The state finally letting teens sleep in
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> That’s about to change in California, when a law—the first of its kind in the nation—goes into effect on July 1 requiring the state’s public high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., and its middle schools no earlier than 8 a.m.
Wow. I may need to reassess my definition of “sleeping in”.
(Spoken as someone who had incredible difficulty getting to school by 8.50am back in the day and who hasn’t gotten up before 10.30am in the last week!)
In the afternoon, I was the last dropoff, which I thought was grossly unfair.
I've managed to train myself to fall asleep on the way back and wake up when the noise in the bus quiets down, in between the second to last and my stop.
I just couldn't have coped classes starting that early.
- Prepare materials for students to work on.
- Mark students' work.
- Write assessment reports on students for parents.
- Write department action plans.
- Complete SEN reports on selected students.
- Complete CPD in electronics and CS to upskill in the subjects I taught.
- Prototype new projects that the students would engage with in the future.
I could go on. For about every hour I spent actually teaching in a classroom, there was half an hour spent planning, assessing or completing admin work. I regularly worked 12 hour days, plus weekends, and all those long holiday that we were supposed to get.
I’d peg roughly 9:30 am as a good time for high schools to start.
It is absurd how early schools start. Objectively, there was no good reason why I had to be on my spot on the field at 7:08a every morning only to be done by 2:50p.
It’s actually deeply annoying for my daughter’s high school. It already started 1st period at 830, but since 0 period no longer “counts”, the day is getting extended by almost an hour for all students.
This is from an email from our district earlier in the year:
The exceptions to this are zero period classes. Since zero period classes are optional and not required, these classes may begin before 8:30 AM; they just cannot be used to meet the instructional minute's requirements of 64,800 annual schoolwide instructional minutes
1st period being the first "official" period of the day, which now can't begin before 8:30a.
Originally, it began life as the before-school time for athletics and other organized extra-curriculars, but once it existed, it became a full-fledged period of instruction, as high-achieving students needed to cram ever more "elective" courses in order to compete for the top university slots.
Even 25 years ago when I was in high school, there was talk of creating a double-zero for the athletics, the marching band, and the extra-curriculars, so that elite students could "still afford" to do them.
In my district, it didn't happen (With zero starting at 7:08a, double-zero would have been 6:03a, if I'm remembering class length correctly). One of the reasons why it didn't happen is that since there is no "honors athletics" which can be graded on the 5-point scale, elite students couldn't afford the grade points to take them anyway.
I took zero period just because I wanted to take additional subjects. I also didn't want to waste a period on P.E. so I did various varsoty sports after school since it counted for a semester each. I took jazz band in 0 period.
And I never even bothered applying to college senior year of high school.
A lot of the organized sports would do practice as a 0 period (for us, we needed 4 semesters of PE, and marching band or organized sport could count for 2 of those; so I took up cymbals for the marching band, cause ugh PE)
If I remember correctly, we started around 7am.
Another explanation I've read is to make room in the afternoon schedule for varsity sports practice. Honestly I'm not sure which is worse.
I would think that using normal public transport vehicles means there would be more capacity rolling around that can easily be diverted for school bus services during the peaks, rather than having a very limited set of special-purpose vehicles?
They wouldn't lock the door at my school, but teachers would generally give you detention when you arrived late. Teachers would also take it personally if you didn't have the textbook for their class with you despite there not being nearly enough time to get to your locker and back. Add to that the fact that teachers often would still be trying to finish things up when the bell rang and wouldn't let us leave, and we'd end up with the perfect storm of being forced to strain to carry all of the textbooks for most of the day just to avoid detention but then end up still being late due to not being let out on time and having to walk slowly because of the said textbooks. And then they'd occasionally lecture us for ruining our posture with our heavy bags like we had any control over the situation...
I mean... 7am, I get... 7:17?! Did someone throw the dart at the clock and hit the 17 minute mark?
At college, everything was 15 past full hour, for 45 minutes, then 15 minute break.
When I got to the army I needed to constantly get up at around 0530. What I found out is that it's not a problem for me (and I firmly believed it would be nearly impossible) if I go to sleep early enough. It worked for most of people around me as well. Since then I don't think getting up earlier or later really matters, I decide it based on the stuff I want to do and not the other way around.
This was very unfortunate as I lived in another state and had to sit 2 hours in public transit, so I had to wake up at 5:45.
I remember almost sleeping after lunch and not learning anything because I was too tired.
This stuff should be fixed everywhere. Getting up this early is not helpful.
I honestly think our schools are a generally a massive waste of time and money, as they are now. Meaning, they meed to i prove. They have basically become daycare centers. The education is really not good, and no one is learning anything. Then you graduate only to be greeted with the basically mandatory acceptance of debt and another four years of extended high school or a lifetime of labor jobs.
My elementary school started at 9. I don't remember when junior high started, but high school was 8:40 I think for homeroom.
Then school ended at 3. If kids are starting school at 7, when does their day end? What excuse are schools giving for this?
Good luck if you did a sport. I remember hearing some elite fencers talk and all of them said essentially "yeah...I didn't get a lot of sleep in high school". That's not some innocuous hard work ethic mindset. That's messing with a developing brain and depriving it of a necessary resource.
It pisses me off that we're just realizing that this culture of torturing teenagers is maybe not the best idea.
Even today, in my 30s, a day or two with poor sleep will make a noticeable mood dip regardless of circumstances.
But as an older adult, I naturally wake up at 6:00 every morning. It was the same for much of my childhood except a few years of high school. So perhaps this was a developmental thing.
University labs were always 8 AM, so wasn't much of a choice to try to do later, especially in the first two or three undergrad years. Even at that age, it was still a struggle. Why not night lab? Surely there's a doctoral student willing to attend to some freshmen doing reactions at 8 PM, right?
(It also applies to other extracurricular sports, but I doubt anyone really worries about play practice schedules)
You can’t really play soccer after dusk if the field is outside and you don’t have lights. So lots of outdoor sports have strict daylight constraints.
At some point you have to decide on an optimum between time, sleep, and output.
I was fortunate enough to go to a high school that did not have a gym period, but required all students to play an organized sport.
Gym in large high schools is a waste of time due to the student to instructor ratio. One frustrated gym teacher to 50+ kids playing dodgeball? Of course you’re going to have theater kids just going through the motions and goth kids behind the bleachers smoking cigarettes. It’s not real exercise.
You need small rosters, organized practices, uniforms, referees, fans (students and parents) and intra-school competition. It creates seriousness and expectations. You can’t hide from your coach when there’s only 14 kids on the roster. You need to do the sprints with everyone else and take the drills seriously.
I don’t think this scales beyond smaller high schools. Not enough facilities, not enough coaches, not enough money.
The important thing is that they get exercise of some kind. Maybe just allow them to choose whatever form of exercise they want as long as they do something each day?
The school could offer sports but also allow them to walk, run, lift weights (when old enough), play tag, do yoga, or whatever they prefer.
If a kid truly hates all exercise and refuses to cooperate, I guess there’s only so much you can do, but you could at least remove as much friction as possible and try to meet them where they are. Anything that gets them moving will offer huge physical and mental benefits over just slouching in shitty plastic chairs all day.
I do think it’s a bit brutal and unnatural to make kids sit in classrooms all day in uncomfortable chairs under fluorescent lights with no time outside and no time for physical activity.
Afaik lots of schools in the US do facilitate physical exams by a doctor. I remember having one in middle school. It was the subject of much discussion among the boys in my class at the time since it involved a female doctor and a hernia check...
Lots of schools have an in-school trained nurse.
>create meal plans
Most schools in the US sell/provide subsidized lunch.
So yeah, there ISN’T much of a line here in the US. The school is daycare, education, basic medical attention, a cafeteria/food welfare program, and sports/after school program all rolled into one.
During early COVID in the Bay Area, the middle school in my neighborhood kept “serving” lunch. That is to say, it was too “dangerous” to hold class. However, they still staffed cafeteria staff and had a line down the street at lunch time of kids with subsidized/free lunch, and they handed out brown paper bags. So the school was literally operating ONLY as a child nutritional welfare program for a while, but not as a school.
As someone who only took part in high school sports for the exercise, I was really frustrated that I went through 10+ years of education without really being taught anything about the realities of what's required to achieve and maintain lifelong fitness.
I would have been happy to join a "cardio and weight training team" because I frankly didn't give a fuck about wrestling or football, especially since those programs focused most of their effort on the well-being of the top-performing players anyway.
I don't know that "too late" has much meaning here.
When the high is 110 F in a Phoenix suburb, you can’t ask the 14 year olds to skateboard 20 miles to school on a country road with no breakdown lane. Similarly, you can’t ask kids from Maine to skateboard to school in the dark on ice.
Whenever this topic gets brought up, a bunch of seemingly childless city dwellers think they’re making some massive revelation suggesting that kids just get their own butts to school at a comfortable 10:30 am.
It’s actually pretty simple: Both parents work. Somebody has to drive the kids to school (hard requirement — there’s no bus and a bike/skateboard is too perilous). Work starts at 9 am. School has to start earlier than that.
[0] Would need to provide more stops and ideally a better more consistent schedule so kids could get there just in time for the bus. Also for hot weather school picks up in the morning so even the hottest places aren't 110+ at pickup time.
In the winter wearing a trench coat, a dr. who scarf, and beetle-eye mirrored sunglasses so my eyes didn't freeze.
For longer distances it’s really not a big deal to bike to school. No one needs to be dropped off by their parents, unless they live out of district and chose to go to a school other than their local one. And even in that situation, many schools open a half hour or more early, where kids can be in the library or cafeteria well before class starts.
The problem that the US faces with respect to this issue is primarily caused the design of american cities (including the surrounding suburbs), which are laid out in a manner that makes the use of a car a practical necessity for getting anywhere. You wouldn't have to worry about a 20-mile country road to school out of a suburb if you instead made the sensible choice of placing services (like schools) right where they are needed, as european cities tend to do, instead of 20 miles away.
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/finland/helsinki/climate https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/sioux-falls/climate
Yes our car-dependent infrastructure is an issue, but it's infrastructure we've built up for the better part of a century. Changing it will be slow and gradual, and in the meantime cold weather and darkness are issues in much of the country. Also hot weather in other parts of the country (heat stroke can be a serious concern in the Southwest)
One statistic I've read for eastern South Dakota is that it's one of the worst states to live if you hate extreme cold and extreme heat as we have both - sometimes within a week of each other!
The weather in Oulu during winter looks a lot like the weather in Sioux Falls, except there's a lot more precipitation (snow) in Oulu.
However, as a Canadian, some of what you say is just plain gibberish. My rural county, not province or country, but county, is on its own larger than some European countries, with a population of 20,000.
If you tried to put schools within even 10 miles of every kid, you'd end up with hundreds of one room schools, with a teacher teaching 4 kids.
The problem here is, there is no one size fits all. Trying to make suggestions needs to be more location specific.
Because when someone starts talking about rural living in the US and Canada, Finnish experience has no parallel.
I mean, come on, I've seen farms, just a single farm owned by one man in rural Manitobia, larger than massive cities!
Millions of acres of land, with just wheat and rye on it! Owned by a dude, presumably larger than some countries!
I am quite aware that what I mentioned is not feasible for some of the more rural regions that exist in the US and Canada. However, those constitute a rather small portion of the population. It is as you say; there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but certain solutions are so widely applicable that they could bring significant benefit to the lives of most americans and are thus worth pursuing (where relevant) even if they do not solve the challenges faced by the small number of people living in the more rural regions of these countries.
The Finnish municipality of Inari is over 17,000 sq.km, in the same ballpark as the entire country of Israel, with a population of 7,000. This gives it a density of 0.47 people/km2, four times less than Manitoba.
We aren't going to completely redesign all of America's cities for the purpose of making sure teens get a bit more sleep though, so the point is irrelevant.
That is quite the hyperbole.
>for the purpose of making sure teens get a bit more sleep
Add to that the time and resources wasted by millions of parents daily driving around instead of doing something economically productive, something that keeps them healthier, or just anything that doesn't cause environmental damage. And the fact that this is just one small instance of a much bigger issue affecting most people (anyone regularly commuting or using services within or near cities) to some degree. It's obviously not the most important issue out there right now, but it is a whole lot of wasted time and effort that could be eliminated, and you could probably even do it gradually without implementing any sudden sweeping changes.
It is really not. The topic is a legal change in california to change when school starts.
And to respond to this fairly minor topic by suggesting that cities be rebuilt is absurd.
I am going to say that there are more immediate solutions to kids getting enough sleep, due to school starting times, than "Well just redesign all our cities to be more like europe!"
Redesigning entire cities is hard. It is not a reasonable thing to bring up, when talking about a policy regarding when school starts.
That is not hyperbole. Instead it is completely legitimate to dismiss someone suggesting that cities are designed poorly, because to fix such a problem would be a huge undertaking.
The health benefits far exceed just sleep.
But I think it would take more than 100 years to change this, and most importantly, many in the US are not interested in such a change whatsoever.
No need to nuke LA and rebuild, just take a few plots in the middle and put a school in there.
At the very least, for most towns, you're looking at moving a bunch of roads around. For many of them, you'd need to add more schools to keep the distances reasonable. I expect, for a large number of the town, the term "complete redesign" is a reasonable description.
Alternatively, and this may be a radical idea: If your town is five kilometers across, with a uniform distribution of population: Why not have two, or three smaller schools, evenly distributed? A similar-sized German city (taking Öhringen, ~25.000 citizens, which also follows the 'almost a circle' rule, as an example here) has six highschools (which also take in students from neighboring villages)...
Money. A lot of it would be required.
As to the local high school parking lot, that's not an "efficiency" thing - it's a "young people getting a taste of freedom" thing.
Also, how is "doubling the school's area and vastly increasing environmental damage" not an efficiency thing? Kids the world over get by without having to rely on cars to experience freedom. If your society requires people to drive multi-thousand dollar pollution machines to experience freedom, then it's not truly free.
It's worth noting that <hotter | colder> than the vast majority of the US isn't a particularly useful metric.
- The people that say their kids can't walk to school because of the winter weather could be in an area where it's constantly below freezing and it's common to have over a foot of snow on the ground most of the time (ie, there is ONLY the road to walk on, and it's unsafe because of the snow). - The people that say their kids can't walk to school because of the heat could be in an area where 110degree weather is common (somewhat less of an issue since most school doesn't happen in the hottest months; but there is summer school). - There are plenty of places in the US where the houses are so far apart that its not realistic to have a school that even moderately close to more than a couple of them.
Even if "most of the US" is more temperate than "some location where kids walk to school", there's still plenty of places where its considerably less reasonable to walk to school year round.
As a Finn, the first part is an infrastructure issue and you're building it wrong, and the second part is just plain old weird; snow on the ground doesn't make walking unsafe. Too much snow makes walking slower and more tiring, but that circles back to infrastructure, specifically snow plowing.
And walking on the road when the road has snow on it (so is slippery) IS dangerous if there's any amount of traffic. Even if you can stay to the side of the road (which is hard when there's a lot of snow), the risk of being hit is increased because cars can lose fine control under such conditions.
Americans don't like to admit certain things, and this is one of those. You shift blame from how your roads are built to things like weather.
From the grandparent:
> Cold weather and darkness are not obstacles.
They really are not the obstacles, so I'd ask you to not use them as excuses.
So yes, because of the way the roads, towns, and cars exist today, it is not reasonable to have kids walk to school in many cases. The weather conditions for the area are one of the things that go into that calculation; they are one of the obstacles that add up to it not being realistic. Are they the root cause? No. But it's irrelevant, because they _are_ one of the factors involved in outcome. If the weather was always perfect, then those children could walk to school year round. If dedicated walking paths were created that cars could not travel on were created, then those children could walk to school year round. Neither one of those is going to happen.
> It's not the snow that is dangerous, it's the cars.
Pretending it's realistic to magic all the car focused town layouts away is completely and utterly unrealistic, so I'd ask you to not pretend that "if we just admitted cars were the problem, all the problems would go away".
Meanwhile, this subthread started at
> Heat, cold, darkness, lack of infrastructure, and distance.
If you don't think poor civic planning is at fault, you'll never fix it.
And then people say that all the work they do is for the benefit of their children...
And then people say that those against mandatory school attendance are crazy...
My workplace starts at 06:00 or 07:00 depending on how much work is on, there are no other options.
Lmao how do people talk like this with a straight face.
Let work start later too. Tell that boss he can get with the times.
80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas [1] and the average school commute distance for high schoolers is (or, was, can't find a recent number) 6 miles [2].
FWIW, I lived a little under 5 miles from school in a non-bike-friendly suburb and managed to transport myself to and from school just fine without a car. We had 100 degree days in the summer, but we also had... summer break. Maybe one hot week in August, but nothing I would call dangerous.
The "20 miles down a county road" scenario is an outlier. If that is representative of your community, then the school policies of your community (including start time) should reflect that reality. The 80+% rest of us are having a different conversation about a different place. No reason to get angry about it.
> city dwellers
Far more Americans live in metro areas than in nonmetro rural areas.
> childless
The vast majority of American children do not live in rural areas. Rural areas are, on average, old and managing to get older.
> think they’re making some massive revelation suggesting that kids just get their own butts to school at a comfortable 10:30 am.
The California law requires a start time no earlier than 8:30am, which is already several hours later than 10:30.
When I was in high school our start time was 7am or something like that, but there were "negative hours" so you could show up as early as 6am. There was cold breakfast in the cafeteria with a staff member present, or you could go to some classrooms for tutoring (I think one per core subject). Hazy on the exacty details -- it was a long time ago -- but I do remember the doors were unlocked 1 hour before classes started and you could either hang out or get tutoring.
Starting -1 hour at 7:30am gives a parent 1.5 hours to commute from school to their job by 9am.
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[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...
at 14 i biked along county roads to get to the hippy school, approx 14 miles.
both my parents worked. i am not a city dweller. kids can absolutely get themselves to and from school and doing so at 9:00 or 10:00 will mean safer roads with less ice and less traffic. if school started at 10:00, snow days would virtually be a thing of the past. skateboards have a lower fatality & injury rate than bikes(mostly due to the inherently lower speeds involved), although they have limitations for long distance transport and offer no luggage capacity.
These also aren't weird, aspirational goals that have never been done before, there are plenty of places where public transport is good enough even in rural areas so that kids can actually get to school. The areas so sparsely populated that that's impossible are...not the majority, to put it mildly.
In some cases, it's more a concern of economically _viable_. Sometimes, the fact that something would cost more means it's not possible. We have teachers that have to pay for the children's school supplies out of their own pockets, because the school system doesn't get enough money.
There are plenty of companies with flexible working hours, and large open-source programming projects with completely asynchronous workflows.
Now yes, there are some valid reasons for a business, such as a shop or restaurant, to have certain opening hours - for most shops, being open during the day and at similar times to other shops (to increase chances that a customer who comes to buy something from one shop will be drawn into the shop next door) is ideal.
However, there is no valid economic reason that I can discern for the vast majority of businesses and the school system to keep blindly imitating 19th century factories in their work hours.
If my parents had time, they'd drive me to the end of the road and let me sit in the car, or if i was lucky drive me to school (allowing me to sleep in more)
> Somebody has to drive the kids to school (hard requirement — there’s no bus and a bike/skateboard is too perilous)
I don't agree with the assessment that there's no bus. If there *really* isn't, change that.
In general: adjust society to make more sense. We know teens have higher sleep requirements. Meet their needs. Find solutions. Work environments can adjust, even if they don't like it.
Maybe well rested teens will be less likely to shoot up the school shrug
Just some quick results from a google search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528821/
https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/tee...
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/features/students-sleep.h...
And more research will be produced showing that teen clocks are also offset, but it's still the case that I have all my anecdata about what it feels to be tired, to get enough sleep etc., and what it feels like to be a teen rebelling against any rules.
hunter gatherer teens did not sleep late every morning, they had to get up just like everybody else, probably at the crack of dawn
Aren’t school districts required to offer busing to rural communities? That’s the way it was done in PA.
Granted, that doesn’t fix the sleeping in issue since we had to catch the bus pretty early.
There are a lot of solutions that don't require school starting before 9 am.
Also, while you may be correct about it affecting a huge area of the US, it doesn't affect many children in the US. Precisely because it's a problem with low density. Maybe the true simple solution is that rural children all telecommute and do teleschool.
When I imagine what a 25 mile dangerous bike ride looks like here, it's living 25 miles out in a place where the US highway is the only route to town. But there's a high school out there, so it wouldn't be 25 miles.
Obviously other situations will exist, but living 20 miles from the school you attend is a corner case and will often be driven by choices the parents are making.
I do not agree with that - but it's the current law, so we can't just leave out early teenagers alone and run to work.
I too was and am a late sleeper and school mornings were torture. Just saying there is indeed a big dependency between work starting times and school starting times - though that can be solved with optional school child care rather than mandatory early classes.
That's a horrible law and I sure hope there are no states with a similar one!
Note, a state that does NOT have such a law is not necessarily a better one - It leaves the decision up to either various criteria (which may be well or poorly defined, subjective or objective), or opinion/assessment of jury/judge/child protection services. And in a state that does have a law with age such as 8 or 9, does not mean you are absolved of responsibility for leaving a 12 year old home. Ultimately, this is a tricky subject that's hard to objectively measure and decide.
What it comes down to is that times/culture have changed. I walked to school on a non-trivial path when I was 6 years old in grade 1; it was about a kilometer, crossed couple of busy intersections and a bridge. So did all of my classmates. But that was in Bosnia in the 80's. Today, in Canada, a 6 year old walking to school unsupervised for 15-20 minutes, in summer and winter? Largely a complete no-go. Multiple neighbours and observers would report it to police - and this is not an opinion, this is local newspapers articles.
To the latter part though - "ensure their autonomy is respected within local community" - unless you started right now and are heavily involved in politics, local school boards, local bylaws, etc... you may find that WAY harder than you think. Culture shift is right - it's not about talking to your 3 neighbours. In the use case of walking to school - it's every neighbour on the way from home to school plus every teacher and school official plus parents of all the kids in the class plus any bystander, jogger, passerby, driver etc who may see your kid alone on the street. The news articles I've seen locally are rarely about the next door neighbour - frequently it's some self-appointed good-samaritan stranger who took it upon themselves to call police or lodge a complaint; or a school counselor etc.
That's great, congratulations and keep it up!
> To the latter part though
You're right. I certainly didn't mean to imply that I would necessarily be entirely successful. I'm keenly aware of how challenging it is to shift social consensus in even very small groups, let alone larger ones.
I understand that it would be scary to go through such a high consequence interaction as having the police called on you for your good parenting choices, but do you have any sense of what the outcome has typically been in those cases where someone complains?
i.e. do the police typically tend to side with the parent or the busybody paternalist?
Well, except when they have to get out the door before 6:15am...
Any parent that wants to torture their kid with a 7am start is free to do so.
That choice however shoulsnt dictate the school time for everyone else.
Early birds can show up to a long recess pre-class time but class should only start at 10am or so
A very beaten dead-horse, but look at Japan:
Elementary Schools and Middle Schools placed within a MAXIMUM 10min walking pace distance at that age group’s walking pace.
High Schoolers able to commute to their school of choice due to robust public transportation network.
We have designed cities that create as byproducts incredible amount of self-inflicted wounds on our culture. We don’t have to live this way. This is a choice.
Parents go to work or send their kids off. A parent personally accompanying a student to school is an indicator of something having gone wrong.
Major US population centers who are not New York should have, at the start of their explosive population growth, experienced a massive construction boom. There should be so many people employed making a city right now that the other problem we have with people not making a living wage because they are working jobs that weren’t designed to be life-sustaining careers might not be a problem!
Tear down all the “historical homes” and build mid-sizes apartment buildings. Build more schools. Hire more teachers.
The “character” and “flavor” of a city will come naturally and organically as an emergent property of trying to build a massive city to house millions.
Cities if done right turn into quasi-perpetual motion machines that feed itself the economic activity to sustain itself. And because they are denser and more compact, resource consumption can be scaled to be more efficient. Oh and all the people who used to be sprawled out now concentrated? That frees up land to build industrial centers on the outskirts that feed more economic activity.
This is an oversimplification that ignores a LOT of externalities to economic activity and histories of urban decay, but essentially: yes cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles essentially need to be rebuilt from the ground up and hopefully it will be as a result of conscious decisions and not a Great Fire of London/Earthquake of 1906 type disaster.
The other problem is bureaucracy and that is actually a consequence of the way US regulations approach regulation. It will make everyone’s life easier if we had very perspective building regulations that can be just checklisted through instead of ambiguous, litigious wording.
No, that's not needed. There is one first start that is relatively easy to do, and many cities are experimenting with it all over the world: ban individual-transportation cars, only allow taxis, ambulances, delivery services, tradespeople's / construction vehicles and transportation for the disabled. Then, use the space on the suddenly free roads to introduce a solid 24/7 bus network and return the space that's not needed any more to the public by building green stripes, bicycle lanes and pedestrian stripes.
It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop, also because your delivery area shrinks because your deliverymen use bicycles and won't drive uphill or more than 5 km from your place.
Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare. And no, taxis won't always accept to drive you to your hometown with no night time bus service.
Not advocating for car culture, but failing to account for citizens' actual needs makes your city unliveable.
The former case can be solved by either going shopping more regularly - or by making that possible in the first place by making sure there are grocery stores at regular walkable distances. If you have to use a car to transport your groceries or other regular (!) shopping, your community is underserved.
The latter case can be solved by regulating delivery services to have enough staff and technology (i.e. pallet trucks) to be able to haul all the furniture from the nearest delivery drop-off point.
> It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop
Objective data from Berlin's experiment shows that this concern is relatively unfounded - they looked at anonymized cellphone tower data to determine a sizable increase in pedestrian traffic for the shops [1]. For stores selling stuff that is not easily transportable without a car (e.g. kitchens), there should be incentives to move these to a new location that is accessible with cars or by delivery services.
> Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare.
Well, they are learning. The important thing was to get started in the first place. Now with real-world experiences they can adapt and improve.
> And no, taxis won't always accept to drive you to your hometown with no night time bus service.
Again, the answer of this is government regulation. In Germany, taxis are mandated by law to serve you.
[1] https://efahrer.chip.de/news/friedrichstrasse-in-berlin-schm...
- Your lifestyle can adjust so that you don’t pick up two weeks of groceries at once and buy in bulk at Costco. You could walk to a fresh market instead. You can get a few days groceries at a time. Getting groceries doesn’t have to be the massive effort it is here in North America. Or there are small electric mobility options.
- Customers and parking. This doesn’t necessarily follow. If a street is very walkable and people use it frequently, people can easily notice a shop and walk in. That doesn’t really happen if you’re driving, as you don’t really interact with or see the outside world. So in theory, a vibrant walkable street can support a lot more local economic activity. Beyond that, the amount of land used for parking in North American suburbs is so vast that there is actually less economic activity because so much land is effectively sitting there empty. If a parking lot is as big as the store… well, that’s one more store that could exist!
> Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare.
The needs of a neighborhood's residents are distinct from and sometimes opposed to the needs of non-resident stakeholders such as suburban commuters, absentee landlords, and tourists. Ultimately I think every neighborhood needs to strike some balance between these stakeholders.
But the extent that most American cities prioritize the needs of commuters and visitors over their own residents has always seemed odd to me. For example, many cities spend huge sums of money destroying local neighborhoods to widen freeways so commuters can move further from the city. This results in a destroyed local tax base and increases in suburban property values.
All else being equal I would have expected most cities to operate like Paris and prioritize the needs of local residents above the needs of visitors.
Existing dense and ultra-dense cities do not face these problems or have adequately addressed them. Or these aren’t actually problems.
Increased density in a neighborhood means increased foot traffic which means increased business.
Delivery of large items become an essential business activity. The Japanese versions of many multinationals offer free, same-day delivery of any items bought in-store if you live within a 30 miles of the store. You actually can have it scheduled to have the delivery truck coincide with when you come home.
Why do you assume the delivery service will use bikes and not mopeds, small cars, or other powered mobility systems?
Businesses respond to the limited range of their customers by increasing their presence. Look at New York — a bodega at every corner. Small businesses can thrive by filling a niche inside a walkable radius and have decreased marketing costs and higher customer discovery because tens of thousands will walk by every day. So large corporations create more jobs and independent mom-and-pops can reliably compete.
Denser cities don’t have your above problems because the nature of dense cities make all of those things moot. Ive seen many of these same counter arguments before, and my only thought is that Americans have lived in our current state for so long we fail to imagine a better life.
French cities are currently not getting denser because of perceived social problems such as poorer working population leading to low economic activity, poor academic performance and eventually and a rise of crime. Paris in particular concentrates a really-non-negligible fraction of the metropolitan area's economic activity but cannot become denser that it is right now because current regulation restricts high-rise buildings in the city proper [1]. That leads to inflated price which drive people away.
Same-day delivery? Good luck with that. 24h is the best they can do, and that's 79 euros -- by the way -- for your sofa that's being delivered to your home, when you'll be there (or not, lol). That being said, Japanese versions likely factor in the delivery cost.
> Why do you assume the delivery service will use bikes and not mopeds, small cars, or other powered mobility systems?
These exist, and there are even moving companies that use that as a selling point. Don't see how practical it is though, especially when driving uphill, as Paris is not exactly as flat as Amsterdam, Chicago or Miami, for example. Mopeds or cars still won't deliver more than 5 km away from their base, but customers can easily drive for 45 min to a good restaurant 20 km away.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A8glements_d%27urbanisme_...
Reading your response, I feel that France has its own set of cultural baggage and norms it must sort through.
>That being said, Japanese versions likely factor in the delivery cost
Not by much though. To the point where it’s still practically free.
Over time the city will grow denser and all other stuff like bike lanes and public transport will simply make sense.
Yes. Move away from car culture.
Assuming you can fall asleep at midnight, sure.
I’m one of those people who normally can’t fall asleep before midnight and struggles to wake up early, but I’ve done a few digital detox programs where I’m without any electronic devices, and I’m always amazed at how quickly I fall into a schedule where I’m asleep before 9 and waking up at 4:30. And it’s also amazing how much better I feel both mentally and physically when I’m on that schedule.
If you assume 8 hours per day for school, maybe one extra to get to/from school then homework and house chores, how much time does that leave for entertainment?
No wonder kids stay up until very late because that's the only time they actually have for themselves to do something they actually enjoy and is not being forced upon them.
A two hour period from waking to being in first period seemed pretty normal, and even if you subtract that from a “more generous” 9am, you still get 7am, which is pretty brutal on adolescents which are known to have shifted sleep schedules.
That is also, I think, an abnormally long bus trip, but maybe that's my bias.
I had a very similar schedule to the person you're responding to, except our high school started at 7:25. I'd take a little extra time in the morning just to get my head together before going to school.
So maybe not typical but definitely believable for me. There are probably some kids in almost every district that have to get on the bus an hour before school starts.
* be really tired (5 min)
* take shower (10)
* get dressed (5)
* eat breakfast (10)
* walk to bus stop (takes 15-20 min, sometimes my parents would drive me)
* buffer
It certainly was given the default sleep schedule I had as a teen.
> Go to sleep by midnight
This wasn't something I could intentionally choose to do as a teenager without the use of drugs like melatonin.
After lunch, we went out to help my father build houses, then off to sports practices (typically two separate practices for two different sports) and classes at the local college. By the end of the day you're exhausted!
A large part of why my parents were so strict is because we were really poor and my parents were determined to not only get out of poverty but also to teach us a good work ethic.
So part of me is really biased in thinking "these kids have an easy schedule, why is it so hard for them to get going in the morning?"
I wouldn't recommend my upbringing necessarily, but also can't help but wonder if kids had a stricter routine, regularly exercise, good diet, and family support if it wouldn't be slightly easier for them to start the day early.
But also on the flip-side I think it's great to let them sleep in because I remember how I felt, and how my friends felt.
Lastly, perhaps public education is partially at fault? Sitting in a classroom for hours every day is exhausting, so how about a more hands-on method of learning where kids actually stand at a white board and write out problems and solutions - something that might work in the lecture part of chemistry, physics, math, and perhaps other courses? - We did this in homeschool as well as at the local college I attended and it absolutely helped me wrap my head around things better!
I ultimately have no dog in the fight as my family and I do our own thing, this is just my opinion.
I get that there are a lot of valid cases where the answer is "homework", "circadian rhythms", "evolution", but...
80% of the answer here is electronics, and really just social media + smartphones. It's incredibly easy to stay up too late when you're hyperconnected and chatting with your classmates late into the night. It just wasn't even a possibility 20 years ago.
Kids and teenagers need some time to do their own thing, so given that most of the "waking hours" are filled with school and other things that we effectively force on them, of course they try to steal some hours for themselves where they can.
In my case, it was programming 8 bit computers and yakking on the CB net a friend and I had setup. We had about 20 people on it at one point. Adults tuned in regularly to listen to us kids talk about all kinds of shit.
Amazingly, they left us alone.
One of the best things we adults can do for our kids, a lot of the time.
The other thing we can do is bring them a lot of hands on experiences. Doing stuff.
Both are high value.
I stayed up until 2 or 3 am reading books because I wasn’t tired. They’re staying up chatting with their friends because they’re not tired. The connection is the “not being tired.”
If anything, that teaches people to hate work (and life).
Children are dropped off at school at the time that allows the parents to get to work at the time required by their boss. And they’re picked up when their boss let’s them go.
The school day (in the form of sports/clubs etc) is extended to keep up with longer working days and the second parent having to work full time instead of part time.
And two parents have to work because they need the combined salary to make the mortgage work, for a home big enough for everyone.
We work too long and too much for too little and if we don’t address the root causes then little is going to really change
If only there were some way for students to get to school that wasn't their parents dropping them off. Some kind of bus maybe, but for students. We could call it a "school bus" perhaps.
This notion that parents have to hover over kids and make sure they "get on the bus" is quite recent.
If children are never allowed to learn independence, then you end up in this never-ending feedback loop of required supervision.
And some edge case about rural towns doesn’t mean much when even urban schools have this issue.
Elementary school is fine with its current schedule because all the students there are pre-adolescent, so the parents could still deal with getting an 8 year old to the bus.
Middle school is in the middle so might not have a good answer. It will likely have many students who have started adolescence and would do better with a late start but are not yet independent enough to be able to handle getting ready and getting to the bus without their parents still around. So probably need to keep early starts for middle school.
I recall taking the bus, on my own, since the second day of first grade. So did everyone else. Nothing terrible happened.
Children/teens don't have it easy.
This is the key right here.
I blame monetary policy for too-low interest rates, which drive up housing prices. I also blame over-restrictive zoning and other restrictions on building that cause houses to be more expensive.
medium-term monetary policy hardly has anything to do with it. Rather, the paradigm of single-family zoning makes it pretty hard to build dense communities en-mass, so the shortage of supply has lead to ever-increasing home prices.
One second-order effect of Covid is that it completely confounds the statistics collection for a wide swathe of issues. With a huge one-off exogenous shock in emotional and physical well-being, it’s basically impossible to make inferences using these statistics from the last couple years.
Maybe we can compute the “Covid baseline impact” but because of the very regional response, it will be extremely hard to control for this factor.
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/mental-health/index.htm#:~:....
> What sticks out is a large decrease in teen suicide rates during the summer vacation months of June/July/August. In contrast, the somewhat older group sees, if anything, an increase in suicide rates in the summer. There’s also a drop in high school suicides in December, around winter vacation.
https://www.basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide...
A ridiculous justification, of course, but that's what you get with a combination of helicopter parenting and a society overreliant on cars.
Allowing a 13 year old to walk to a bus stop would be extremely high risk for having police called.
There was no need to force all the other students to start earlier too. (And I would then nap in first period as a result of getting up early, which teachers would take in different ways. Some just left me, some would try catch me out by asking questions, but since I had just done the homework an hour before and read ahead on the material, usually I could answer)
It is, and a lot of people seemed to take joy in putting kids through the wringer for no reason. Not only do some people enjoy doing that to kids, they are also proud of it, and make up reasons for why the borderline abuse is actually good for kids. At least that was my takeaway from growing up in the US, that adults can be pretty sadistic to the kids whose lives they're in charge of.
> The Good: I think even mentioning the lack of sleep for kids as a problem is a good first step. As far as physical health, learning, and daily mood goes, good sleep is a really big part of the equation.
> The Bad: Despite having a later wakeup time, I think most teens probably will not get a whole lot of extra sleep. Kids are kids and will stay up later to play games, watch movies, or do whatever else they love to do knowing that they have more time to sleep in.
> The Ugly: I think acknowledging the mental health crises among many kids is a good step, but I don't think you're going to really fix anybody who might be in a danger zone by telling them that they have the option to wake up a bit later. I sincerely doubt that a sleep deficit is the issue that inspires extremely negative life-threatening behavior among anybody.
PS: As a practical matter, was it mentioned in this article if ending times for schools were changed by this new policy? If it was, I didn't notice it, and that's what I wanted to see mentioned here. I'm just thinking about my own past experience, but if school begins say an hour later but also ends an hour later, I'm not sure that would have been a net benefit to school-aged me. It would have been very difficult for me to get all the way out to my soccer practice or work my part-time, after-school job if the school's ending time was pushed back.
A known issue that I'm still trying to sort out in my 30s.
This needn't be true, the natural time for teens to go to sleep is 10-11pm [0]. So at this time they may feel tired, and go to sleep.
Teens are already staying up past their natural sleepiness time. Sleepiness is not the problem.
The problem with teens and sleep is not just that we expect them to get up early. We also expect them to go to school, do sometimes hours of homework, do as many extra-curricular activities as they can cram onto a CV, have jobs, spend time with family, and they usually want to have fun with friends and date. They're already sleeping as much as they can. (Many of them are also abusing caffeine and other drugs to manage all of it.)
Humans have two mechanisms for sleepiness. The first is a 'time since last sleep' function that builds sleepiness over time. This is delayed in teen. (This mechanism will respond poorly to later start times.) The second is a 'has it gotten dark' function that responds to the daylight. This is also delayed in teens.
Very likely many teens will simply stay up later. They'll have to in order to keep doing all they want and are expected to do.
However, the delayed start is still a good thing because it is much better aligned with the second mechanism of sleepiness, gives them more opportunities for sleep, and will likely reduce their morning grogginess, even if they don't get more sleep overall.
> When Seattle’s public-school district shifted its start time in 2016 (from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.), students got a median of an additional 34 minutes of sleep a night as a result. And in Cherry Creek, a Denver-area suburb, high schoolers slept about 45 minutes longer on average, and those improvements endured even two years after the change.
I’m also not sure what’s so “ugly” about your “ugly” point. Starting school later isn’t about solving every possible problem for at-risk kids.
A very short version of my answer to this is that it's a big deal because if this sort of action is portrayed to the public as solving the mental health crisis in teens, then the real reasons for many issues might be completely ignored. The bureaucracy might claim a false victory and then hope everybody moves on and ignores some bigger issues that creates such an unhealthy environment in schools.
Lack of sleep can easily exacerbate symptoms of what might be transient or mild mental illness, and allow them to develop into chronic problems with the potential for acute breakdowns.
There are some antidepressants that are on the market that are speculated to work not from their specific actions on neurotransmitters, like how SSRIs are hypothesized to work, but from the fact that they help with disordered sleep. They help with sleep by increasing the length of time the patient sleeps each night, and there's a correlation with getting sufficient sleep and reduction in symptoms of mental illness like depression, and symptoms like stress and anxiety, along with other illness like anxiety disorders and what not.
In its most extreme, lack of sufficient sleep over time can even trigger transient psychosis in otherwise mentally sound people. For those with predispositions for psychotic illness, sleep deficits can bring those symptoms to the surface, while someone who has those same predispositions and gets sufficient amounts sleep might never actually experience them ever in their lives. I think this is important for psychotic disorders specifically, as they usually present in early adolescence, so reducing factors that can exacerbate them is important. Psychotic disorders can and do ruin lives, however the severity of those disorders decreases the longer someone goes without experiencing them. A 17 year old with a predisposition for schizophrenia-related disorders who doesn't experience psychosis early on could very likely never experience those symptoms later in life, and live a normal life. That same person who does experience those symptoms, perhaps triggered by sleep deprivation, might walk away with a chronic condition that's expensive, significantly lowers their potential lifespan, and can be utterly disabling.
tl;dr: the amount of sleep, and types of sleep, really do matter when it comes to mental health
But why are so many people getting to that edge? People have been dealing with not enough sleep for a very long time and we didn't see some current day problems in the past. To me, this seems to show that a lack of sleep is probably not anywhere close to the biggest variable when it comes to the major mental health challenges that the current generation faces.
Theory. Sleep might be emphasized here by officialdom because it's one of the few additional variables that's politically correct enough to start to discuss and tackle. They can try and tackle sleep because no school administrator/media entity/politician is going to get cancelled (yet) for trying to ensure that the students get enough sleep.
I can easily see tons of kids going "oh now I can stay up till 1-2 am" and as someone that is currently struggling to actually fix my sleep schedule after going WFH, its hard to stay on track.
Despite all that though, I do hope this shows potential or at least reveals new information.
Even before the era of late night multiplayer games and browsing the Facespace and instatoks, teens were staying up, partying or prowling the streets. It’s been a stereotype since the dawn of time that teens go out late at night and are up to no good.
After all, somebody had to stay up and keep watch all night when we lived in caves.
Humans who need night watch take turns in short shifts.
> Places that have already pushed back school start times have repeatedly seen positive results. When Seattle’s public-school district shifted its start time in 2016 (from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.), students got a median of an additional 34 minutes of sleep a night as a result. And in Cherry Creek, a Denver-area suburb, high schoolers slept about 45 minutes longer on average, and those improvements endured even two years after the change.
34 extra minutes of sleep on 55 is pretty good IMO.
I had stretches where I would sleep/wake at a full 8 hrs and in time for school. I would be lying if it wasn't ~90% personal accountability of winding down when I needed to. Other 10% was if I were sick or had some insomnia which at that point wouldn't matter what I did or when school started. Even struggle with it now.
So yeah it’s technically not “impossible”, but it’s very difficult, and it seems to me without good reason.
> When Seattle’s public-school district shifted its start time in 2016 (from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.), students got a median of an additional 34 minutes of sleep a night as a result. And in Cherry Creek, a Denver-area suburb, high schoolers slept about 45 minutes longer on average, and those improvements endured even two years after the change.
I am a bit of a night owl myself, but I sleep much more soundly if I have a lot of physical activity across the day. If I walk 20 000 steps and spend an hour in the gym, I have no trouble falling asleep.
Teenagers being the bombs of energy that they are, might need some 5-6 hours of physical activity to actually tire and sleep well. But a typical highschooler sits most of the day on his/her ass.
The concept that everyone should keep the same sleep schedule and at that an early rising one is the product of the industrial revolution and Protestant work ethic in the west. It is unnatural.
Most of our lifestyle is unnatural (we live very differently from the original hunters and gatherers), but we could often find ways how to adapt without causing too much suffering.
If teenagers suffer, I would look at various methods how to mitigate their suffering. Starting the school later is an obvious quick patch, but we shouldn't ignore other problems, such as quality of sleep in general. Not least because some of the problems may persist indefinitely.
Having not enough physical activity is, in my opinion, a contributing factor, though not probably an overwhelming one.
And there were knock-on effects - due to bussing needs, they changed the elementary schools to start earlier. This meant they got out earlier, which meant they got home earlier...but suddenly the HS students who were built-in babysitters were not there as they were still in school, so working parents had to pay for child care or rely on after-school programs that may not meet parents expectations.
Also, teenagers who held after-school jobs, either to help the family or help themselves, found they not longer had the time to work, what with getting out later, homework, etc.
I was attending a boarding school in the 1990s as an 'external' student (which means I lived at home and commuted in each day). They started their first period at 7:15 am, because that allowed everyone to go to mess hall at the same time during dinner.
Which meant that to catch the bus, I needed to rise at 5am, showered and dressed half-dead, got into the bus at 5:45am, arrived around 6:45am, and stood another half-hour freezing. My brother, who attended another school, started at 8am, which afforded him 80 more minutes of sleep...
For normal classes which I had several periods during the week, one being in the early-morning spot did not make much of a difference. Then, one year, I got my favourite subject - physics - scheduled for monday morning, 7:15am, and thursday afternoon at 4:30pm.
I failed that class - in a subject in which I used to be a straight A student.
The policy had other effects, too. Eventually, I went on autocontrol, getting in on bank holidays (because at 5:00, I would wake automatically, but still was too brain-fogged to realise it was not a working day) on more than one occassion.
All that research about teenage circadian cycles came later - and it had absolutely no effect. My nephew is in that very school today (and thanks to my suggestion, because if you take the early rising aspect out, those were the best days of my school life). They still start at 7:15am.
Our 9-year old leaves on a (non-electric) scooter at 7.25am for the 10-min journey to school, he needs to be there for 7.45am
Our 6-year old leaves with me either in the car at 8.25am if we're late, or 8.15am on bikes if we're early, for kindergarden.
After all that, my wife gets up :)
Nowadays I struggle to get up before 10h30[1] (I set all my meetings starting at 10h30, and usually wake up 10 minutes before them -- the wonders of remote working). I have never been a morning person, and I cannot believe that there are parts of the world where children are forced to wake up so early. I'm sure it's fine for many, but it must be equally terrible for others.
In my college days, classes equally started at 9h, but I almost always managed to get them later. There was this own professor who insisted on having his class tart at 8h30 which is incredibly frustrating: he was a drunkard who, in spite of being the only one to haave a class start before 9AM, was always late, and AFTER 9AM. I got up way earlier because of this garbage human.
(I still very clearly hold a grudge against him, because he marked my final grade a 19.4/20; I'm sure he did it because he didn't want to give me a 20).
[1] I can get up before 10h30 fine, and sometimes I get up as early as 6h30 "as needed". But it's definitely not good for me "in the long run" and renders me less productive overall. It is clear my natural rhythm is going to bed at 2h-4h and waking up at 12h-14h. Alas, I go to bed at 2h-4h and wake up 10h-12h. I suppose I'll die younger, but such is life.
It's not the amount of sleep, because I've often been able to do great on just 3-5h of sleep consistently. I can sleep 5h, 10h, you name it, and it doesn't matter if I wake up early. Waking up early really ruins me.
I think we are flexible enough to be whatever we want.
Then I went back to past 9 and was happy.
There are definitely some people out there who have severely distorted sleep schedules that won't respond to adjustments.
However, I think it's far more rare than a lot of people think. There are a lot of people whose shifted sleep schedules come mostly from lifestyle factors, not genetics.
This becomes most obvious when you watch new parents adapt. Most of the "genetic late sleepers" I knew mysteriously became natural morning people after having kids.
I had a coworker who insisted he simply could not show up to work before 11AM due to his sleep genetics. That is until he went on a camping trip for a week and his sleep schedule completely normalized. He was showing up at 9AM wide awake (and happy!) for several weeks after that, but then slowly shifted back to his 11AM arrivals as his sleep schedule deteriorated from his lifestyle. The culprit, in his case, was late-night internet usage that he wouldn't give up. At least he recognized and accepted the actual problem later.
But I can very confidently say that while I can certainly function, be productive at my job, be liked by my peers, and be happy waking up at 7AM, I can be much better at everything, and much happier (and even creative!) if I just follow my more natural rhythm.
To be honest, I've grown particularly tired of some morning people insisting that if I just "tried it", it would "work" and that the morning is so much better and we can adapt. That I "need" to change because that's how "everyone works". I did try. It didn't work as advertised. Functional, even happy, but in nearly every way inferior to what I am now. Moreover, it's been obvious for a long long time, in many ways, that I'm not like "everyone else". Look at it from whatever angle, and I'm not. It's life, I live with it and enjoy it, and I guess that's what ultimately matters.
[1] Someone below mentioned this is based on the environment and context, and not genetics. I can certainly agree, but my environment won't change overnight, nor do I want it to. My life right now works much better, and makes me happy with my current schedule. Perhaps in the future it won't be like that.
If I can't sleep, then too bad. I'll sleep better the next day! It's self correcting.
Perhaps someday the routines of society will be able to accomodate starting the day a little later, at least I hope so. Maybe having the first few classes be less mentally intensive. It's difficult to implement changes, though... and there is no universal solution that would work for everyone. Maybe some more flexibility so teens can choose their schedules to suit their individual routines- that would be a good starting point- or something like some light calisthenics or a little stretching before beginning the school day... I feel like it might be helpful to ask teens themselves what they think would make their ability to study more productive and it would be very interesting to know what they have to say.
The secret? I had an early bedtime, typically 9pm, at least to start winding down. It definitely wasn’t cool, I didn’t see the interesting late night TV shows, I didn’t go out much during the week, and I generally wasn’t allowed to do sleepovers on school nights. But I had a rich social life, friends, fun and interesting activities, and did among the best at my school.
I know lots of kids who had no bedtimes or who were just in control of getting enough sleep on their own. I don’t think it worked out very well.
(For the record, I don't disagree with the premise that sleeping patterns do change during the teenage years)
Getting up approximately at sunrise should be fine most people assuming they have many of the other factors in place like a wind down period, screen time cut off, dark room, low or soothing sounds, good temperature etc.
However I cant imagine that for many kids they have all these in place, and Id find it hard to believe that anything a high school maybe trying to teach them today is going to be more lifelong value than maximizing their physical/brain development (until 25!) and learning good sleep hygiene.
What, 4am?
A parent needs their kids to be supervised until they come home from work. Kids need to get sleep. Schools are presently time shifted between 2and 3 hours early relative to parental schedules.
My only question is why? School could start 3 hours later and kids would get out roughly at the time their parents are coming home from work.
Toronto's public school board opens for 8:30 and classes start at 8:50. Work starts at 9 in Toronto.
Work on the other hand started at 9-9:30AM. While I didn't experience this directly, my mother must have had the brutal schedule of being up at 5 AM and arriving home at 6 PM.
I was in AP Classes, plus working 35 hours a week.
In hindsight, I would have filed for emancipation and started freelancing immediately.
High school is a waste of time.
It’s a hard thing to do in practice. You can’t have 1/3 a 1/2 of the classes duplicated throughout the day. Are you going to have two honors chemistry classes? Not all of the classes could be offered in that core set of hours when everyone was there. Or are you only going to have electives in the morning and afternoon hours?
It worked for the larger school because the classes were split by grade. So you didn’t have two freshman English classes. You had freshman in the afternoon and seniors in the morning.
The real problem is now instead of covering 6-7 hours of classes, teachers would need to cover 9-10 hours. You aren’t going to hire more teachers to do this. Is the Economics teacher going to only have classes from 7-10 and then 1-4?
The more I think about it, the more unworkable it seems.
I wonder if there are provisions for this in the new plan (e.g., the school opens early for kids to just hang around if they still need to be dropped off early).
In 1969, 48% of children walked or biked to school. In 2009 that figure is 13%. http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
Even if you happen to live close enough to a school and the walking environment is safe, it‘s not unheard of for Child Protective Services to be called on parents for letting their children be autonomous.
And with the decline in routine physical activity we are now generally less healthy.
at the elementary school level there were even some enrichment programs beforehand.
even if some kids still have to wake up early, they can benefit from not having to have to take tests until a bit later in the morning.
Feels like start times have gotten worse. Especially due to paranoia about letting kids walk around by themselves. Busing and low density suburbs. And school closures. Probably also administrators impulse to inflict control on students and teachers.
edit: as an early riser myself, that absolutely doesn't mean that I want to go in early. I enjoy having hours to myself in the morning, being able to relax, cook a nice breakfast, maybe watch a movie, before going in. I don't know why it has to be the standard that we be in a frustrated hurry every morning.
Middle school (grades 6-8) were waking up at 6:30 am to be there by 7:30.
And then high school (grades 9-12) was waking-up at 7 am to arrive by 8. 20 minute bike ride each way.
Kicker: I had undiagnosed sleep apnea, ADHD, anxiety, and depression.
You can't make teenagers sleep more by changing the number on the clock.
> Adolescents in the U.S. are chronically sleep-deprived, in part because most schools start too early.
The goal of changing the start time is to allow students to sleep more.
But changing the number on the clock doesn't mean students will sleep more. Allowing students to start at 8am instead of 7am will just mean they go to bed and hour later because teenagers are terrible about going to bed on time.
They aren’t changing the number on the clock like Daylight Saving Time did. They’re changing when you are required to arrive. They number on the clocks are staying fixed and that’s why it’s more likely to help.
But anyone who has flown between the East Coast and West Coast of the US knows that the sun doesn't determine when you feel tired or when you wake up: your sleep hygiene does.
I used to fly to SF from Boston and wanted to go to bed at 7-8pm every night and then would wake up at 4am. Not because of sunlight but because my body was used to that schedule.
> Researchers said the wavelengths at sunrise and sunset have the biggest impact to brain centers that regulate our circadian clock and our mood and alertness.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200220141731.h...
But if I take a short trip from the East Coast to the West Coast in the US, I often go to bed on the early side and wake up early.
I find the 3 hour difference to the west coast to be way harder to adjust to than the 5 or 6 hour (depending on destination) difference to Europe. I'm a zombie for a week going to California and spring right back to eastern time going home.
Going to Europe, it's about a day to fully kick over to the time change in either direction. Admittedly, it's a rough day headed east that usually involves an afternoon nap, but I've come to despise the three hour change to Pacific time far more.
Tech jobs generally don't have set times to be in. But most jobs do.
Teaching teenagers responsibility (to go to sleep on time and wake up on time) is an important skill to have.
No, of course not.
Because the times you get tired and wake up have nothing to do with an arbitrary number on the wall.
Anyone who has traveled more than one time zone away knows this.
> He says night workers are exposed to low light levels during the overnight shift, but as they encounter bright natural light on the journey home, their internal clocks lock on to the normal light-dark pattern that day shift workers are on. “So, you constantly have to override this sort of biological drive from the clock saying you should be asleep.”
https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/seasonal-affecti...
> A lack of sunlight might stop a part of the brain called the hypothalamus working properly, which may affect the production of melatonin, serotonin, and the body's circadian rhythms.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751071/
> Our circadian pacemaker, the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) in the hypothalamus, is entrained to the 24-hour solar day via a pathway from the retina and synchronises our internal biological rhythms. Rhythmic variations in ambient illumination impact behaviours such as rest during sleep and activity during wakefulness as well as their underlying biological processes.
I guess the doctors quoted in these articles didn't work in multiple timezones then.
My argument is that you can override this with good sleep hygiene, which teenagers don't have. You have to fix the hygiene problem, not the clock problem. They are trying to fix the symptoms and not the cause.
However, the ironic thing is you are arguing for teenagers to wake up early and NOT sleep in. It's the long wavelengths of light at sunrise and sunset that reset your circadian rhythm:
> Researchers said the wavelengths at sunrise and sunset have the biggest impact to brain centers that regulate our circadian clock and our mood and alertness
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200220141731.h...
Shifting your arguments to different topics is only fooling yourself. You bring up points, which are refuted, then you claim it has nothing to do with the topic. That's disingenuous. Now you can look back and figure out where you've misstated the facts and you want to reset the conversation. Let's do that.
> My argument is that you can override this with good sleep hygiene
That's not an argument. That's a fact everyone agrees on.
> You have to fix the hygiene problem, not the clock problem.
This strategy that has been pursued for decades (and you have continued to parrot) is an unmitigated failure. There is an acute statistical academic penalty for setting the arbitrary school "early classes" starting time around ~6-7am^. This is primarily used by students who are either trying to catch up due to poor past performance or to get ahead by those pushing the upper bounds. There is a small cadre of students for which this schedule aligns with parental obligations, but it has been shrinking for decades. Due to the pareto distribution, you can guess who makes up the largest demographic.
> They are trying to fix the symptoms and not the cause.
Time to explore other strategies, as that's been a failure for a host of reasons. Let's start with the realities of being an adult vs child->young adult (youngling, in aggregate).
Adults manage a stable rhythm via self-training as part of a long term strategy that dovetails with stable biological development - which is negatively affected by other long-term changes like having children, ie mommy brain. Parents have to get up earlier than the earliest classes to prepare for transport. School transportation schedule tend to serve the median start time, not the boundary, if you didn't notice.
Younglings have increasing autonomy, hyperactive metabolism and erratic hormones. They have poor (or none) training for what is likely a temporary time in their life, along with the other stresses on themselves and the family.
The symptoms are the problem because you cannot address the cause. No amount of PSAs are going to help, because it's been tried and failed. Like most pundits, standing along the side and claiming "that won't work" or "we aren't doing X enough!" rather than trying to take a different action to generate new data, is compounding the failures.
^My parents and I had me in early classes for a few months before we communally agreed to stop. It wasn't effective learning for anyone in the classes, to say the least.
Humans aren't totally divorced from biological cycles.
As a matter of fact, the article cites data from Seattle and Denver which shows that teenagers slept more after schools in these areas changed the number on the clock.
Then after a year or two it will be the same problem again.
Changing the number on the clock to get more sleep is like taking out a loan to pay down your debt: sure you will be able to pay off your housing and car payment today, but soon that loan you took out will come due.
>
> Then after a year or two it will be the same problem again.
According to the article it lasted for over two years.
Actually they are changing the position of the sun on the sky.