waited outside by ourselves. Even 9-10 year olds commonly have parents waiting with them.

Well, it's usually parents making this complaint, so I assume that it is the parents who don't want to stand with their kids that have an issue.

There was no schoolbus system where I grew up in southern california, we only ever took the school bus for field trips. Is it really that common across the country for kids to get to school by bus? We always just rode our bikes or walked, or got driven by parents.

The argument is basically "we know this is bad for kids" vs "well, yeah ... but I want to drop them off on the way to work"

In Weston Massachusetts there is a proposal to move the start of high school and middle school back to 8:45 for this reason.

https://www.westonschools.org/blog/2017/10/23/proposed-chang...

They need a solid 6-8 hours of sleep, like other humans.

I suspect the problem is that teens just stay awake FAR LONGER than is advisable perhaps to maximize their free unstructured time at night and to minimize the crushing grind of the mornings?

I expect that if the school start time was shifted to 9am, the kids would just stay up until 5AM instead of only 3AM.

Most adults need 6-8 hours of sleep. Kids need more than that.

https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchslee...

There may be something to it. At least, when I was young, I could accumulate a lot more sleep-debt before there were consequences.

These days (I am 37 now), when I go to bed an hour later than usual, I will feel it all day. Might not be a huge deal, but I notice it.

For some reason the sleep pattern changes for adolescents. Now that I'm in my 30s, waking up early is no big deal, but waking up before 8 was a huge struggle and I was always an advocate of 8 hours of sleep for myself.

Here's a summary of the issue: https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/school-start-time-and...

Most teenagers aren't staying awake til 3am, it turns out. And you can test your theory in several ways - either by checking American teenager sleep habits against those in other countries where school does start later (e.g Australia - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2941425/figure/...), or by looking for the existing studies that have been done on changing school times (e.g this one in Norway https://teensneedsleep.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/school-st...)

Summary: your theory doesn't appear to be supported by data.

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