Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpyne | Hacker News Reader

My wife's background is in childhood development. Her job involves keeping up with studies in the field. I remember her talking about this issue. There's evidence that school start times should be flipped for elementary and high school students: elementary going in earlier and high school later. Teenagers need more sleep due to their brains re-wiring, so the reasoning goes.

Keep in mind that in our school district, elementary school students need to be in by 8:40 while high school students need to be in by 7:50.

Our neighborhood is setup for walking. The elementary school is a six block walk, so most people walk their kids to school. My daughter didn't sleep past 7:00 for most of elementary school. Our experience was that elementary really could have started closer to 8:00.

I'm with you on all your other points. But, I think our experience was significantly different for elementary school.

View on HN

I actually went to a school corporation where this happened, about 20 years ago. I was in high school. School started at 7:38. We got up around 5:30, boarded the bus at 6:05, arrived to school at 7:00. Elementary school started at 8:55, with a similar length bus pre-schedule.

Our corporation hired a firm to do a study, found that younger children performed much better during earlier hours, and flipped the schedules. The next year, the high school started at 8:50, and the elementary school at 7:45, and the schedules have been essential unchanged since. I can't describe how much of a difference that 1.5 hours made to a 16-year old.

As a father of 3 young children, they rarely sleep past when I have to wake them for school anyway. The same is definitely not true of teenagers.

Makes a little more sense in the parent's position as well. An argument that is normally made to stop school start times from being set later is that the parents have jobs which require them to normally wake up the same time as their kids. Elementary school children obviously need this parental help in the morning much more than high school students who can even possibly get to school by themselves by driving or simply being self-sufficient enough to walk to the bus stop.

As a counter-anecdote, we have to get our kids up by 7:30 to get them to their elementary school on time, and it's a battle every single morning. Left to their own devices, they would sleep to at least 8:30.

Kids are different, and we really don't have very good ways of dealing with that in some ways...

So, maybe they would benefit from an earlier bedtime? Not being snarky, am a parent myself.

It's possible. They are generally in bed by 8:30. We have tried experimenting with pushing it back to 8 and that did not have an obvious effect on their mornings and did make evenings a lot more miserable. Going even earlier than 8 is not really feasible given that dinner generally can't happen until 6pm.

(Our no-longer-elementary-schooler, by the way, never really had this problem. He just seems to sleep a lot less in general.... kids are different.)

Just an idea - you could try putting them to bed 15 min earlier every few days, and if they have trouble sleeping put on a short kids audiobook. Two of the most peaceful I know of from Audible are “The Tailor of Gloucester” read by Meryl Streep and “The Little House”.

Also depends on how young they are, if they are of reading age, then putting them to bed a little earlier and then allowing them to read for 15-20 minutes on their own can also be another way of calming them down.

Some of the kids mindfulness podcasts (Peace Out as an example) are also good for this kind of thing

Scripture Lullabies is really great too - very peaceful & soothing.

One is of reading age, one is just about there.

The one of reading age is already reading after he's in bed. The hard part is getting him to stop and actually go to sleep.

I will look into the podcasts; thank you for the suggestion!

Anecdotally based on my kid (n=1), stopping screen time about an hour before bedtime helps.

However, she still seems wired to fall sleep at a certain time, and we finally decided that fighting biology is a losing battle. The strategy of moving bedtime a little bit earlier each day didn't work at all.

There's definitely no screen time involved anywhere near bedtime. But yes, I'm pretty sure it would not help if there were!

> maybe they would benefit from an earlier bedtime?

One can try but you will be limited by biology: The problem is that our internal clocks are reset by daylight. You can't just shift yourself to another timezone, since your circadian rhythm will always set itself back to the respective local time. So if your brain prefers you to go to sleep and to wake up at certain points it will always be relative to "local (sunlight) time", not relative to human clock time.

Okay, but you don't have counter-evidence. Yes, kids are different, but YES, we also know that younger children generally desire sleep and wake earlier, and teens desire sleep and wake LATER than adults. Biologically. Why not start from there, and THEN acknowledge that everyone's different, rather than starting from the WORST principles and throw up our hands and say "we can't suit everyone, may as well screw as many people as possible!"?

Where did I suggest starting "from the WORST principles"?

What I would suggest is that there is not a Pareto-optimal solution here short of redesigning how schooling works entirely...

If the schools are fun and a great experience, the kids would wake up at 5 for school. The schools are so boring and useless, the kids obviously find no use or interest in attending them.

The kids are very happy to _go_ to school once they've woken up enough. It's that first 20 minutes after we start trying to wake them up that are miserable.

I would think that would be because teenagers are more likely to stay up late over elementary school kids.

It's a combination of a shifted sleep schedule and teenage brains going through significant, exhausting development.

> Teenagers need more sleep due to their brains re-wiring, so the reasoning goes.

I work in the education industry, and the education experts in our company have been saying this for years.

I'm envious. My high school started at 7:17am. It was brutal.

I took zero hour PE to add in an extra class and mine started at 6:30 am

OMG! 7:17am, that's crazy. Mine started at 8:30am, it was ok most days, especially later years as I generally enjoyed going, depending on what class was first. But 9am would have been better. (as that's when primary school started for me), which suited me really well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com