Teenagers allowed to wake up later have fewer absences from school | Hacker News Reader

Teenagers allowed to wake up later have fewer absences from school

news.bbc.co.uk

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There's a thing called Delayed Sleep Phase Sndrome. It's a circadian rhythm disorder that affects maybe 1/2 of 1% of people (but seems to be more prevalent among engineers and software people, possibly because DSPS sufferers choose vocations that allow for flexible schedules). Essentially, DSPS people have a natural sleep-wake cycle that's shifted a few hours from the norm. My natural cycle is to sleep at about 2:30am and wake at 11:30. I can force myself into a "normal" schedule, but I can't change my natural circadian rhythm, so I suffer from various effects of sleep disruption that are similar to jetlag. For some reason, a high proportion of teenagers, particularly boys, experience temporary DSPS during their adolescence. It can be as many as 20%. I suspect that the natural creeping of the circadian rhythm that happens during adolescence (as mentioned in this article) kicks into overdrive for some kids, and gives them DSPS-like symptoms during that time. Most of these kids grow out of it and re-establish a normal rhythm into adulthood. People like me, however, keep their DSPS throughout their lives. (And it's hereditary. I got it from my mother) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome

This would be an interesting poll.

Thanks for the link. I'm pretty sure I have this.

I'm a little different - I'm fairly certain I have a non-24-hour circadian clock. If I do not force myself, via scheduled melatonin supplements and caffeine/B-vitamin supplements, I naturally land on about a 26 hour circadian clock.

It gets really annoying really quickly.

Tangentially. I wonder at the reason for the increase of DSPS during adolescence among boys. It might very well be evolutionary - the young had to stay up later for watching over camps/habitat at night, perhaps?

I'm in the same boat. I've never been able to keep a normal sleep schedule outside of boarding school (had no choice there, literally).

Adolescent common chimpanzees form bands of males that stay up later than the rest and patrol the group's perimeter. I'm guessing human teenagers are genetically programmed to be the night watch.

(Reposted from below :)

How much exercise do you get every day? I find that makes a big difference for me.

Alright, so the research has been conducted, verified, and introduced changes in the lives of teenagers. Now let's move on to adults. Where's my 10am start time at work???

I have it. Try academic work.

Most of us don't want to deal with academia's abortion of a job market.

I have it. It's great. It helps that I'm in EST and my company is primarily in PST so coming in later is one more hour of overlap with that office.

The idea that 9am is holy and if you're not there you're not productive is just flatly contradicted by my personal experience.

In the early nineties I used to start extra early so I could get my work done before the Americans started hogging mainframes.

Most of my co-workers get in at 10am. I often come as late as 2pm.

Did I mention that we are looking to expanding our team in Cambridge, UK? (Send me an email, if you'd like more information. You can also find some positions on http://www.citrix.com/English/aboutCitrix/employment/feature...)

Smart companies do this where they can.

Even though I'm a night person though, I still find myself much more productive in the morning.

Working until 7 is a drag.

Try to land a system programming gig at a bleeding-edge research company! I work as one, and easily 1/2 of the workers don't come in until 10:00. Some come in as late as 1:00 when they don't have meetings.

It's also a great environment for early risers. I get in at 8, and I'm a machine through 10:00 every day

If you're a talented developer and live in (or will relocate to) Tampa FL, let me know. We're always hiring good developers and most our team has chosen the 10 to 6.

What are you guys doing? I'm in Tampa.

Citrix has an office in Tampa. Maybe it's that?

No go, I'm careful about posting identifiable info here. But this is an Inc 500 startup. Reply to this and I'll email you if you're interested.

Adults aren't teenagers.

As an adult, your [highest daytime alertness is at 10AM]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Biological_clock_human.PNG). You don't go from drowsy to alert instantly, so 9AM to 10AM is one of the most alert parts of your day.

Adults aren't all identical.

My biological clock is about 3 hours behind, in relation to the light-dark cycle. I become tremendously productive just before noon.

I'm often still in bed then when I'm most alert?

My work often starts at 11am, sometimes 9am, sometimes 7am. I finish at 6pm-ish though sometimes 5pm, sometimes, 9:30 and sometimes 2am or 3am. If a 7 hour day sounds good, it can be but generally I'd do a couple of extras to avoid doing a 14 or 21 day cycle without a proper break.

Thankfully I hate routine.

I do have a second job too.

I'm a freelancer, so I guess I have one.

I managed to arrange a flexible schedule at a few companies I worked for so far. My problem is that there's not much left of the day after 18:00. It's a bit harder to arrange for 4-hour work days. Peers that have to stick around the entire length will be demoralized or envious (even though a lot of them are never effective more than 4 hours per day)

Another benefit is that you miss the peak hour commute, pretty sure Melbourne at some point promoted alternate work hours to ease the congestion. Our rail network is free if you arrive before 7am.

I understand the need for many workplace to have close to standard hours but freedom to alter hours given your day should be a must. Where I did my internship had people arrive from 8-10ish and leave 4-6 and was very generous about people being able to come in late or leave early if they had something to do on the day.

I usually come to work around noon. And I work at a company with 250,000+ employees.

In high school, I would fall asleep in class all the time. Teachers would yell, I'd get in trouble, it was awful. It wasn't intentional, I was just so tired that I could not keep myself awake. If I could have stopped it, I would have been much happier, but I couldn't.

Even during my waking periods, I'm sure I wasn't operating at peak mental efficiency.

Why couldn't you have stopped it? Wouldn't going to bed earlier have helped?

If the melatonin isn't being secreted earlier, no, it wouldn't. If the melatonin isn't there, it isn't there.

The only way willpower or just going to bed earlier would help is if he had used the willpower to go buy some melatonin supplements* and then went to bed earlier.

It only takes a few instances of going to bed early, moping around for an hour or two, and still not getting a good night's sleep, before one rationally decides to just stay up later.

* or similar technological hack, like blue glasses

Anecdotal evidence: I can't ever remember being as exhausted as I was having to get up every day for high school. I think my body has adjusted better to less sleep now, but I just remember it being awful.

I felt even worse for the kids who came on the bus. No wonder many of them couldn't stay awake! They probably had to get up at 5:30 every morning just to go to school!

Anecdotally, I had an hour and a half bus ride to school back in the day. We were picked up at 5:45 (school started at 7:30). For much of the school year, it was pitch dark out waiting for the bus.

If I wanted to be presentable and eat breakfast, I had to wake up at 4:45.

I was similar. Towards the end of high school I moved far away. School started at 8:30, my alarm was set to 6. Bus left just before 7 down the road a little.

It was interesting taking a bus + train + bus to school, but I wasn't really a fan of waking up that early.

Same, I've never been more consistently tired as I was in high school, even though at times since then I have ran similar hours.

10am? That means they were going at 9am? That seems really late compared to when I went to school and it started at 7:30am! I can see where later would cut down on absentees, but it seems to be at a cost of pushing after school activities later and taking away from family time.

I think the four-day school week is a better idea. I think it would help in terms of attendance and would cut costs: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=four%20day%20school%...

i'm pretty sure school in the uk always started at (around) 9am. at least, i think it did in my comprehensive, many years ago.

10am is when lessons start. My school expected us to be in by 8:30, with lessons starting at 9.

Well, the data speaks for itself. Did you read the article? The official school hours are the same, they just shifted classes from the morning to the afternoon slots for that group. And they still get out of school earlier than the typical adult workday ends.

Another factor is that in the US, there's often a bottleneck in the bus system. It's more efficient to use the same buses for multiple levels of school, but a "bus cycle" may take an hour, and you may have three schools to service separately (high school, middle school, elementary). As a a result, the elementary school may start at 9 AM, but that pushes the high school to 7 AM. And you don't really want to reverse it.

> As a a result, the elementary school may start at 9 AM, but that pushes the high school to 7 AM. And you don't really want to reverse it.

Why not? I'm one of 4 children; every single one of us in elementary school would get up on our own ridiculously early. We would wake up and eagerly watch _Pokemon_ at, IIRC, 6:30 AM. Waking up in the 5s wasn't unheard of. It wasn't until high school and getting up at 6 AM that an older kid would finally start getting up before the younger kids.

The problem is having the younger children outside waiting for the bus in the dark before or soon after the sun comes up in late autumn and winter.

That doesn't sound so bad. It's going to be cold even if one waits an hour or two.

I hate to be that guy, but the headline should say fewer absences.

Then don't. Def #6

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/less

Cool! But the OED disagrees: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/few

The wikipedia article says that using fewer for counting nouns is fairly new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less

So I guess you're probably right, and it's not worth correcting people on this matter.

(But I'm probably still going to use fewer instead of less).

The distinction can be important. For example, are you one of the less intelligent members of HN, or one of the fewer intelligent members of HN?

Cute example but the fewer vs less argument is for when those words affect the same word.

In "less intelligent members," less is an adverb affecting the verb of the sentence, whereas in "fewer intelligent members," fewer is affecting the number of "members." The word switch is changing the entire meaning of the sentence, but the fewer vs less argument is over using the right word for a single, specific meaning.

There, corrected.

School start time is changing to 30 minutes later than the current time at a school that my fiance teaches at next year. The decision has come with some mixed opinions, but there is certainly some evidence to support this theory. Although, a lot of the kids are pretty pissed, because it means they have to stay at school for 30 mins later into their valuable afternoons.

My opinion though is that once people get use to the new hours (perhaps after 6 months, 1 year, or longer) that it will become the new "normal" and lose its benefits. But my opinion is garbage, because I wake up and go to sleep at terribly insane hours :)

This is usually how I did it in high school. I would stay up late either working on actual school work, messing around with video production for tv station, or some web stuff. Instead of waking up tired as hell, I would just go in later. It's better to miss a few hours than take the entire day off OR have that tired feeling ruin an entire day with a domino effect impacting the rest of your productivity. I'm glad people are finally doing something about this.

In my high school we had "late" days once or twice a month, where the school day started about an hour later than usual. Also, seniors could schedule their classes so that they could either be done for the day an hour early or show up an hour late. Years later, I still remember the euphoria of waking up at 7 only to realize I had an extra hour to sleep.

This would have definitely helped me out in school. One bathroom, 4 people, standing at a bus stop at 7am outside in freezing temperatures, lack of coffee (not allowed in my school even in HS), lack of transportation for after school activities before 5PM, staying up late to use the phone line on my computer after everyone else went to sleep, staying up until ungodly hours to watch MST3k on Comedy Central, etc. Gotta imagine kids today still face some of these reasons for needing a later start. These are the type of people who in the real world would gravitate towards jobs that allowed them the same respect & flexibility.

I can personally vouch for this myself in practice.

This is a classic case of quality vs quantity. Depending on my workload, I have sessions of varying time of hyper-activity. If something is highly urgent, then these sessions can endure for as long as I need. The only thing I require is that I'm not that tired.

Luckily, I work in an environment that only requires results. Time is of course tracked, but the ultimate reflection of my value is in my creative thinking and the actual work that gets done.

I've been wondering for a while now: why are so many people at HN and similar sites generally the late-riser type? It seems disproportionate.

A lot of us have the freedom to be. A disproportionate number of us are owners/founders or otherwise self employed. I go to bed about 8 am :-)

I think there is a tenancy for the hacker type to be a night owl, maybe it has something to do with the ability to be able to do work at any hour and the relative peace you get at night.

How are parents supposed to get their children prepared or take them to school in office hours?

How are parents supposed to pick their children up during office hours?

Combined with the option of riding a bus, I don't think it makes parent's lives any more difficult. Without a bus, I can see it being a big problem for many families, though.

What happened to bicycles?

Well, my High School was about 20 miles driving distance away from my home. Much of that along a limited access highway. I suppose I could have biked it, but avoiding the limited access highway adds 10 miles onto the trip and detours you through some fairly rough neighborhoods.

Doubt a bicycle would have helped, there.

What ever happened to schools in your neighborhood?

Oh yeah, McMansions.

Yes, I knew that my comment outed me as a smug European.

Even with a bus, not every parent can leave for work at 8:00-ish (even 9) and assume/hope their kids will get up, ready and off to school on time.

Not sure about kids today, but if my sister and I ever did that growing up we'd be grounded for at least 2 weeks. Granted my mom stood at home, but we'd still be liable for a whoopin' if we pulled such a stunt. Grades lower than a B? Not doing homework? Detention? We knew never to let any of that happen. That was the story for most kids I knew. I'm not talking about the 60s either, but rather the late 80s and the 90s.

I'm still fairly certain that was the end of the era where you really were expected to straighten up and fly right. When the high school pared down course difficulty from 5 levels (plus AP) to 3, and eventually 1 causing the top teachers to retire or quit in frustration. When No Child Left Behind warped into justifiable laziness and also ensuring no other child can dare get ahead.

I'd also like to take the time to point out that I lived at the bottom of a hill, and the school was on the opposite side. So yes I did walk uphill, both ways, in winter.

Here's the trouble.. School start times for Elementary, Middle and High School need to be staggered. Otherwise they'd need a lot more buses.

But if you put grade school kids at the earlier start time, you'll have little kids that take the bus standing outside in the dark. That is not good.

In some communities with a bus mass transit service you can start HS at the same time as grade school by putting the HS kids on the transit buses. That works--the buses aren't as regulated, but it works. But school districts where this is possible are probably just a fraction.

In San Francisco Unified there isn't a high school bus system, and the classes still start at 7:30 AM. It has more to do with hidebound teachers and admins.

Of course, not having a high school bus system doesn't defacto mean you'll start class late.

But bussing high school kids means you can't, unless you want to...(see my OP)

>"you'll have little kids that take the bus standing outside in the dark"

And? Why can't they stand in the dark - if it's a big problem for the parents they could walk them to the bus stop.

Adolescent common chimpanzees form bands of males that stay up later than the rest and patrol the group's perimeter. I'm guessing human teenagers are genetically programmed to be the night watch.

In a couple Wall Street companies I've experienced, the penalties were harsher for being a few minutes late than just calling in sick, so there were a lot of unnecessary sick days that happened because a person would rather "throw a sickie" than get reamed for showing up at 9:08. It's really stupid and counterproductive.

"It's really stupid and counterproductive"

One might say the same about Wall Street in general... alright, maybe not completely, but a little?

The culture sucks, and the reasons for that are deep and sociological, but Wall Street firms are definitely not stupid. As for counterproductive, that's a very long discussion, because financial markets are probably a necessary evil. The short version is: most people suck at capturing the value they add. Wall Streeters are great at snaring this surplus value, so you have a lot of ridiculously overcompensated people at the top.

It’s pretty counterproductive to have 30 or 40 percent of the graduates of the top colleges in the country going to work on Wall Street, as was the case in the mid-2000s, “snaring surplus” rather than producing something of their own.

No disagreement there. I think Wall Street's only constructive purpose is to bid up the price of talent. This makes analyst programs (staffed with the untalented) a total waste, but that's another discussion.

At a previous employer, we were supposed to be in at 8:30am. Our boss even spoke to myself and a friend if we regularly arrived at 8:45, even if we didn't have any specific appointments. (And we stayed plenty late at the end of the day.)

I wouldn't have minded, except that he would regularly be 30-60 minutes late for meetings with clients!

Yes, rules like this can be extremely stupid and counterproductive.

This is a direct consequence of middle management.

It works like this: marketing boss and accounting boss have to have everyone in at 9:00 for specific reasons (customers, time-specific responsibilities). Programming boss doesn't need his people in at 9 for any good reason, but his peers all need their subordinates in at that time, and he gets scared for his image among his peer group. If his people are more disheveled and work at weird times, he might look like he doesn't "have them under control".

This is also why you get in more trouble for being 20 minutes late than for "throwing a sickie". The first is taken to reflect upon your boss, while the second isn't, even though it's a much bigger hit to productivity.

Hah. I remember having a job where my boss would complain about how late I was every day. He said I should come in earlier. I didn't. He asked me if I had trouble understanding his instructions. I told him I understood perfectly, but I just wasn't awake at that hour. He then asked, "so you're intentionally disobeying my instructions." I smiled and said yes.

The issue was not raised again.

(Compare this to my current job, where I got weird looks when I asked if I should be in at 9 on my first day. Little did I realize that this was a place where people came in at 7:00 pm and nobody batted an eye :)

traders have to be in before the market opens. that's not really stupid or counterproductive.

Traders should be in before the market opens, but being late on this is less disruptive than being out sick, and being absent the whole day. Although there's an ethical distinction between being legitimately sick and "throwing a sickie", and the latter will usually get you fired if caught-- although it's unlikely that this would happen-- they're both equal in terms of disruptiveness and loss to the firm.

My point is that it's counterproductive to have an incentive system in which being 8 minutes late is worse than missing a whole day.

1 word: duh.

The more we do this stuff to kids, the more the real world is going to kick their ass.

You didn't read the article, or the background research behind it, did you?

It's based on research into the natural sleep cycle of adolescent humans, and their cognitive abilities. Turns out that there are changes associated with puberty (who knew?) that make them wake up several hours later and stay awake longer than children; their cognitive abilities also peak later in the day. From age 18 onwards they revert towards the adult baseline.

Assuming you're an adult, do you think you'd work more efficiently if you were rousted out of bed at 5am to start work each morning, and forced to finish at 1pm?

No, I absolutely know that I would not work better that way, but my point is, everyone around me is forced to wake up at the crack of dawn and get their ass to work.

I have kids in school, and every year the school changes things around to accommodate some consultant's suggestions regarding grades, start times, recesses, how they learn to read, how they learn math, etc.

Every damn year!! Kids are getting screwed left and right because of studies like this. Last year, my oldest was using one method to learn to read, this year it's something new. And a new way of learning math too.

They had an assembly for us parents explaining to us that they were preparing kids for "jobs that don't exist yet". And that they didn't know if these methods were perfect, but they were based on studies, so.... Kids just end up confused.

This hits a nerve with me. I hate seeing this stuff happen because of studies. I hate when people like you justify stuff like this when you aren't living in it.

Also, how do parents get their kids to school at 10am? How? School needs to start when work starts so we can drop them off on our way.

This stuff screws up kids and will make adjusting to the real world much harder.

Are there no buses where you are? During my entire time in public school, I got there in one of three ways: took the bus, I got a ride with my older brother, or I drove myself.

Also keep in mind this would apply to high school students, not elementary school kids. And this isn't a single study, or even a new result. I've known this about teenagers for a while.

No. In fact, buses don't go far enough out in some places here, and they don't stop close enough. Plus, I believe they can't afford to run all their buses anymore.

I didn't have my own car until I was a senior in high school. I got dropped off every day (12 years ago now.)

Where we are people live far enough from the school that it's too far too walk, but it's just as far to walk to catch a bus. Getting kids home from school is equally as difficult but most kids are forced to take the long treks by foot or bike. And in the winter, we sometimes get 3+ feet of snow at a time.

It's a big world, I know I shouldn't have started this argument here. I'm frustrated about the education my own kids are getting, and I hate seeing so many people agree with studies that cause sweeping changes in schools.

I'll read the article again. I'm pretty sure I read through it the first time with my mind frustrated with this headline anyway.

In the real world, you can find jobs that allow you to work when you are most productive. Some professions require rising early - subway stations in my area open between 5 and 6am, for example, and presumably the people who work there don't drop their kids off at school on the way to work.

Other professions which are not customer-facing may not depend on starting at a particular time at all, but simply ensuring that projects are completed by a certain date. Like a lot of HNers, I am more productive in the afternoon and evening hours than I am in the morning, not to mention more pleasant to be around.

Still other professions require people to work late when most people would rather be relaxing. Bartending springs to mind, as do many others.

There's no law of nature or man that says all work must begin at 9 and end at 6. In fact, staggering arrival times and the like might reduce traffic and transit bottlenecks and lead to an increase in overall productivity.

I fully understand that some people are early risers and get the most work done by turning up very early and zipping through stuff before the phones start ringing. Good on them! I see no reason why late risers should not enjoy the same freedom to maximize their productivity.

Or maybe they'll be better prepared because they actually learned more in school.

8th graders with 1 hour of sleep less perform two whole grade levels lower on tests (i.e. like 6th graders.) There's an entire chapter of Nurture Shock devoted to this topic, and it's pretty damning.

And perhaps the "real world" will adjust too. Flexible hours etc.

I start work at 10am, because I have flexitime. I just work later than the people who start at 7:30.

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