Let Teenagers Sleep In

FWIW: I used to feel this way before I entered my 40’s.

Unless you think you'd never resynchronize after moving across the world, it's pretty obvious that your wake and sleep time would have to be a lot more malleable than you suggest.

Here is an excerpt from the book "Why we sleep" (which BTW is written by a neuroscientist and psychology prof working at the Center for Human Sleep Science )

> An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics. If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl. Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts. First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours. Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early. However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate. Second is the engrained, un-level playing field of society’s work scheduling, which is strongly biased toward early start times that punish owls and favor larks.

EDIT: This is just one argument against the generalization that humans are hard-wired to sleep early. The book is filled with countless research pieces and experiments; science seems to suggest otherwise. Highly recommended read!

I ask as a person who's been on both sides of the fence, from 8pm nights and 4am mornings to 4am nights and 1pm "mornings" (and, of course, all manner of ranges in between). I've had months where I'm alert and out of bed 15 seconds after the alarm rings, and months where it takes me 2+ hours to rely wake up (although, on the whole, I'd still consider myself a "morning person", since I tend to feel better and get more done when I'm on the early shift).

I've found that, no matter what time I'm waking up, my ability to start moving in the "morning" is dependent in huge part (55%) on a consistent wake up time, and in small part dependent on getting enough sleep (20%) and getting up immediately instead of snoozing or otherwise staying horizontal (25%). Percentages are non-scientific estimates.

I do acknowledge, it's hard as hell to transition to being a "morning person" when I haven't been for a while, because it's just SO hard to force myself out of bed for the 1-2 week period I need to aclimate. Especially since in a half-awake state I don't have much mental capacity to push through the sleepiness. And it would be harder if I'd never experienced easy mornings to know they're possible.

For the record, to preempt a rebuttle along these lines: I also don't dispute that some people, for whatever reason -- genetics, life circumstances, etc -- may just not be able to make the switch. I am curious whether whether it's a matter of "I've done the above and it had no effect on me" or "The above is just impossible for me."

tbh, i doubt the time that students are required to be at school has much to do with their ideal sleep schedules. only about a third of women are stay at home moms these days, so you can consider parents to fall into one of two groups: shift workers and 9-5 office workers. shifts can start/end at any time so they can't really be planned around at the level of an entire school system. so by default, the schedule gets planned with the assumption of both parents working 9-5s. if both parents have to be at work by 9:00, the kids need to be at school by 8:00, so the parents can drop them off or at least make sure they get on the bus.

also, a lot of school districts only have enough buses to transport all the lower, middle, or high school students at once, so their arrivals must be staggered.

given that school also serves the purpose of gov't sponsored day care, i'm not sure what they could really do better aside from granting tardiness allowances for students with bona-fide sleeping disorders.

But I recently spent the better part of five months going to bed at 9:30pm and waking up at 4:30am. Despite getting less sleep overall, I've never felt as well rested or alert throughout the day as I did during those five months and I've never had an easier time getting to sleep. The key, for me, was also modifying my eating schedule and screen usage (computer, phone, TV). I often wonder how many people who simply accept that they're naturally nite owls are using blue-light-emitting screens late into the night and eating their last meal of the day so late that their body isn't ready for sleep. Because I know that once I adjusted those aspects of my life, my sleep schedule magically responded.

The difficulty in maintaining that schedule has been societal pressures. Those five months were spent living outside of a city where noise, light and social norms around dinner time all make it very difficult to maintain while having any sort of social life. I'm still searching for a way to reconcile my sleep schedule with my intended lifestyle.

If I had to guess, I'd wonder if school conventionally starts early because pre-teens are up early.

Surely teenagers could scheme among themselves while adults were awake? All they'd have to do is walk somewhere else. It's not like the adults would constantly be in their way.

Also, those functions may as well be done by adults. For instance startup founders are not all kids right out of college.

Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with the idea that teenagers sleep later, just sceptical about why it is so.

Any evidence to put this down as a 'likelihood'?

We've also disrupted this with younger kids. They never really get to play without adults in the mix.

I think this is actually one of the reasons why Minecraft was so successful, especially with kids. It gave them a way to explore the wilderness (also rare these days) and a way to interact without adult supervision. They got to be masters of their domain and learn how to cooperate and resolve disputes among themselves.

And some evolutionary biologists, like Dawkins, argues that it really acts on genes rather than the individual.

So, I might be missing some of the claim, but I find it unlikely that teenagers would stay up later to be away from adults and drive the tribe out of its ruts.

> humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples. Appreciating this evolutionary context, the benefits of such genetically programmed variation in sleep/wake timing preferences can be understood. The night owls in the group would not be going to sleep until one or two a.m., and not waking until nine or ten a.m. The morning larks, on the other hand, would have retired for the night at nine p.m. and woken at five a.m. Consequently, the group as a whole is only collectively vulnerable (i.e., every person asleep) for just four rather than eight hours, despite everyone still getting the chance for eight hours of sleep. That’s potentially a 50 percent increase in survival fitness. Mother Nature would never pass on a biological trait—here, the useful variability in when individuals within a collective tribe go to sleep and wake up—that could enhance the survival safety and thus fitness of a species by this amount. And so she hasn’t. 


Thanks for giving me the inspiration to read it. This book is just fantastic.

I've always been under the impression that start times were staggered for transportation reasons, as you can't drop everyone off at the same time. My experiences are limited to small towns, so I could be way off, but the differences seemed too small for sibling care to be the motive

That's an interesting postulation, but is it born out by societies where most families have a single child?

What were the child care options like at the time that the current school hours were developed (I'm guessing this is close to a century ago).

Do all relatively-civilised societies have the same attitude towards school hours and public commitment to child care?

If not, then trying to identify some correlations would be informative.

My gut feel is it's entirely unrelated to older siblings looking after younger ones -- partly because if both are at school at the same time, that problem is already solved.

I suspect the root cause is probably something more simple -- at the time school hours were decided, schools / education departments looked to how it was done elsewhere, be it neighbouring schools / states, or failing that, simply aligning the hours with what was commonly regarded as a 'good honest day's work'.

Clearly this would all have been a long time before anyone knew about, let alone considered, age-specific circadian rhythm variations.

Jesus, we know more than enough about it now -- the damage lack of sleep does to adults, and its profound importance through development especially in the teenage years -- and yet it'll be at least a decade before even the more progressive western societies shift teenage school hours forward by a few hours.

We had a breakdown of extended family structure (aunts watching the kids for an hour or two) and neighborhoods (same but for elderly neighbors, sometimes compensated). Everyone knows child care is labor intensive. Nobody knows how to pay for it is all.

Where? Everywhere I've lived, high school starts earlier and ends later. They have longer days than the elementary kids.

There is a high school in Texas with a $72 million dollar stadium. That should be indicative of where the priorities are.

>The article misses the point almost to the point of absurdity.

>I feel weird having to explain this.

>Academia concerns me sometimes.

    > ...no competing theory that does have hard evidence has been proposed, so current behavior is actually the first rationalization.

I suspect one thing is a much higher percentage of "structured time". Teens today seem to have far more time obligations than my generation did. As a result, socializing and free-time ends up getting pushed to interstitial times, late at night _and_ online.

Young people need unstructured time for ad-hoc socializing and discovering who they are and there is less opportunity for that now so it happens later at night when their obligations have been met and the time is their own. That's a simpler explanation than primate sexual urges.

IMO teenage perception of the world, which triggers the frenzy need to act, create, be seen; this is how I interpret pseudonyms and graffiti for instance.

A century ago, the average independance was ~16, similarly some religion have rites of passage in mid teens to signal a change of status. I think they did notice there was a need for teens to change lifestyle.

It’s lucky that I have a flexible workplace and a supervisor who has a kid with a sleep disorder, because the hardest thing about having this disorder is that it’s so hard for anybody with a normal cycle to understand how inflexible circadian rhythms are. You hear all sorts of BS about “you just need to be more disciplined”, etc. which just doesn’t work.

The latter is harder because of how many societal conventions we’ve built up. There are lots of systems in place for childcare in the summer. Less so for longer fall/winter/spring breaks. This largely isn’t a huge deal for teenagers but having school systems operating on 2 major calendars is a challenge.

Had I been able to sleep properly during those years, I might be a completely different person now.

To this day, I cannot (and will not) work a Monday-Friday 8-5 job.

And personally I did prefer course instances that were later on the day over those that were earlier.

We still had mandatory lesson attendance, though, unlike most university courses.

I was doing this as a senior in HS in the 90s. Because I had been ahead since elementary school, by the time I was a senior in HS there were only a couple classes left I needed to take. I showed up late, left early and most days went to work.

The overall affect of this is that good students would end up receiving a more directed education and were in a much more desirable system with immense freedom to pursue their education and growth as they saw fit. But at the same time 'less good' students did extremely poorly. And I think in general there is going to be a strong connection between increasing freedom and increasing the polarization of results. In a way it's really an educational analog of the differences between capitalism and communism.

It is a brave new world.

People can do things that are both unpleasant and harmful to them for extended periods of time if subjected to sufficient coercion, social pressure, or reward.

Every, single social media platform, political show, talk show, no matter the side.

They literally are. And that time is later than adults. That's what circadean rhythms are.

IMO, general level of education is important to fostering future curiosities.

Additionally, what about the teens who do get up early? I feel like these studies are sometimes trying to explain something that really is simple to understand. Kids stay up later today because there is so much more keeping them awake. If they stay up late, then they need to sleep later to get the sleep they need.

Growing up, my friends and a I almost all got up with the sun. All the activities we wanted to do revolved around the daytime. As a consequence we were usually asleep not much later than 10pm.

As someone who was recently a teenager, if school started an hour later, I would have stayed up another hour. Most of my friends were the same way.

One of the things people seem to miss is late nights are generally when teenagers have the most freedom. With your parents asleep no one is awake to bother you.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

They would be more successful if they got more sleep, so it makes sense to give teens a couple more hours to benefit society as a whole, even if only marginally.

Humans are very resilient and will often have acceptable outcomes even when some aspects of their lifestyle are sub-optimal.

As a teenager I would hate you for that :). Part of the reason I seem to be wired for night life since my teenage years is probably because that's the time everyone else is asleep, giving time to think, concentrate, enjoy experiences without interruptions, and generally not be interrupted by other people's random nonsense.

I believe Germany has this kind of system.

Coming from a poor, working class family, an apprenticeship-driven society like those of centuries ago would've resulted in me being trapped doing back-breaking labor and having no chance to escape.

But I got a chance to study tech and other languages, got interested in things my family could never understand, and moved to another country to pursue what made me happy.

I think offering a choice of apprenticeships would be good, but discouraging schooling in any way in favor of them would lead back to cycles of poverty and and end to the upward movement we've seen in the past century with the introduction of widespread public education.

We had an apprentice at work (in Germany) who was going to a Waldorf school I think. They do a half-year apprenticeship as opposed to three weeks as the others do.

It might be on a per-country basis. So far 2/3 of the responses have been German. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/world/europe/eu-daylight-...

Nevertheless, I would still on occasion go to bed at 10:30 (had to get up at 6:30) and lie awake in bed till 01:00-02:00am.

Whenever someone tells me they have a hard time going to sleep, my first question is always to ask if they exercise. I rarely stayed up past 10pm, much less past midnight as a teenager because my friends and I were getting up early to surf, ski, skate, play football, basketball, baseball, etc... By the time 10pm rolled around I was dead tired and ready to sleep. And on days I had to work after school, I got home around 10 and would literally pass out.

I know the environment is different, but my experiences make me cautious to say 'all teenagers' have different rhythms or want to stay up all night because of something biological.

It's not as easy as "just go to bed earlier."