> Terra Ziporyn Snider of Severna Park, Maryland, still remembers how difficult it was for her son to wake up for his 7:17 a.m. first-period class…
> 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!)
Does that law account for "zero period"? From my quick reading of the bill, I think it does not -- so probably not that much will actually change. School may start at 8:30, but zero period will still start around 7:30, and some schools might create a double-zero to go earlier still.
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.
I recall reading in numerous places that the reason for that is so that the same bus fleet can be re-used to bring the elementary school children in at the far more reasonable time of 9 AM. I don't know if it's true, but if it is it's a uniquely American social phenomenon - inadequate public transport, a strange mixture of nanny state mentality and indifference to the welfare of children, and penny pinching all combining into a perfect storm of chronic sleep deprivation for an entire demographic of developing brains.
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.
Is there a reason the US have a specific kind of school bus rather than using the same vehicles as public transport?
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?
Yeah, in my country, the school bus program was just discounted annual tickets for the regular bus service, and a consideration for school locations/start times when designing the schedule for the regular buses
My school district in California also put us on a city bus. I can't remember now whether we got a discount or full vouchers, but the bus line/schedule had definitely been chosen to support the school. It worked great and also familiarized me with the bus system, so when I grew into middle/high school I knew the lines and could get wherever.
No not really, at least when I attended. I checked and 1st period is at 9am now, which is better. There was a cluster of suicides in my grade and the grades after, which might have led to the change. I left after 10th grade to finish high school at the community college down the road, which is a really excellent program offered to students who aren't "doing well" at the high schools. Honestly this option (Middle College) probably saves lives. The only hard constraint was a 12-2pm (iirc) class with the other high schoolers, and other than that we chose our own course schedule from the community college.
many areas will have an 'official unofficial' public bus that coordinates its route to transfer students to the school bus and vice-versa at the end of the day. in effect this means having to wake up even earlier though.
The law does actually - you can have zero period but it can’t count towards the instructional time required for students.
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.
At my school, band was 1st period, orchestra was 2nd period, and the band teacher was away for the rest of the day teaching band and orchestra at elementary schools. Jazz band was either in 0 period or didn't exist.
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)
Sounds like what we called 'early bird'. And, as an early bird, I loved it. I understand why the people who need to sleep in feel strongly about it, but still, everyone talks like that's the only correct answer. Can't make everyone happy.
When I was in high school some 20 years ago, I had to be up no later than 6 if I wanted to make my zero period choir class. And moving it after school was a no go due to related (theater or band) extra-curriculars. Regular school started at 7:20. We have exchange students, and it's slightly better for them at 7:45…
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 gasped at the 7:17am opening class time. That's absurd. I think mine was something like 8-8:30am, and even that was hell. It would even be absolute hell now as an adult.
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.
Idk, it is a matter of preference. I was hard for me to get up for school because I went to sleep late, because I didn't care enough about school. If the school started (and ended) later, then I'd to sleep even later. What mostly matters after all is the number of hours you slept.
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.
My HS (early 2000s in the Midwest) started at 7:0x through the years, I remember 7:04 and 7:07 start times. It was all about “minutes of education” as that’s what the funding for schools was based on. 5 minutes between classes to hit your locker, the restroom, chat with friends, and get to your next class. They were such jerks about it that they’d literally lock the doors to the classrooms the second the bell rang, then do hall sweeps with the security guards and anyone who didn’t get into a classroom got automatic detention. If that happened 3 times in a school year, you’d get a week suspension and your parents would have to come in and talk to one of the vice principals.
> They were such jerks about it that they’d literally lock the doors to the classrooms the second the bell rang, then do hall sweeps with the security guards and anyone who didn’t get into a classroom got automatic detention.
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 went to a high school in the same district as this one, 7:17 am was absolutely brutal. I had it timed down to the minute so I could sleep as long as possible and not be late once I started driving myself.
When I was teaching, I'd get into school for about 7:15am (so wake up at about 5am), so I could make sure I was prepared for my lessons that day. My first class was never before 9am, and school ended at 3:30pm.
I just couldn't have coped classes starting that early.
- 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.
That was my morning, my evenings, my weekends and my "holidays". I could have added more to the list. Teaching is not about babysitting kids for 60 minutes while you scroll though a PowerPoint.
I know obviously that it isn't. If only because when I went to school there was no PowerPoint and I am old enough to have TA'd on a blackboard with chalk.
It also didn't include anything that had to be done in the morning such as commuting. I am not suggesting that school should start at 7:15 but, if school began and ended earlier, all of those activities could be moved after school ended (possibly to the previous day).
Yeah, my high school started at 8:50 am too, and that still felt too early. This article mentioned that Seattle high schools used to start at 7:50 am, that seems absolutely nuts.
I’d peg roughly 9:30 am as a good time for high schools to start.
Ireland here. My school (which thought entirely through Irish, aside from English lessons, obviously, advertised itself as starting and finishing early, and it started at 08:30 as well.
It's weird looking back on high school and realizing how much of it was ridiculously cruel. You'd have teachers and parents all telling you that it's your fault for not having better time management skills or executive functioning skills, all the while you're 15; you're still growing mentally and physically; you're sleep deprived as hell; and the work is just piling on, and on and on. Their advice, I kid you not, was to just squeak in work in every possible situation. On the subway? Read your assigned book. In class? Sneak in some homework. And sure, kids procrastinate. But they procrastinate because they want to have leisure and they feel absolutely no control over their lives.
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.
I recall simply being unable to wake up for first period at 8am most days, in late high school. Waking was painful and nothing felt better than sleep. However at night, despite efforts at good sleep hygiene and consultation from a counselor, i couldn’t get to sleep before 11 or later. My grades and mood suffered greatly, as did the relationship with my poor mother. She battled with me day after day, first thing in the morning, to go to school.
The first few years of college I did not schedule any classes before 10am and had effectively perfect attendance. Mood problems faded as soon as high school ended.
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.
Pretty much the same. It's like everything is exactly backwards. High school was brutal. I should have started school at 11 AM. Now, I absolutely get my best work done between 5 AM and noon.
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?
My high school started at 8:30 twenty years ago, and it was hell waking up to be there on time. Cut a period and let kids go in at 10am. 9:30am at the earliest. This, of course, will never happen. Even if it did happen, school at 10 implies that kids will wake up at 9 or earlier, which is still torturous.
School start is really bounded by the start of the average parent’s workday, unfortunately. Mom and Dad start work at 9 am. Kids need to be at school before then. None of this 10 am start talk makes sense for the kids that aren’t on the bus line and have parents that drive them to school.
This is the problem with American cities in general.
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.
Scratch the minimum parking requirements and allow people to fill up those spaces with new buildings. Maybe require basement parking or multistory parking at least.
Over time the city will grow denser and all other stuff like bike lanes and public transport will simply make sense.
> But how can we fix it? Tear down all the cities and start over?
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 have to transport 2 weeks worth of groceries with joint pain, or Ikea furniture in the street because the deliveryman couldn't access your street.
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.
- 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!
> 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.
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.
Culture is harder to shift, and I was mostly talking about France, but your points on increased density neighborhoods are valid nonetheless.
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.
They want to turn a city into a car-free one but regulation ties their hands. As long as the city transitions, its citizens have two problems that lead to them being driven further and further away from the city proper.
You raise some good points, but I wanted to touch upon this one:
> 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.
> It's all fun and games until you have to transport 2 weeks worth of groceries with joint pain, or Ikea furniture in the street because the deliveryman couldn't access your street.
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.
Yeah, sorry. That doesn’t work in a huge percentage of areas in the US. Heat, cold, darkness, lack of infrastructure, and distance.
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.
Cold weather and darkness are not obstacles. Here in Finland the winters are darker, colder, and longer than in the vast majority of the US, yet even elementary schoolers usually go to school by themselves, often by foot or on a bike, sometimes by taking a bus or a train.
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.
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)
Helsinki is one of the Southern-most cities of Finland situated on the edge of a large body of water. Instead, take a look at this Not Just Bikes video covering biking in Finland during winter: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
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.
Pierre is the capital of South Dakota - though Sioux Falls is the largest city.
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!
Some of what you say in your second part makes sense, although it has absolutely no bearing, nor is it a counter argument to the post you are replying to. It certainly doesn't refute the parent poster's statements about now, today, right now, instead, at best, maybe over 30 years, change could slowly be enacted.
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!
My comment was not an attempt to refute the entirety of what the parent comment stated (since I agree with most of it), merely a response to a tangential aspect of it.
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.
> Because when someone starts talking about rural living in the US and Canada, Finnish experience has no parallel.
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.
No, the problem isn't suburbs. Those are densely packed enough that a bus picks kids up. It's rural areas that don't have mass transport, which makes sense.
Suburbs are not densely packed. Picking up kids in a school bus would require over an hour, even in the small suburb that I live in. Rather, everybody either drives to school or is dropped off there: the parking lot of the high school is the same square footage as the school itself (excluding the football field).
Then you probably either (a) really live a rural area/exurb or (b) don't understand that they can operate more than one bus or (c) live in one of the areas that has had local government intentionally killing off bus service.
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.
I live in a Bay Area suburb that is decidedly not rural.
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.
> ie, there is ONLY the road to walk on, and it's unsafe because of the snow
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.
Solving the infrastructure problem is extremely costly. Sure it can be done, but that means someone else doesn't get done. You have to pick your battles.
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.
The roads are already built, and the towns are already laid out in ways that require cars. Arguing that the roads, towns, and cars could be changed so that walking to school is reasonable... while technically true, is not particularly useful in anything but the very long term. There isn't the money to do that.
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".
Ok, maybe it is partly caused by the design of cities.
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.
>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!"
Actually, there's even a name for that kind of hyperbolic misrepresentation of what someone else was saying so you can pretend their argument wasn't even valid.
Suggesting that cities aren't designed correctly is obviously implying that the solution is to redesign cities.
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.
No need for a complete redesign. Further up, it was suggested to put the schools near to where the students are - in the suburbs. That's a common sense policy Europe does naturally, and which everyone who spent some time playing SimCity (or the likes) understands.
No need to nuke LA and rebuild, just take a few plots in the middle and put a school in there.
This seems to not take into account the size of towns. For example, the one I live in is ~23.5 sq miles. If you put the schools in the center, you're looking at approximately a 2.5 mile walk each way for the children on the outskirts (the town isn't perfectly round, but close enough). And even that is assuming there's a direct "as the crow flies" path; which there certainly isn't.
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.
Hm, 2.5 miles are 4 kilometers - perfectly walk- and bikeable. Any teenager easily can do that, over here, they would. I do not see the issue, especially since it will not hit everyone.
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)...
House keys and a bus though could work though for 90%+ of kids even in places with extreme weather [0] and you could have pre-school programs for the 10% that can't either because their too far for bussing or can't get themselves to the bus, eg those with assorted disabilities. You're right though the school start time is tied to it's function as free daycare for children so parents can work, COVID proved that is a critical part of schooling for the modern economy.
[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.
Why is it that we can radically transform human society in the first place, but we simply cannot design our cities and schools and work days to just let teenagers sleep in a bit more? There's absolutely nothing immutable here and these are all problems that can be solved. Why can't workdays be vastly more flexible for parents? Why can't public transport be vastly superior to allow teenagers to get to school whenever needed?
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.
I disagree with this, I think it's just a force of habit, where outdated industrial era behavioral patterns keep propagating themselves because no one takes the time to rethink them.
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.
Why does no one take the time? Because they don't get paid for it. The root cause of almost everything is "I made more money that way". I remember reading that Feynman tried to work on an education board, but gave up because of corruption, lobbying and no one really caring about learning outcomes while prescribing books for kids..
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.
Phoenix area schools all are required to provide busses for junior high and high school kids that live more than 2.5 miles away. That is generally a walkable distance, even in the May and August heat. I know, as from middle school on I did exactly that (walked or biked ~2 miles to and from school in the Phoenix metro).
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.
So, we're going to start school an hour later to let kids sleep in. And then make them get up at the same early time so they can walk an hour to school? And then likely get to school smelling like a pool of sweat. That sounds sub-optimal.
I’ve ridden skinny tires in the snow and… yeah I’d probably chance it in MN (at least Saint Paul where I actually lived through a winter, can’t speak to Minneapolis but I’d bet it’s just as passable). I’ll never do it again in Seattle, where even arterial streets have a grade unsafe for foot traffic in freezing weather conditions.
you can't speak to Minneapolis from St. Paul? I've never been to either but Minneapolis-St. Paul is one city, isn't it? Twin Cities, Minnesota Twins and all?
I grew up in an incredibly rural town (population ~1200) in new england. I had to walk half a mile down a dirt road to catch a bus at 6:30am. It's often still dark out at this time -- having a later start and still having to do the walk would have actually been safer. Not that it was particularly dangerous. I was more worried about a coyote than anything else. The bus ride was an hour long.
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
when I was a teen I was sent to bed at 10, had no trouble falling asleep and got plenty of sleep. I know teens like to rebel and do what they want and stay up late, but that's different than saying it's difficult for them to actually fall asleep at a reasonable hour and it seems rather drastic to rearrange everyone else's schedule to accommodate staying up late playing games and texting
I'm well aware of the research, I'm talking about the scheduling.
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
I always wonder when reading the posts about how it's impossible for kids/teenagers to get to school by themselves because of weather, are the parents happy with the type of dependent children they create? Children that have to rely on their parents to get anywhere until well into their teenager years seems like a disaster to me. How will they ever learn to become independent?
> 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.
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.
Getting home is a big issue for a lot of families. School ends around 3 pm, but most kids do some sort of after school activity like a sport to bridge the gap until after 5 pm when a parent can come through the pickup line. Growing up, there was also just general “after-school” programs. Basically just day care for after the school day that would cost extra.
most schools are located near public transportation and even if there are no bus stops near the home it is generally easy enough for kids to get to their parent's office/rec center/ friend's house etc. basically you have a lot more options when everyone is no longer rushing to be at work or school
Those kids in Phoenix and Maine should just take a school bus like half the kids in America that cannot take themselves. Phoenix suburbs aren't that sparsely populated.
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.
from the ages of 8 to 13 i woke up at 5:45 and did a double public bus transfer every weekday to get to the out of district rich kids school, approx 45 miles
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.
in Ontario you are not allowed to leave child alone before age 16. I'm sure there are states with similar age limits.
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.
Wait, what?! A 15 year old cannot be left unsupervised? The parent can't leave to pick up a loaf of bread and the child can't walk over to the neighbor's house?
That's a horrible law and I sure hope there are no states with a similar one!
I agree that's a horrible law. A few states do have similar laws. Illinois e.g. is 14 if I recall correctly.
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.
Culture shifts are real. That doesn't mean they're justified. It's certainly not a topic without nuance, but I will say that if and when I have children I will do my best to ensure that they are capable, aware, and that their autonomy is respected within my local community.
As I said, I agree with the notion - we are certainly raising our kids to be independent, critical thinkers and safe operators - and I believe we are succeeding.
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.
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?
Many states in the US have very vague laws about “when the child is ready”. Basically if anything bad happens you are in trouble.. so people are slow to talk about it.
To the degree the community allows it. If society as a whole decided on making things better, tons of things would change (including a mixed zoning and multi-family housing overhaul), but as it stands local cities and counties have vast power in managing themselves, and they have a vested interest in continuing to divert resources to their biggest income sources (single-family homeowners).
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.
It can be argued that single-family homes and the associated low-density land uses are only cash cows in the short term, and are in fact ticking timebombs in the long term.
It is also bounded in the other end by sports. If your school day goes too late, you won’t have time in the afternoon/evening for sports practices. So, if you still need X hours for classes, you’ll need to start early enough to get over in time for 1-1.5 hour practices.
(It also applies to other extracurricular sports, but I doubt anyone really worries about play practice schedules)
Delusional. Sports are competitive. They require daily reps. Sports are also meant to keep kids physically active and healthy, and to establish a routine of physical activity into their adulthood (alongside intellectual productivity). You can’t just be physically active and healthy on the weekend.
Then have sports be an acceptable substitute to gym classes and a regular part of the day. I doubt anyone can explain to me why the captain of our football team also needed to be in gym class playing flag football with us in order to graduate in a way where the answer isn't bureaucratic.
At some point you have to decide on an optimum between time, sleep, and output.
I’m not defending daily gym class. I’m defending daily sports.
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.
That sounds great to me as an athlete, but I know there are many kids who would hate being forced to be part of organized sports.
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.
As someone not from the US all this is bizarrely moving a health concern into school which should be about education and nothing else. If it's reasonable for school to prescribe exercise for kids why not have them schedule doctor visits for the kids and create meal plans? Where is the line?
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.
That happened in a lot of places. In fact, one of the good policies that emerged from COVID was that in order to remove the stigma of "kids who qualify for free lunch," the school district made all meals free. I think you still have the option of buying extra food if needed. My child still has about $80 unused in his lunch account for the last couple years.
It probably has as much effect on later adult quality of life as anything academic they could be doing, but yeah I suppose there are very different cultural views on this in different places. Where are you from btw?
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...
>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?
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 agree with the option to do other activities. I didn't like sports much, but I liked lifting in off-season, but when I didn't want to play in any sports (we didn't have power lifting) I got taken out of off-season and put back playing full-contact half court while the PE teacher tried to ignore that almost no one was doing anything physically active.
It's not just sports. I didn't do sports in high school but I had quite a few other after school activities. And, no, it wouldn't make sense for everyone who wanted to do extracurriculars to come in on Saturday on a regular basis--probably driven by parents.
In the UK schools get around that problem by running 'Breakfast clubs' kids can turn up early and get a nourishing breakfast from a bit before 8am. The school day doesn't start until just before 9
Same. Hell on earth. I would never get up fresh no matter how early I went to bed. Most of my health problems started there and so many possibilities were lost! I'd rather have skipped early lessons, get bad marks, but had more energy to study later!
I don’t know. My schools first period was 7:50, but that meant we’d normally have to wake up around 5:45 in order to get ready for the bus, which came by our house around 6:45.
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.
What on earth were you doing for an hour in the morning?! Even today I can be out the door in 20 minutes and forget it, as a teen I probably could do it in 7.
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.
We lived right on the border with the neighboring school district, so I was one of the first kids on the bus. The school was only fifteen minutes away but my bus ride was 45-50 minutes one way, and the bus got to the school with 10 minutes to spare before the first period.
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.
A lot of that is sleep hygiene. People rarely had issues falling asleep early before electrification. And we’ve made it even worse with TV, computers and smartphones. Being very conscious of light consumption and turning off devices several hours before sleep makes it pretty easy to fall asleep earlier.
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.
In my opinion teenagers need time for entertainment and socialization. When adults do it it's normal but when kids do it it's "TV bad, computer bad, smartphone bad".
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.
9 hours of sleep every night?? I'd be happy with 6 or 7. But I'll need a full-time housekeeping staff and a personal assistant, to cook, wash dishes, clean the house, wash clothes, take care of house stuff, pay bills, go grocery shopping, and everything required for even a basic lifestyle, etc.
This is pretty cool and it's probably healthy. I was homeschooled my whole life with super strict parents - mom was an Olympian, and my father owned a construction company. My brother and I had to be up by 5:30AM for chores and exercising as this was also my moms routine. We were doing school work by 8:00AM with a small break around 10:30AM, then lunch at noon.
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.
> why is it so hard for them to get going in the morning
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.
It's natural to blame this stuff on the latest bogeyman but I doubt it has anything to do with smartphones and social media specifically. I was in school before smartphones and social media, and I just stayed up until the small hours talking on the landline.
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.
Yes. The forms change with tech, but the basic dynamics are the same.
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.
> 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.
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.”
I grew up before social media, and I stayed up late reading books. "just one more chapter and then I'll go to sleep". And I'm not even a book nerd - I haven't read any fiction in over a decade now, it's just what we had. I think young people will find something no matter what.
It’s not the state in control of when children sleep, it’s business owners.
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
> And two parents have to work because they need the combined salary to make the mortgage work, for a home big enough for everyone.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Snark doesn't solve problems. When I was in middle school, it was a 45 minute bus ride. The same bus had to drop us off at 7:30 am so they could get back in time to pick up the elementary kids and get them to school on time. So the bus picked us up at 6:45 am which means we are waking up around 6:15 at the latest. That isn't sleeping in. The GP is right, the parents still need to be there for the 6th grader to get on the bus and ALSO make it to work on time at 8:00. Not everyone lives 5 minutes from work. In some rural areas parents have an hour drive even after their kids get on the bus or get dropped at daycare.
In the country I live in, we have a pretty good public transport service. I still had to get up at like 5:30 in the morning, to get to grade 9+ on time. (8 ish in the morning for the first period) From taking a long time to properly get up (constant sleep deprivation) to taking a bus to get me to the bus that takes me to a third bus that takes me to school, plus some wait times in between... And also a lot of heavy books...
That’s because the school is still scheduled around driving parents. If children majority took the bus, they could start school at 10:00 and leave it up to the remaining car users to make that work.
And some edge case about rural towns doesn’t mean much when even urban schools have this issue.
I can only speak to where I went to school, but even now, 90% of kids ride the bus. I'm not sure how school can start at 10:00 if the parents have to be there to get an 8 year old safely on the bus but somehow still make it to work by even 9:00.
It is teens who due to changes they undergo during adolescence that would greatly benefit from much later school starts, and they should also be old enough to be able to get to the bus without parents supervising them.
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.
Where I live, middle school aged kids still run the risk of big trouble for being unsupervised. 6th grade starts at 11 years old. So the bus can drop them off and pick them up, but better be there when they leave and when they get home.
It was the same for me in the US in the 1970s. I rode the bus to school from first grade. Yes my parents were home in the morning and helped me get ready but I walked to the bus stop in the morning and back home in the afternoon.
This notion that parents have to hover over kids and make sure they "get on the bus" is quite recent.
Kids walk to and from school at like 5 years old in Europe. In some countries they also walk home for lunch, since there is a break with no childcare where they have to go home to eat.
If children are never allowed to learn independence, then you end up in this never-ending feedback loop of required supervision.
> That’s profoundly unsettling, particularly in light of data released by the CDC in April showing that 44 percent of high schoolers said they’d had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” during the past year, and 20 percent had seriously contemplated suicide.
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.
This is ridiculous. The CDC doesn’t care about teenagers’ mental health. They’re using this specific effect as an argument for something they actually care about. School is itself deleterious to teenagers’ mental health. School causes suicide. This is as you would expect from an institution that constrains them from doing what they want and following their interests, that is hostile to their autonomy as such.
> 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.
In the UK it's normal for schools to start around 9am. I thought this was some kind of avant gate experiment letting teens start at 11am, I would've loved that at 15. I didn't realise schools started so early in the states, 7am seems pretty sadistic to me
This was also a thing in Ireland. The school building opened at 7:30am, but it was basically just the principal and janitor in that early. As one of the kids getting dropped off relatively early (7:45am), I just did my homework in the school building until classes started at 9:15am, which meant my evenings were free.
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)
I get it for kids younger than 8-10 (depending on the kid), but after that age kids should be able to get out of the house and to school on their own. For the youngest it can be solved with a before school program. The kids just need a place to eat breakfast and chill with their friends before the school day starts.
Letting a child under 18 step outside without being in a car or under direct parent supervision is child abuse in the US and the police will usually be called.
No, there are countless shocking cases of police showing up for things like a child was playing in the front yard unattended while the parent was inside and in some cases the child was taken from the parent due to this “abuse”.
Allowing a 13 year old to walk to a bus stop would be extremely high risk for having police called.
It absolutely happens often enough all across the coutnry to be a serious concern for parents, and you can find plenty of news articles about it with some simple web searches.
I see kids wandering around my neighborhood by themself or in groups all the time, and where I grew up(rural CA), I roamed 5-15 miles away from home regularly on a bike or 4-wheeler.
Early start times in the US long predate both the large growth and suburbs and the shift from almost all kids having a stay at home Mom to having both parents employed outside the home.
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.
Wait until you hear how much vacation and health care we get. As pampered as Americans are in a lot of ways, we also screw ourselves over plenty. (But don't tell the citizens that, they think they don't have to do anything to get better living conditions)
> 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.
Regarding the bad you listed, the article addresses it and basically debunks your concern. Schools that made the change saw teens getting more sleep.
> 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.
> I’m also not sure what’s so “ugly” about your “ugly” point.
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.
> Despite having a later wakeup time, I think most teens will probably not get a whole lot of extra sleep. Kids are kids and will stay up later to play games ...
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.
I think you're overstating what the source is saying a bit. Yes, that's literally what the source says, but it feels exemplary and to the extent it's true, it's true because of a lot of hidden assumptions. The source is basically saying "a normal teen in a vacuum gets sleepy at this time" but it points out many ways in which teens are not in any such vacuum and how they should be trying to get into and stay in that vacuum. A real teen doesn't live in that vacuum.
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.
> > 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.
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
I understand that sleep is a variable worth studying and improving and that somebody on the edge of the bubble might be pushed over that edge if they also had to simultaneously deal with a lack of good sleep.
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.
About the ugly: While I don't think just being tired is the essential cause of many problems, it does seem like it could be pretty wide-ranging. So, if every decision you make is a little bit worse and your emotional state is always just a little big degraded, this seems like it could compound pretty easily -- you'll be dealing with the consequences of your previous poor decisions while still tired and irritable.
re: your PS - it will depend on the school district, but my daughter’s high school is significantly extending their day. They were allowed to leave this year at 225 (with an optional 7th period that went to 310). Next year, they end at 329. And she gains no benefit in the morning because they already started first period at 830.
I get it... at the same time though, sure it was hard to wake up in the morning but that's because I would be up till 12 am playing video games, lol.
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.
There’s been research that shows teens have something like a shifted biological clock.
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.
I've heard of this research. I wouldn't at all doubt it. I think 8:30 is perfectly reasonable... I just don't think it will have the effects people think it will. Maybe a marginal improvement which is fine to shoot for... but I just see too many kids choosing an extra hour of games/phone vs sleep.
> 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.
Society has always done plenty of things that are hugely unfriendly to basic human nature. Historically it's often been out of necessity, but fortunately we're well-off enough now as a group to afford changing that.
Maybe your stayed up later because that was the time your body was at its peak awareness. It could be conditioned that way, or it could be built into your genes.
After all, somebody had to stay up and keep watch all night when we lived in caves.
Congratulations, you have reinvented a scientific hypothesis. Unfortunately I can’t find a related article in one minute’s search but IIRC even sure extremely small groups, less than 10 people there’s enough variety in sleep patterns that on average someone is awake for all but ~30 minutes most nights.
That’s their and/or their parent’s choice to make, the important point is that the system shouldn’t be set up in such a way that it’s impossible for them to live a healthy lifestyle.
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.
If school starts at 7:30 and you live an hour away with school morning traffic, you’d have to get up at 6am at the latest. Given the need for 8-10 hours of sleep (particularly for highly active athletes who need the extra sleep for muscle recovery), you’d need to go to sleep between 8pm and 10pm. My understanding is that its very difficult for teenagers to go to sleep before 10 for biological reasons, so only a teen with monk like discipline could get the bare minimum (and even then that might not be enough depending on their exercise regimen).
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 can agree with this. I did always find it a bit jarring that I had to wake up before the sun was even out, lol. Thinking about it now you raise a good point. Haven't woken up that early in years. I find it 100x easier to wake up when I have the blinds open to hit me in the morning.
I wonder how much of this problem is caused by our sedentary lifestyles.
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.
Individual and age based preferences for early or late sleeping schedules have been observed in modern day hunter gatherer tribes. It is highly doubtful that this has anything to do with modern lifestyles instead it is a feature of humanity.
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.
Many studies have shown that teenagers go to bed later and wake up later, and forcing them to wake up earlier is bad for their cognition. People generally start naturally waking up earlier as they get older.
Personal anecdote but I was extremely active in high school, playing football, mountain biking 20-40 miles every week, and working an outdoor job, and it was a nightmare to wake up for my 9:15am classes. High school for me was 1999-2003 so I didn't spent a whole lot of time on the computer, which was in my older brother's room.
Thank goodness. May this herald the beginning of an era of sensible public school policies. We don't need to be making the lives of teens harder than they already are.
My city did this last year. It...sort of worked. For the responsible kids who didn't have problems before, they continued to do well, perhaps even improving. Unfortunately, what we found was many kids, seeing that they got to "sleep in" every day, stayed up later, thus erasing the benefit.
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.
7:30am class was only part of the problem. Sports practice before school (that would need to conclude before 7:30am class) meant I woke up at 5am for much of my high school years.
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 12-year old (but turning 13 soon! :eek:) has to leave the house on foot at 6.50am at the latest for the 10min walk to the station to catch a train to school, he gets there around 7.35am and his first lesson starts at 7.50am
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.
I think I very rarely woke up earlier than 7h30 or 8h30 as a kid. I recall school starting usually at 9am.
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 have tried this. In fact, I have lived for several months consistently waking up at 7AM because I had to. I functioned, it was okay, I was productive and I'd say happy, but eventually I drifted back to my natural schedule and I realized ALL that I was missing out on and had forgotten about.
People change. My mother used to be a "party girl" and she says that her life completely changed when I was born. She started waking up early, like 7AM, and that was far out of her schedule (I think she lived like me, to be honest). So I'm sure I may one day change, but that hasn't happened yet, even after living for the aforementioned months in a very different way[1].
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.
I'm less of a morning person and more of a strict early bedtime person. I had horrible sleep for a long time until I put my sandal down and set a strict bedtime.
If I can't sleep, then too bad. I'll sleep better the next day! It's self correcting.
Obviously. Comparing different sleeping times without keeping the same length would be way too obvious for people to point out as a problem, even if forcing oneself to sleep earlier isn't as easy as people try to push.
> I think we are flexible enough to be whatever we want.
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.
Sounds about right. Sleep disorders are rare yet everyone thinks they have a sleep disorder. It's most likely poor habits. The best thing for me was having a routine.
When I was in high school I went out to catch the bus around 0630, and if I didn't have some caffeine before starting the day being able to focus was nearly impossible. I could function with less sleep then, but even so mornings have always been difficult. I tend to be far more productive at night, and falling asleep is earier during the day.
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.
That's amazing. My high school started at 7:05. By senior year, I began systematically missing first period because I just couldn't get up and ready on time without feeling terrible.
In belgium my school started around 8.30, which meant getting up at 7.30 in my case. I always had a very hard time waking up and was often tired during the day. However in summer, time in Belgium is 2 hours ahead of what's considered 'natural time'. In winter, with DST only 1. Summer or winter, I was always just as tired. Now I need to wake up at around 8.30 for work. I'm still just as tired, since I just go to sleep later. So I'm doubtful this will help much since in my experience the hard part is going to bed early enough.
The issue with kids is theres often a lot of real problems with how they actually get to school. In the US kids will often wait anywhere from 5-20 minutes for the bus, sometimes in 0° F (-17.8° C) weather. Not to mention that waking up before the sunrise has its own issues with decreasing mood.
Why shouldn't this be decided at the local level? My high school kids have responded to a later start time by going to sleep later, so I'm not sure there has been much benefit.
Absolutely, as someone that got 10+ hours of sleep year round for multiple years in high school (early bedtime, early waking), the dread of having to sit in a class and learn horrendous nonsense was more of a motivation to sleep in then actual physical necessity. I suspect it's the case for many adolescents who see little value in secondary courses.
Personal anecdote here, and I’m sure things have changed in 30 years, but I feel like it was never a problem for me to attend class starting at 8:15. I had to get up at 6 or 6:30, do outdoor chores like taking care of animals, including in the dead of winter and lots of snow, get a shower, eat a healthy breakfast, catch the bus by about 7:45, and ride in.
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.
There's a study linked in the article about how this isn't statistically how most people work. But you know, it worked for you, so let's just keep doing what we're doing.
I recommend reading Matthew Walker’s “Why we sleep”. Needles to say, as a sleep researcher, he’s a big proponent of schools starting later for kids and youth in the formative years. Especially to make room for the “late morning REM” sleep that appears to be very important for young humans with developing brains.
Can I ask why this was down voted? Looking at the linked article the author, while not a scientist in the field, seems to base his claims on reputable scientific research.
This is exacerbated by an unproductive amount of both homework and screen time.
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.
I find it very unconvincing that parents needing to get to work on time necessitates starting school so early. In Ireland (a country with very poor public transport) in the 2010s I started secondary school at 8.45am. This usually meant getting up about 7.45am, and being dropped to school by parents about 8.30am, so they'd have plenty of time to make it to work by 9. In what universe is making teenagers arrive in by 7am justified?
I train a teenager who happily starts school at 8:00, but having huge troubles on the weekend to play before 11:30. Not possible even with 2 cups of strong coffee. Probably because his parties usually last until 4am on Friday and Saturday. The challenge will be to play now on the county level, because these games start at Sat 10am not Wed 5pm anymore. Troubled times for teenagers.
Not totally a benefit. In the Midwest, if you start class at 9:30, as some middle schools do due to bussing availability, you’d get out at 4:30. In the winter, the sun has set. How horrible that is to feel like the day was spent inside a dingy and neglected building. The advantages of sleep must also be weighed against other psychological benefits.
The advantage of the decline of public TV is that I can get to sleep now at around 10pm, so I get up at 5:30am every day, to serve my cats.
Starting work at 6:30am is a revelation. I get so much more done in the morning, without any interruptions.
I really don't understand the pressure to start schools so early, it seems contrary to the goals of both children and parents.
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.
Places where schools start early also may be places where work starts early. For example, I live in Calgary. My high school started at 8 and many kids got there at 7:30. Work in Calgary also starts at 8ish in my experience.
Toronto's public school board opens for 8:30 and classes start at 8:50. Work starts at 9 in Toronto.
This may be a Canadian thing. where I went to school in Connecticut, school began at 7:15 AM with the first busses arriving at 6:30 AM. A non trivial portion of students had to be out of the house by 5:30 AM to make the bus.
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.
the supervision argument has always been strange to me because after school you have gaggles of unsupervised children who have maybe a 2-3 hour gap between the school day ending and their parents getting home. are kids dying in droves between 3 pm and 5:30?
As a perrenial night owl, I always wish there was parallel social systems from schools to businesses to accomdate people who thrive at night. But enabling 8 hours of sleep after midnight bedtime is a start.
Tha doesn’t always work. The school I was supposed to go to for high school (before moving prior to the year starting) did that by default. Grades 11-12 started early and got out early. Grades 9-10 started later and ended later. There were about 3 hours of overlap.
I think the comment you are replying to would suggest that for every kid that choice gets to be made by their parent(a) /guardian as to whether or not they start late or early.
I was trying to give a counter point about that type of flex schedule already happening at some schools. But it isn’t based on parental choice.
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.
Seems like this could create a group of kids who were formerly driven to school and live out of schoolbus range, but their parents go to work too early to be able to drive them now.
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).
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.
We need penalties for these nosy people who call Child Protective Services when there is clearly no danger to the child. In some states, you can get in serious trouble (jail time) for abusing E-911 service, why can't people get in trouble for falsely reporting a child who they know is not in danger? The trick is how do you define "clearly"? I'd at least expect a caller to be able to articulate a specific danger they observed the child was in (someone following them or the child was not dressed for the weather, and so on). Not just "he's alone therefore help".
I don't know about California but I know in the state I grew up in, there was a legal requirement for the school to send a bus to pick you up if you lived in the school district and were further than walking distance from the school. Several times our bus ended up with a new home added to the route midyear, which required some tricky maneuvering on dirt roads and created a longer ride for anyone whose stop came after those new spots.
I remember high school back in the 1970's. Classes started at 8:30 and had 6 periods. But the last one was all optional classes. It's deranged they didn't flip that.
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.
Will they, or will they have a lot of free time in the morning? Time they could even spend doing homework, giving them their evenings free and clear.
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.
Yeah, like that would work. My parents weren’t completely unreasonable about bedtimes but did require us to go to bed by something like 10 or 11PM so we didn’t keep them up all night with our noise. I would then lie in bed staring at the ceiling until I fell asleep at 2AM. Nothing I was able to do would help me fall asleep sooner. Then I’d just barely wake up at 6AM and drag my ass into the shower. I’d basically sleep through first and second hour. Our lunch started at something ridiculous like 10AM. My body couldn’t make heads or tails of it and my circadian rhythms were totally fucked for the next 4 to 8 years. Luckily I have a sane job now and haven’t set an alarm in about 20 years.
You’re right but no one wants to admit it. It’s just like how computers have become orders of magnitude faster over the years, yet end users feel none of it because we use every new cycle we can squeeze out. Likewise, if you give kids more hours, they’ll fill them with more extracurriculars or computer time.
For grades 3 - 5, forced busing 90 minutes each way in California to the bad part of town because of skin color required waking up at 4:55 am every morning. Didn't get home until late evening. If I was any other ethnicity, I wouldn't have been required to be subjected to a worse and more dangerous school.
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.
The later they start, then the less time they'll have to get in trouble after school. Basically no one gets in trouble BEFORE school, right? Oh wait.. I got suspended once before school. Is there any studies on whether or not people are more likely to get in trouble based on time of day?
Afternoon rush hour tends to be worst than morning rush hour since more people leave at the end of the workday at the same time than arrive at the start of the workday. For schools, does letting everyone out at the same time create more opportunities for conflict and trouble? Or does the before school period that's usually unstructured allow more due to how little supervision there is? For my schooling, I remember far more after school conflict, most arising from events during the school day. Kids tend to forget grudges much easier than adults so maybe in the morning they're not as upset at the insult they heard from a classmate as they were the previous afternoon.
This type of thinking is backwards. Ignoring modern human behavior is what has contributed to student (and faculty) performance problems for 50+ yrs. Poor performance in the earliest classes is a leading indicator for class performance overall (similar to broken window theory). Supposing (pretending?) that arbitrary time constraints will force behavior without confounding effects is the kind of willful ignorance that has perpetuated poor academic performance around the world.
I see it as yet another case where we're cutting against the grain of humanity for ascetic reasons. Bonus people in power love imposing stuff like that on other people.
Tell me: If you go to bed at 11pm and wake up at 7am every day, and then change time zones, do you magically go to bed at the new 11pm and wake up at the new 7am?
No, of course not.
Because the times you get tired and wake up have nothing to do with an arbitrary number on the wall.
> 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.”
> 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.
> 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.
I'm not arguing that the sun isn't good for you or that bright lights don't make you feel of more awake. Of course they do.
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
> I'm not arguing that the sun isn't good for you or that bright lights don't make you feel of more awake. Of course they do.
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.
The thing that changes sleep isn't actually the clock changing. It's that in combination with "Our business/school opens at 8 AM every day" and the sun behaving decidedly different from that.
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.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’re atypical in this way? I’ve done flights from the US to Europe, and not slept during the flight and landed in the morning in Europe. While I’m initially tired, I’m unable to fall asleep in this situation. I spend the day walking around outside and eating at local time. After going to bed just a little earlier (wall time) than usual the first day, I’m adjusted because of the sun (aka the number on the wall), food intake, etc.
It's not just the GP. I've done both US Eastern to EU and US Eastern to US Pacific enough times to know how I respond.
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.
That's a red eye you're talking about though. Yes, I normally try to fight through the day and go to sleep at a normalish time for the location. And I'm usually on a decent schedule within a day or two.
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.
Many studies claim the response people have to the manipulation of light intensity, color, and duration, does effect several aspects of the person. Sleep hygiene does seem to play a large role, but the sun is likely the largest contributor to the human body's roughly 24 hour circadian rhythm.
Ironically it's the wavelengths at sunrise which have the greatest affect. If teenagers are sleeping in they don't get to see these:
> 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.
Absolutely not my experience at all. Something as simple as the sun rising up sooner in summer makes me inclined to wake up and be active earlier, whereas winter makes me feel groggy and mediocre for several hours until the sun is actually up.
> You can't make teenagers sleep more by changing the number on the clock.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
You're massively over-generalising there. Some will do that, sure. But this should make it better for some teenagers, without making it worse for others. That sounds like a good solution.
> changing the number on the clock doesn't mean students will sleep more
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.
> 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!)