Schools Are Slow to Learn That Sleep Deprivation Hits Teenagers Hardest
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.
Schools are government-subsidised daycare first, educational institutions second, which is the reason they often fail at teaching students but rarely fail at keeping them in place.
From that perspective, why would you change a child's school hours to anything less compatible with their parents' work hours? If anything, I would expect the trend to be towards longer hours at school, perhaps by more tightly integrating after-school activities.
There's no good reason for high school hours and parents work hours to be coupled, unless it is necessary for a parent to drive the kids to school on their way to work (i.e. because the bus is too slow and would require waking up hours earlier).
In which case the actual problem has nothing to do with education policy, and everything to do with the parents' decision to live in sprawl.
The US is about thirty times larger than Poland and much of it was developed after the wide adoption of automobiles. Few children live within a mile of their school here, and of the ones that do, there are often not walkable routes to get there. Many roads in the US have no sidewalk and are intended only for vehicle traffic.
I am one of the few parents that trusts their own kids to walk a short distance to school by themselves. I have received a few comments from other parents implying negligence for trusting my kids.
I have doubts that it's busy roads that changed this behaviour.
Is that really true? 80% of Americans live within large metro areas rather than rural areas.
Look for the percentage who actually live in the cities, vs. the metro areas.
And when I lived in the Denver suburbs, my brother attended a couple of county schools. The junior high was at least a couple of miles away, the high school more like five. Do not underestimate American sprawl.
Part of it is the spread-out car culture of the US, where virtually the entire country is so car-centric that walking anywhere is prohibitively difficult and/or risky. It's kinda self-reinforcing - walking is awkward and discouraged, so almost nobody does it, so there's no incentive to fix any of the walkability problems, like missing or neglected sidewalks, bad traffic light behavior, huge parking lots everywhere to cross, etc.
But the bigger part IMHO is the stranger-danger paranoia. Google the free-range parenting movement here for a few disturbing stories. The media hypes up stories about rare child molesters who kidnap children off the streets for better viewership numbers, then people start to think that kidnappers are everywhere and you don't dare take your eyes off a kid for a minute. This makes its way into policy and expectations. Add that into the common viewpoint here that if you have a child, they must be the most important thing in your life and your entire life must be centered around improving the kid's life. You get a society where letting a child, or even teenager, walk to school seems so outrageously dangerous and irresponsible that kids may sometimes be picked up by the police and returned to their parents even though nothing is wrong, and the parents may sometimes even be investigated themselves for their supposedly wildly irresponsible behavior.
When I first went to school, my mother told me not to accept lollies, gifts or rides from strangers. The same fears existed, but people tempered those fears and kept paranoia in check.
What has most probably changed is the social attitude which has become far more judgemental and much more intolerant. I've given a lot of thought to these social attitudes and I see today's society as closer to the Torch and Pitchfork scenes in Beauty and the Beast (think of the feminist attack on Matt Taylor by The Verge as one of many examples of extreme verbal aggression by the masses). This mob intolerance has become popular and frequent in the last 10 or so years.
The media and political classes just creates an environment where it seems more dangerous for their own benefit. People who are constantly afraid buy more newspapers/click more news links and will vote to reduce their own rights. All the better if the dangers are essentially imaginary - the gravy train can keep running without worrying about figuring out something to do that actually solves the problem, or the problem going away once it's solved.
Most german friends I know of started earlier than 8:00 too (most started at 7:30). And yes I'm talking about actual lessons starting at that time - not "day care". Even though from our point of view there seemingly wasn't really a difference between those anyways...
This may not apply to urban families who take a train or bus to work. I commuted to high school on a subway by myself, and would have preferred leaving an hour or two later.
Also, living in a city isn't the only solution. I lived in a suburb ten miles away from the city but all 3 schools were <15 minute walks.
You hit the nail on the head with this one. High school hours are specifically set to end earlier than elementary and middle school hours. This is so that high schoolers can pick up their younger siblings and walk them home while parents are still at work.
Unless, of course, they need a ride to school.
Walking works great even when the roads are unusable for cars. The only relevant limit to walking in the winter is your clothing.
And it was easily possible to walk there, or later, bike there. (although I had to walk every now and so often when my bike broke down in -14°C in winter).
I don’t really see where the issue is?
Today, same school, same neighborhood, is a traffic jam every morning, as the kids are all driven to school. I could very well imagine parents saying that it's no longer safe to walk, due to the traffic. :-(
It was literally impossible to drive on the road for cars during the half hour each morning and afternoon where we kids were there.
Similar to Amsterdam or København
Every student on a residential college campus that's bigger than tiny is going to walk 3 or 4 times that in a day. Middle school students will stress their bodies a few orders of magnitude harder in sports practices (or even light exercise).
4km a day, or later 8km a day is nothing, and has never caused me or anyone else I know – and literally every child here does this – any issues.
Even today, when I’m bored and I know the bus will only come in 30min, I usually just walk 6km home from uni.
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I’m not even sure if your comment isn’t just satire, exaggerating the helicopter-mentality of some northamerican parents.
And yes, every specialist I've been to has said all I can do is try to protect my joints until I eventually decide I want surgery.
It was also easily the worst part of the day, so I can't blame parents from wanting to get their kids out of that.
In these places, everyone who matters politically has a car, everywhere they want to go has parking, roads are huge, etc. so there is no political will for expensive transit, and the surface area is too large to cover effectively with cheap transit.
It's not ideal, but I didn't have my parents drive me (I didn't have a car). I don't see why high school students can't do this.
Perhaps I should have clarified, there are no buses/trams/subways or any type of public transportation in my school district for high-school students to take, because there is no public transportation period in my city. The only options for going to school are walk, ride a bike, or drive, and the first two aren't practical during winter - that's besides the fact that I lived three miles away from the school.
I'm reminded of how my school district carefully made sure that the austerity or budget-freeze budgets which happened when voters failed to approve their preferred budgets always just happened to not have enough funding for football...
I checked my high school and others districts to confirm they operate on an 8 am - 3 pm schedule +/- 30 minutes. Is this uncommon?
560 min or 650 min periods, 45 min lunch, 15 min morning break. 6 hour minimum day. Any extra time is padding for registration or longer breaks.
This seems pretty reasonable to me.
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
Also, its not just kids. The Stanford prison experiment showed that. Also riots during power outages. Also the Serbo-Croatian war. Any time a breakdown of public order happens, folks all over revert to savagery.
My 11th and 12th years happened in 2008/2009 so good luck having a job as a high schooler.
I really learned almost nothing, which isn't the fault of my teachers or anyone else. I would have been better off in a radically less structured educational environment, something as simple as being put in a room alone with some books and an offline computer for 4 hours a day, with long breaks in between to exercise and socialize.
Previously he woke around 5am, but now it is after 7am every day.
As someone that is definitely not a morning person, I think I am starting to rub off.
Kids seem to be normal enough and adapting. If anything, they're a little more independent than most kids that age I've met in the city.
When I am emperor dictator, no schools open before 9AM.
Here's a reference for that (from 2002): http://bul.sagepub.com/content/86/633/3.full.pdf
> To take your argument ad absurdum, if your job had started at 6pm, would you have gone to bed at 11am?
A lot of people that do shift work sleep and wake at odd hours. Also, during undergrad and grad school I tried to schedule nothing before ~2pm. I would sleep from 6am to 2pm. ... Not sure if any of this applies to high schoolers, though.
Children need to learn discipline. School is where they learn.
Not sure why downvoted.
I had the same thing happen in college. When classes start at 3 I go to sleep at 8am.
Of course, maybe it's harder to do this nearer the poles but, in the tropics we get near equal hours of day and night.
I have found sleeping early and staying away from modern tech 30-45 mins. before sleep to be _immensely_ beneficial.
For a while I had to wake before 6:00 and it really sucked at winter when sunrise here is after 9:00. This has little to do with the amount of sleeping. To my surprise I managed to switch to going to bed before 10pm. It is precisely waking up in the dark that was problematic.
Schools operate as if the majority get tired and go to bed between 7 pm and 10 pm. This is just wrong, in world with TV and internet and electricity.
@downvoters: what's wrong? going to bed at 8pm or 9pm is common for childs and teens.
>http://www.wsj.com/articles/teens-need-later-start-to-school...
So you stay up late at night and wonder why you barely wake up early in the morning? So shocking. Maybe because you stayed up too long the nights before?
There is a reason why people go with the natural day-night cycle. If you life a different life-style for what ever reason, feel free to do it, everybody has different preferences, but don't write BS and get personal. It's well known from various studies about shift workers that working a different cycle than the natural day-night isn't that healthy in the long term.
Such studies show that the natural balance of the sleep portion of the wake/sleep cycle shifts towards 1-10 am for young men and becomes more resilient.
The "day/night" cycle is the external cycle that interacts only to tune the sleep/wake cycle. Suggesting that the sleep/wake cycle and the day/night cycle should be aligned, and that such is natural, is incorrect.
I'll link you some papers when I get home. However, in the mean time, I suggest you re-read some of those studies you are claiming to habe read.
But it meant I didn't know what happened on the cool TV shows and I couldn't see late-night (East coast). Not something I let bother me.
I think it's more about discipline than people give credit for. Farmers, arguably rooted in schedules that developed before electricity and TV, are up very early (even I had to adjust when I worked on a farm- but I did). We would get up near or even before sunrise so that we were ready to work when it got light.
So I agree with frik. I have a feeling this as much about discipline and self control as anything else.
My personal schedule as an adult is to start working around 10am. Oddly enough when I am on vacation I tend to trend towards getting up earlier. If I need to get to work early for a meeting e.g. I tend to feel very tired the entire day.
I think some lot of this is related to how our sleep patterns are screwed up by artificial lighting. When we go camping we generally don't have fires and we go to sleep when the sun sets down and get up when it comes up. It all feels very natural after you've done a few days of that...
In my mind, the only ideal solution for kids is a much more flexible schooling system that runs from the earlier hours to the later ones. Students would be able to select their classes (there's never THAT many in grade school) based on times that are convenient for their mental health and living arrangements. So Suzy could wake up and start classes at 8 and go home at 3, while John, who like me hates early mornings, could start classes at 10 and go home at 5. Of course, a bunch of organizational problems come up and let's not forget that anything run by the government is dreadfully inefficient, but in an ideal world, I think this kind of system would work.
This is what stood out to me. I'd like to know more about how this study was done, but if it's valid this is one of the most compelling arguments I've seen for changing school start times.
That might not work for everybody, but I advice everybody to try out what works best for them.
My point is that naps are good but at some point they're harmful for your night, and 3 hours is getting close. I believe it's better to keep at least 7-hour nights and have 30- to 90- minute naps. But the truth is that school hours are poorly designed.
This is a kind of biphasic sleep by the way.
As you can probably tell, I was not a popular child with teachers/authority in my high school days :P
Remembering when I was a teenager not too long ago, I could have told you the same. To this day, however, I am a night owl, which has also been shown to be more common in more intelligent persons,[0] so it really is a potentially more hard hitting situation to those brighter than average as well.
[0] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
You understand the global history since the neolithical times rougly, and your own contintents history since the 1500s pretty exactly.
You understand how algebra, analysis, stochastic work, and can do simple mathematical proofs.
You know the laws of physics, how and why things work, you have learnt general and special relativity, and even know parts of quantum mechanics, including being able to work with the probability functions of electrons.
You know basic chemistry, understand what each element is, know a large part of organic and inorganic chemistry, have experimented with it, and can explain why some molecular bindings work, and why some don’t.
You speak fluently 3 to 4 languages, and can read standard literature in them, as well as being able to write essays about cultural topics in them.
You have had PE, know how to play a majority of sports, and have a physical condition where you are able to play them.
You know the historical styles of art produced, and when and where they were produced, and have experience working in a majority of styles yourself.
You know how our political system and our economy works, and know how to do accounting and taxes for yourself. You know how to start a company, and the trade offs of different types of incorporation.
You are able to work in teams, can delegate work, know how to learn things from existing sources and do your own research, how to write scientific papers, can debate with others in a civil way.
________________________
Excerpted and translated from the curriculum for high school students in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, 2012.
(And I can attest that what I learnt in school fits this description)
History, yes. Algebra and basic proofs yes. Basic physics were covered, but no calculations were ever done with relativity, and no quantum mechanics.
Chemistry covered the elements, molecular structure, and several dozen compounds. The Krebs cycle was roughly covered in biology class, but most organic chemistry went unexplored.
Language classes were enough to half-learn one beyond English, and not to fluency.
PE yes. Art history no.
The mechanism of government was very well studied, but politics were largely ignored. The economy was not a subject of study except for a bit about the Great Depression. Accounting was barely mentioned, and definitely not taxes or incorporation.
Teamwork? It was practiced, at least. Research and debate? Yes, pretty well.
That leads to the question: Why is the US education system always portrayed like that?
This means for example that my sister who is more artistically talented than I am was sorted into the high school track that is shorter, teaches only the very basics of these topics. Her highschool track ends at 16 and students are expected to go into a college that teaches some kind of physical skill, she did graphical design, and after that got accepted into an academy of arts.
In contrast I went to the highest highschool track, did everything parent post mentioned, did that until 18 (6 years) and was then expected to pick a higher learning college (which we call university) to which you are generally automatically accepted if you have a higher learning high school diploma.
I often wonder how the US deals with this. My sister would be severely unhappy at my highschool being constantly confronted with topics that would be hard and uninteresting to her. I would likely be bored and vastly unqualified for proper university if I went to hers. How would you put us in the same classroom? ( though I would have loved to go to the same school as her, she rocks :) )
For cases like your sister, there was options for classes to be taken. She can take many different art classes over the course of a couple years to help build a portfolio for submitting to colleges. I on the other hand had 2 maths, 2 sciences, and an English class my final semester. It was great since it so closely aligned with my college studies and helped me get ahead (AP). I never felt difficulty in college having taken these APs either.
Just setting the record straight, it's not the complete Wild West over here. Just some schools are stronger than others. My school is pretty standard as far as schools in south east Massachusetts go.
In my 4-year public high school there were at least 10 different math courses. The lowest students would still be taking some remedial arithmetic and such, normal students would take algebra, and I was taking discrete (first year).
This applies for pretty much all study areas, with AP/advanced options available for the best students and remedial courses for the worst. There's also a large degree of flexibility in choosing your schedule, so students who aren't planning to go to university could choose mostly shop classes and have half days for their final year or two of high school.
The end result was that I wasn't in a single class with the remedial bullies from elementary school (where unfortunately there is substantially less segregation, with the only solution being to move up a grade).
The vast majority of students at my public high school definitely graduated with most of those skills. I didn't go to a particularly special high school, just a normal public school in Vermont.
I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that most high school graduates in the U.S. are not fluent in 3 or 4 languages or able to solve problems in organic chemistry and quantum mechanics. This is, after all, a country where merely teaching the theory of evolution vs "intelligent design" in public school is still considered controversial among the general public, and people have trouble locating the countries they've recently spent a decade at war with on a map.
That being said, I do agree there are large inequalities in education between states. I certainly don't think most US high school graduates are fluent in 3 or 4 languages. Heck, I'm not.
But that's a far cry from claiming that "Almost no one graduating in the US would have even one of these skills." Some large states actually have decent enough education that I'd expect their students to at least pass half the skill list.
[0] http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/h...
What do you do in high school all day long then?
(Edit: In fact, it seems MA would be pretty competitive globally against other country's schools - 9th in math, 4th in reading, 2nd in math. On the other hand, the worst U.S. states are on par with Bulgaria and Kazakhstan, among others.[4])
[1] http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/h...
[2] https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/
[3] http://www.aecf.org/m/databook/aecf-2014kidscountdatabook-em...
[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2014/09/29/i...
For one thing, most items on the list wouldn't even be covered by U.S. standards (i.e. Common Core). Speak 3 to 4 languages fluently? The requirement to graduate in my state was 2 years of a foreign language (my school offered Spanish, German, French, and Latin, but options vary from place to place). Even assuming two years of a 55-minute a day class, 180 days a year, was enough to become fluent, that would leave you with two.
Similarly for science, you're required to take some basic science classes - intro chemistry and biology were the only required ones at my school. You wouldn't touch organic chemistry unless you took an AP (advanced placement, for college credit) class, and the teacher decided to cover it. I did take AP Chemistry and received college credit - we still didn't touch anything from organic the entire time, and I couldn't have even told you what a functional group was when I finished. Physics is just an elective and calculus-based wasn't even offered at my high school, so the majority of students aren't taking it.
Understanding special relativity? Quantum mechanics? General relativity? The highest math requirement is algebra 2, which might include a brief intro to how to add and multiply matrices. So exactly what level of "understanding" are we talking about this hypothetical median high school graduate having, in any country? General relativity is advanced enough that most physics majors won't even cover it beyond a superficial introductory level. You'd need a decent understanding of differential equations, linear algebra, and tensor analysis to tackle that kind of stuff, and the highest students could ever typically go (without the administration bending over backwards for a few particularly bright ones) is AP Calculus.
So I really have trouble believing the list of expected knowledge described in the GGP is anything other than a wish list for the best students. U.S. public schools may not be great but even I wouldn't criticize them for not meeting those standards for typical students.
That aside there are some real problems. Where I graduated HS, about 15 years ago, things were divided into the Honors program and Vocational program. The honors program was where you basically got what we might think of as a normal high school experience, teachers actually expected at least a minimal amount of work from you, and the better students had the option of AP classes. The vocational program was for everyone else. I knew people in it who didn't turn in any work their entire four years of high school. The classes were made to maintain a reasonable graduation rate despite having to deal with a large number of students who simply didn't care or for whom everyone had very low expectations. Those students might take two years of Spanish, but they weren't expected to be able to speak or understand it in even the most rudimentary way. Forget about actually learning algebra or knowing how to "solve for x." Even at the community college I attended, there were students who needed some science classes to do nursing who couldn't grasp the concept of atoms being made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and therefore couldn't get credit.
This is just how it is for a large portion of the populace - the really bad cases are far worse. My girlfriend is currently a student teacher at one of the two lowest performing schools in our state. She has immigrant students (in junior high) who not only don't speak English, but can barely read or write Spanish either. It seems like about 15-20% of her students would simply fail if she didn't take steps to try and get them to the minimum passing grade. But would it be better to hold them in the 7th grade indefinitely? Or to pass them along to a higher grade despite having only rudimentary understanding of the material outlined in the standards?
I know one thing she has changed her mind on recently, with actually being a teacher, is that it's possible for every student to get an A. It would take massive interventions beyond what a few teachers are capable of to turn around students from poor, rural, impoverished communities, who sometimes have histories of assault and abuse, and who have been perpetually falling behind the ideal outcome a little more every year. For the really poor outcomes, or just the suboptimal ones, it's a lot more complicated than just "what do you do in high school all day long?" The cases of having students primed for learning but not given enough resources are far fewer than the ones where schools are taking disadvantaged people who have already fallen behind and trying to make the best they can of bad situations.
I'm no fan of the U.S. public school system, but even I can't blame it for not being able to get students up to those kinds of standards before graduating.
I think I would qualify...
While the public schools in the US need some work, many of the people I talked to that 'didn't learn anything' didn't want to put the time and effort into actually learning.
Instead, time was spent on complaining about the system.
Stress and sleep are the same physiological system. The best way to recover from stress is to sleep. Not surprisingly, increasing stress also inhibits memory, learning, and attention. So by driving a stressful lifestyle with few hours of sleep, students are working against the need to strengthen the brain. Sleep literally seems to refresh us, consolidating new memories and washing away built up toxins.
Don't set an alarm clock - set a time to sleep.
This could also probably reduce the wasted time of going to school and going home, if you only have to go their where personal attendance is necessary.
School today works in a way where the teacher doesn’t teach the students things directly, but where the students try to explore and understand themselves in small groups, with the teacher only giving hints.
This technique started in the applied sciences, where the concept of giving students a task, like "find out what this material is" (chemistry), and letting each group then design an experiment on how to test it, and then – after they succeeded or failed – letting each group present their results to the others.
Nowadays, it’s used in almost all classes, from language classes to math, from PE to compsci.
Streaming such classes – which are the majority in todays schools – would be an impossible task.
EDIT: Again, if you downvote, please comment why you did so – an open discussion is always better than just plain downvoting, as it helps understand why you disagree.
FWIW, Not only is streaming education possible, it is already happening in the home-schooling world, and k12.com comes to mind, which is driving online education in public and private schools. Trust me, I attend educational trade shows, and I see increasing number of vendors in this space. And yes, some of this is moving to the traditional classroom, but we are a few years off of it being common.
You can’t work on an experiment in chemistry or physics or biology via streaming together (aside from the fact that buying all the required materials is a financial impossibility).
How is playing an excerpt from a theatre play in groups possible online?
Almost all language and scientific education requires direct interaction.
> it is already happening in the home-schooling world
Which is something that most nations have declared as "not properly fulfilling the right to education of the child".
________________________
I’m seriously questioning how you propose kids do scientific experiments or do theatre plays, etc in groups via online education.
As far ALL things require physical interaction... no. That is simply untrue. Some do, not all. You gave valid examples of some that do, and I agree with those. But you are approaching this discussion with absolutes and tossing the word "impossible" around enough that I want to respond with quotes from the Princess Bride.
In university, we always have for each course each a lecture (which is pure "listen and learn") and a lab (where we have to do things ourselves in groups, show the others our results, solve things together, etc.).
A lab and lecture for each course, 4 courses per semester. And it’s a pretty good combination, we get experience with practical stuff, and can learn better, but we also get to hear specific details in the lecture we might have missed if we had only done the lab stuff.
As far as I know, this education is standard here in northern Europe, and has been for as far as I can remember – but then again, I’m only 19 :D
When I see the school bus picking up kids in my neighborhood at 6.45 I feel so sorry for the poor bastards. A buddy once told me that they start so early because they need the buses later for little kids.
And it has other bad impacts. They most likely get breakfast around 6am. How can they keep it together until 12pm? So of course, they snack on a bag of Cheezy Poofs in the morning. Doesn't help with good eating habits.
"Too big to succeed"
We need education to be able to change fast and adapt. Something we clearly cannot get with these large institutions.
Perhaps school six days a week with shorter hours for more days per year? Or just full year schedules with shorter days as you increase in grade?
Schools cannot adjust for the schedules of their students times simply because there are too many variances. Start times will simply be followed by changes where the advantage wanted gets lost
So nearly all of our population experiences their most impressionable, value forming years under the influence of schools, which almost all operate in a similar way. You'd expect this to have a profound effect of behavior, on the level that religion can have. So yes, schools make for a good "catch-all scapegoat" because the impact that they have on society is so large that for any given problem with society, you can probably find a quite reasonable causal link from schools.
The term "armchair expert" is used to make anti-intellectual arguments. It's usually not hard to tell the difference between someone arguing a carefully considered position and someone who's just hastily defending their ideas against new information, or whatever it is that people do. Don't lose the signal in the noise. If you don't consider any of it signal, then there's no reason to be in this thread.
But it's not like teachers are especially qualified in this area. Some are because they consider it a professional obligation to keep up on such literature and have an informed opinion on the issues the encounter, others simply because they're naturally inclined to care about these matters. But teachers in the US only need a bachelor's degree and a teacher's vocational training. Having a bachelor's degree doesn't make them any more qualified than the average HN commenter, and the vocational training typically doesn't bother with child psychology or pedagogical philosophy. The only factor that makes teachers any more qualified to speak on this than HN commenters is their lived experience working as a teacher. Such experience is subject to bias, for example, selection bias favoring the way thing are because the ones who disagree never became teachers or got fired. More importantly, though, it's not very exclusive experience. Everyone has a reasonable amount of experience with the education system from their 13 years in it as a student. People also get to experience working with children from an adult perspective when they become parents.
I appreciate that not everyone can do this, but my wife and I home school our daughter, and one of the very things we talk about is that we're glad we don't have to wake up earlier than our bodies need to get the child somewhere. That's not the main reason we home school, but it's a nice benefit.
Edit: I meant to add that the main reason we home school is to get to spend the most amount of time with her as we can. It's such a precious time and I wouldn't want to see her gone most of the day.
This is unduly personal and not in the spirit of civility which is supposed to govern this site. In fact it's a downright nasty response to cesarbs's perfectly cordial comment. Please don't post like this. If you'd left (or edited) out the first paragraph, the comment would have made your point without putting someone else down.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11410231 and marked it off-topic.
Most of the time I get questions as comments to my comments, and can’t answer them because of "You are submitting too fast".
So I type my answer to that comment, leave the browser tab open, and wait an hour to submit it.
This obviously makes discussion with others quite problematic, and I’ve even thought about starting a second account just to be able to answer other comments with less than a few hours delay.
(Ironically, this comment was also posted in a similar way: I wrote it 2 hours before posting, but had to wait again and again for the "You are submitting too fast" to end).
Every parent I know loves their children and is delighted with them, but they leap at any opportunity to spend time without them. A night out with adult friends while the kids sleep at the grandparents' is a luxury to be seized. Not quite what the previous poster was getting at, just another data point in the complex relationship between parent and child.
There is a spectrum of characters in children, some don't respond well to homeschooling (or other non-school based education). Moreover, some parents don't have the knowledge, imagination or general wherewithal to be directly responsible for aspects of their child's education.
Children are also for society as a whole, as much as continuation of the species is considered a moral and necessary good! Even if you can't see them all the time there is still good reason to be involved in their being raised, educated, integrated in to the future of our species ... we could perhaps plan it all a bit better though.