Later school start times are associated with more sleep and better performance | Hacker News Reader

Later school start times are associated with more sleep and better performance

advances.sciencemag.org

314 pointssimonebrunozzi170 comments

As a kid I remember waking up at 7 and heading to class which was starting at 8. I was half awake up until about 10 in the morning, I don't know how I was making it to school in one piece (school was within walking distance and was about 15 minutes from home). Also, in the winter at 7 it was still dark and cold I still remember the a magnetic force I had to fight away from the warm cozy bed. That was me at the time. A group of kids didn't seem to have this problem at all, so this early sleepiness phenomena is not universal. Throughout my life I was also a night owl, my most productive and creative moments took place after dark. Recently, however, something changed. I feel much more comfortable in the morning, I even enjoy the quiet hours early in the morning until things start to hustle and bustle and enjoy and am able to go to sleep earlier.

So to conclude, this is not a universal thing and this is the problem, we are all different so a one sized solution does both good and bad.

I had a split schedule in 7th and 8th grade, from 11:30am to 5 pm. Best time of my childhood education in terms of awakeness and alertness. High school was the opposite, horrible, had to be on the bus by 6:45am. It was dark and raining/snowing sometimes, we hid under parapets at nearby houses sometimes for shelter. I remember cursing the Board of Education during those times, they didnt have to suffer through the stupidity of their decisions.

Yes, I vividly remember the awful feeling when it was dark, cold, wet and on the way to school half asleep. We too had 2 shifts for school, the first 4 grades were in the morning and then it would alternate every other grade in the morning or evening. I liked when I had school in the second part of the day but in the winter I had a nearly similar experience returning home, at about 6 or 7 it was already dark, cold and snowy. And this schedule would eat out the whole day.

As someone who I think excuses his own laziness with 'being a night owl', I appreciate your mentioning of recently changing. I'm an aspiring morning person.

Given the downvotes, perhaps it wasn't clear I was referring to myself.

When I went to Waterloo, most of the math classes were scheduled around 8:30 - 10 while most of the computer science classes were scheduled in the afternoon.

I'm pretty sure my major would be different if I was a morning person.

We know that math professors see the blank looks and droopy eyelids in their 8 AM and 9 AM classes. Why do they schedule those classes?

Because most professors are scheduling classes for THEIR convenience, not the students. You don't typically keep your professorship and grow in an academic career by teaching students. They're scheduling classes in a way that maximises productive time for them (pitching sponsors, supervising research etc)

While many profs would probably do this if they could, the registrar usually makes the schedule.

Wild guess: you started waking up a more consistent time each day (less sleeping in on weekends). This might have been a result of getting more sleep on weekdays and therefore not feeling like you need to sleep in, or of less late night socializing.

As someone who has run the full gamut of sleep schedules over different years of my life, I've found by FAR (orders of magnitude) the most influential factor in how I feel in the morning is the consistency of my wake-up time. The only factor that can sometimes eclipse it is extended periods of sleep deprivation (eg, 1-2 weeks of averaging 4 hours per night).

If you want to try this, I highly recommend an alarm app for Android called Talalarmo - https://f-droid.org/app/trikita.talalarmo

Yes, i think it is true and it makes a whole lot of sense too

How has your diet changed over the years? I'd be curious to know if different foods and eating schedules might affect circadian rhythm.

They do and there is quite a bit of research on it. Food is a major zeitgeber.

My partner is a vegetarian and a good cook so we don't serve meat at home. Consequentially I eat less meat now; I eat less meat also because the meat quality isn't very good unless you go to a very good restaurant and that is not 100% guaranteed either. I've got a friend who ran a restaurant business and was shocked to learn the price of the chicken was suspiciously low. After doing some digging I realized what most meat we eat, how it is produced, what animals are fed and all the antibiotics they're fed are quite bad for us. I frankly lost my appetite for meat. I started eating more fish instead, not a very good decision either but nonetheless better imho. I still eat meat but not too often, not sure if I'll ever become a fulltime vegetarian.

Second, I stopped drinking alcohol excessively and completely stopped eating sugary drinks or sugary things in general. Rarely whenever I eat something sugary, because I'm no longer used to it, it makes me very nauseous.

> and all the antibiotics they're fed

To nitpick on this one, the societal problem isn't the antibiotics, per se... it's that antibiotics get used to paper over an incredibly unhealthy and unclean environment, and that in doing they so encourage the rise of 'superbug' antibiotic-resistant diseases.

But also the mass over consumption of meat isn't very normal either, plenty of countries are vegetarian, take for example parts of India for generations; to me at least, the current practices in our modern meat factories kill my appetite. I do still consume some animal products but always try to get those from farmers, and for one it's noticeably tasting better.

One year I had to take a class before school and by winter it started before sunup and it was horrible.

On a handful of occasions I had a moment while washing my hair where I could not recall the alarm going off. I'm not sure anything aggravates a night owl more than discovering that they have accidentally gotten up early... except discovering you'd gotten up four hours early.

And then barely getting to sleep in because fixing wet bedhead takes almost as long as taking a shower.

I did not sign up for the follow-on class.

I had the sleep schedule you describe until my first child. Now, I'm opportunistic. Generally I get up at 7 or so, because a certain someone makes sure no-one sleeps past that. It's fine, now. But at rare times the little one is away with grandparents, and then the sleep rhythm rapidly returns to night-owl mode.

But my point is, I think maybe parents are a bit unsympathetic to the optimal sleep patterns of their children because those same children have spent years teaching the parents that sleep is a luxury you have limited access to.

Firefox just suggested the following article to me a minute ago, actually...

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/brain-scans-reveal-why-ni...

You got older. It is pretty well established that a) people are different but b) teenagers on average don't wake up early as well as adults. e.g https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170621140458.h...

I was the same as you until about 26-27. I could operate on nearly no sleep. As a teenager and throughout my twenties i didn't really like sleeping. I'd stay up past 12 most nights and wake up around 7 as a teenager and closer to 5 or 6 from about 21 until 27-28 or so. Then I just started appreciating sleep. I started going to bed around 9:30 or 10, feeling like shit if I get less than 8 hours consistently for some time in a row and just generally preferring consistency and routine for my sleep schedule, where as before I didn't really care or think much about it.

Yes, thats sign of maturing and doing whats obviously best for our bodies and implicitly ourselves. I know people who never learned this and somehow you can even tell by looking at them, their bodies always look more aged

> a one sized solution does both good and bad

Not necessarily. Who says morning people have a problem with later school start times?

They can still get up earlier if they like and use those hours for something productive (e.g. doing homework in the morning vs. in the evening / at night)

I teach at the high school level. Everyone knows this is true and some districts in my area are changing to a later start time; however, there is a great deal of institutional momentum working against the change. Primarily due to primary school start times, bussing schedules, and athletics.

> Primarily due to primary school start times, bussing schedules, and athletics.

Not only that. Starting late also creates a problem for parents.

Parents need to go to work. If kids take bus, kids usually need to board on the school bus before parents leave home. If parents drive kids to school, then the late school start time will become totally unacceptable for many parents because of the conflict with their work start time.

Absolutely true. Cynics often jib that school is glorified daycare, but it’s very real that without schools many people would simply be unable to work. Inflexibility around parent work schedules is a significant factor in why later start times is difficult.

This is the primary reason for an early start. Primary school, bussing schedules and athletics can shift.

This leaves the question: why does work start so early? If children benefit from sleeping longer, so should adults.

> If children benefit from sleeping longer, so should adults.

People at different ages require different amounts of sleep in order to be healthy. Adults require less than children [0].

Also, one of the big problems for teenagers (the subject of the article) is that their circadian rhythm is out of phase from adults, shifted later about 2 hours [1]. Early start times don't just reduce sleep, they're also just the wrong time of day. Telling a teen to wake up at 7am is like telling an adult to wake up at 5am.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/features/sleep/index.html

[1]: https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/sleep-and-teens

It probably would be healthier for a lot of adults. They even find that because of set work start times, the average adult in the western edge of a time zone ends up sleeping less than the one in the eastern edge.

> This leaves the question: why does work start so early? If children benefit from sleeping longer, so should adults.

If you work 7-15h (3pm american), you still have some daylight time left at home, after work so you can do other, non-work stuff that requires daylight. If you sleep until 9 and work 10-18h, you get zero off-work daylight for most of the year.

Yeah, it’s a nice thought, but completely unworkable. I live 0.99 miles (seriously!) from my kids’ school. The minimum bus distance in 1 mile - so they won’t send buses to pick up my kids. That means that they have to walk 0.99 miles, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the cold, across three fairly busy intersections, or I have to drive them. My commute is about an hour long (longer because I’m driving at the worst possible time), so I’m getting into work later than everybody else as it is.

Is there a reason they can not walk to school? It doesn't really take long to walk a mile and it is very good for them mentally to get a walk in before and after school anyway. There may be times when inclement weather might make it a little miserable but proper clothes can address that in all but the most extreme cases. I grew up in MT and had to walk about a mile to my elementary school and almost a mile to my High School bus stop. I enjoyed those walks and the time to think it afforded.

Well, if school didn't start until 9 AM, I'd have to, but I'd feel horrible about it.

Do you live in a particularly dangerous area or something? I walked (later biked) a mile to school a few times a week starting some time in elementary school.

In my country there is no really the concept of the "school bus". Google Maps says I walked exactly 1.0 miles... climbing a mountain, because my school was in the freaking top of a mountain. In some parts climbs were so steep that nowadays there are escalators on the streets.

I did that from 4 to 18 yo. It did never bother me, sometimes I literally did the whole way back running non-stop for fun, it was kind of like a roller coaster. But:

- Weather was generally good

- I obviously didn't walk alone when I was 4 yo.

We don't even know the age of those kids. Maybe they will walk to school alone... when they are older.

How many 30-40 mph roads/intersections were between your house and school?

Unfortunately this is the kind of thing that prevents many kids from walking to school in the US, even in cities, there are often few safe walking routes, incomplete sidewalks, poorly designed intersections across wide, fast moving roads.

Sounds like you have bigger problems than school starting times. I'd be working on the local municipaility to get the facilities in place. Being able to walk anywhere you need to go should be one of those human rights. It's basic to our physology.

> Is there a reason they can not walk to school?

Sounds like a good way to get yourself a visit from CPS. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parent...

I can't believe this isn't some sort of Onion article.

Could they walk to a stop that’s 0.01 miles further away? Surely there’s another stop nearby.

The school checks them against a list. We weren't the first parents to think of that.

It takes 10 minutes at most to cycle one mile. What's the problem?

This is, nowadays, for most parents, because work and school schedules have fallen into a sort equilibrium. If school started later, many work places would be forced to be accommodating. The ones that wouldn't be forced are mostly already an issue for parents with kids in school.

> kids usually need to board on the school bus before parents leave home

Why’s that?

To ensure your single digit aged child reaches the bus. Good luck trying to explain what happened if they don’t.

Pretty sure Otto Mann doesn’t know if you’re child is supposed to go to school today or not (scheduled absence), so the driver can’t know to expect your child or not

>To ensure your single digit aged child reaches the bus.

For what it's worth, this is a uniquely American problem; schoolchildren in Europe and Asia have no problems taking public transit while being single-digit age.

Of course, those places haven't bowed to irrational paranoia like North American countries do, but the fact remains that the assumption that children aren't capable of getting to a bus stop safely is a falsehood that fortunately only North American societies have chosen to embrace.

It's stupid, but taking that on requires people to stop listening to a certain loud minority, so it's hard to break, though some states (like Utah) have made legal inroads against them.

Yeah, I used to walk to school when I was 7. It was only about 4 blocks away, and my mom told me to never deviate from the route she laid out for me, but it wasn't a bit deal.

Who is this loud minority that’s against young children walking alone?

Some quick examples:

https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-s...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parent...

https://people.com/parents/mom-investigated-dcfs-letting-dau...

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...

Probably the most dramatic example would be Japan, where it's not unheard of for grade school children to take a train ride alone to school, sometimes with transfers.

Asian here. Never took public transit until I was in my teens. And I wasn't alone - I don't remember a single kid from my school who used public transport when they were less than 10yrs old.

So I don't know which Asia you are talking about.

It's very normal in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Once kids are out of kindergarten, it's assumed that they're able to get from point A to point B without much help.

Very normal in the non-rich parts of Southeast Asia.

Well Asia is literally the biggest continent on earth with a population of over 4.5 billion people so some mileage may vary. I don't expect growing up in Tokyo is all that similar to growing up in rural Turkey.

I grew up in a west Asian country and walked to school every days from age 6 to 18. I didn't get on public transit on my own till probably my teens either because I didn't need to!

Everywhere I needed to get to was within walking distance. I sometimes walked for an hour to get to my sister's place on the other side of town but my schools were first 5 minutes walk and then 15 minutes walk away from where my parents lived.

When I went to elementary school there was a dedicated school bus.

European here. I walked to school, sometimes more than 3 miles from 8 to 12 years old. Then I took one hour of train from 12 to 18.

Your comment got it right, there is a weird paranoia in the US. Typical American parents never allow their children to do anything by themselves anymore. When I was a kid, I used to play for hours in the street from my neighborhood, sometimes climbing on trees in the wood nearby. My parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing and that was fine. I cannot even imagine what American parents would think if this happened in the US nowadays. Social services would probably be called upon my parents.

I'm convinced that having micromanaging parent is not sane for a kid's mental development.

When I entered 3rd grade, my morning get on bus was our driveway.

Afternoon drop off was 1/2 mile away. A few of us walked it each day, unless weather was terrible.

Those walks home were amazing. Great times I remember fondly.

This was West Coast Rural USA, starting during late 70's.

Play, explore experiences were similar.

You can't leave a 7 year old home alone, nevermind expect them to lock up and walk alone to a bus stop.

This can result in losing custody and other legal action against the parent: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/consequences-...

> You can't leave a 7 year old home alone, nevermind expect them to lock up and walk alone to a bus stop.

Many people do this just fine.

Starting at 6yo, I woke up to an empty house & got myself fed and off to school. It was a rural area & I walked a dirt road to the bus stop. This was the early 1970s & we kids felt an expectation to manage their own affairs.

Regarding school start times, I've long said that we do it backwards. Elementary school should start first & high school last.

Hang on, Arn't we talking about High School students? Surely they are capable of getting themselves to the bus stop without mum or dad holding their hands?

I was perfectly capable, but my parents weren't willing to let me transport myself anywhere until I was 18, then I was allowed to take the bus and I got a car.

I'm determined to let my toddler be independent as he grows, but when I talk to other parents about this, most are convinced that if I let them out of my sight they'll be raped and murdered immediately.

Daycare and siblings with drastically different schedules are huge issues.

The reason start times are complex is buses. To save money and optimize the number of buses, the same set of buses are used for elementary, middle, and high school. So if high school kids start later the middle school or elementary school kids need to start earlier. They tried this in our community and the proposal had elementary school kids in our neighborhood on the street for the bus at 6:30 am ( which is pitch dark in the winter).

This could have made my formative years immeasurably better. I woke up between 5:30-6am every school day between grades 6-12. I had an incredibly hard time focusing on and starting my homework, and was often up past midnight. It was a vicious cycle of not sleeping and depression and anxiety. Typical school hours are insane for the kids who need sleep the most. Even being chronically underslept, I'd still easily stay up until 1 or 2am on weekends which I'm "too old for" (read: my circadian rhythms have changed as I reached adulthood). As a kid, I was frequently sleeping till 11am or noon on weekend days to try to make up for it. It's just not healthy -- any of it.

Yeah, same here. I remember getting home from high school around 2:00 (even earlier if I didn't have a class for the 6th hour). I would just collapse on the couch and sleep for an hour. Then, of course, I'd have trouble falling asleep at night, leading to it being hard to get up. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Reminds me of when Boston tried to make some changes to start times for a number of reasons:

What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity with an algorithm

https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-m...

"But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed. Angry parents signed an online petition and filled the school committee chamber, turning the plan into one of the biggest crises of Mayor Marty Walsh’s tenure. The city summarily dropped it. The failure would eventually play a role in the superintendent’s resignation."

Indeed, school hours are tied to work hours. Now and forever.

> What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity with an algorithm

Ugh

One thing I hated about this story was people complaining about being controlled by a black box algorithm. This was not a black box algorithm. It was, in fact, the opposite. It was an optimization solver that found the best outcome as defined by you given the constraints as defined by you. It could not be more transparent how it worked.

The Boston plan was to move a lot of younger students to earlier start times. People seem to just shrug this part off for some reason. People talk about the benefit of later start times for teenagers, but the negative impact that earlier start times would have on younger students gets ignored.

The younger kids should be going earlier, at least around here. They start after 9:00! They've had two of their most alert hours of the day already by then.

This is so the older kids can start earlier. There are only so many buses. Adjust one to start later and the other starts earlier, and vice-versa. The high schools should have the 9:00 start and the elementaries should get their 7:40 start or whatever it is, assuming the whole window can't be adjusted.

Nb. I've had it explained to my by people in education that early starts in high school are insisted upon by the sports folks, so they can have longer afternoon practices with sunlight in the Winter, and that there's no hope of switching start times up on a large scale without attacking that constituency and winning, which is... probably not gonna happen.

The Boston plan was to start elementary school kids at 7:15, which is why parents were complaining about forcing young kids out of bed at 5:30-6:00 am. Not an unreasonable criticism, I think (there were also complaints from working families that they'd have to pay more for after school childcare).

But you're right that part of the problem was that there was no interest in spending more on transportation (or in generally improving the poor state of transportation). I'd say it's also worth questioning why we insist that all students need to go to school at the same time. The education system seems needlessly rigid (though I suppose imposing a certain amount of conformity is one of its goals).

Oof, OK, yeah, no one should have to be somewhere at 7:15AM. 7:30's pushing it.

...sports folks, so they can have longer afternoon practices with sunlight in the Winter...

What is this, the ski team? No popular USA scholastic winter sport takes place outside. (It's cold outside in winter!) Indoors we have artificial lights. In my experience, high school basketball teams regularly practice in the morning before school anyway; they would not complain about that starting at 7:30 rather than 6:00 AM.

I guess I just assumed the reason was for sunlight, which is why they can't just have morning practices (also dark, unless they school starts really late). Regardless, reason I've been given (by people who'd asked, and had this reason given to them by folks working in school admin) is that early-start high school is sacred to the athletic department, for whatever reason.

If that was the case, it was probably more for football after the return to standard time. (Football determines everything.) That may be less important now that the return is a week later: there isn't a great deal of football season left after the first week in November. Also ISTM there has been a great deal of ideological turnover in high school football in recent years. The old dudes have retired; their successors might be more open to reason. Having your entire team less tired, all the time is likely to be a competitive advantage...

> They've had two of their most alert hours of the day already by then.

[citation needed]

It’s obviously not universal but small children very commonly wake up early. In my house it’s usually the 6 year old coming into our room at 6am asking if she can go play.

Interesting study, but there are some potential issues.

One is that it is small, about 100 students.

The other is that the demographics of the students at the second school shift between the 2 years. This may confound the study due to cultural differences. For example, in my limited experience, it seems that white parents are more strict about bedtime than Asian parents, and if that is the case, more sleep may simply be a result that the second group had parents who pushed stricter bedtimes.

From: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/suppl/2018/...

School RHS FHS

Year 2016 2017 2016 2017

Students 51 41 41 41

% Female 53 49* 56 58

% White 76 75 2 19

% Asian 10 5 54 46

% Hispanic 6 5 7 7

% African American 8 5 32 22

% Unknown/other 0 10 10 10

Age (mean ±SEM) 16.08 ± 0.05 16.27 ± 0.08 16.13 ± 0.05 16.13 ± 0.06

I would take these results with a grain of salt.

>The other is that the demographics of the students at the second school shift between the 2 years

Not really. The first class had 21 Asian students, the second had 20. The small sample limits the use of this study, but it's not the only one out there.

I've posted this before, but it's relevant again:

My high school started at 7am. I also took the bus; which picked up around 6:15am; so I usually woke up around 5:45am during the week. I would often nod off during my first or second period; and routinely took 2-3 hour naps when I got home from school; which screwed up my ability to fall asleep early at night or get much homework done. I sometimes wonder what my academics would have been like if I was actually awake during those first two periods.

(This was in the 90's)

Same schedule still exists here, and we're on the East Coast.

I think it applies to adults just as much, except most adults "get used to it". So at my company we've always started the day at 10am and everyone cites it as one of the things they like the most about working here (we then end at 5.30pm – which also works out well as all the 5pm rush traffic has cleared up by then).

My kid starts elementary school at 9am with one late start day a week. We’re able to spend more time with her in the evening because we don’t feel rushed to get her to bed so she gets enough sleep. I also find she doesn’t seem totally exhausted when she gets up in the morning.

That being said, my spouse and I are very fortunate in that we have flexible jobs with part-time remote work ability. I can’t imagine how a single parent working two jobs would deal with the schedule change and late start day.

Reading this thread it appears high school in the US starts a lot earlier than in the UK.

Even the article states: "We show that a delay in the high school start times from 7:50 to 8:45 a.m. had several measurable benefits for students".

In my experience at least, high school in the UK doesn't start earlier than 9am and usually starts at 9:30am. End of day is about 3:30/4:00pm.

What's the reasoning for starting to early in the US?

I'm not sure if its universal, but in my district the biggest reason - or at least the most often stated challenge to changing the times for high school - is that we have limited buses that service the high school first, then middle and then elementary.

My district uses that excuse, and the logical answer is to swap elementary and high school start times.

In my district the HS start is 7:20, middle at 8:05, elementary at 9:00.

Any parent will tell you 9:00 is a crazy late time of the morning for a kindergartener.

I would wonder whether anyone who willingly created such a backwards schedule could be fit to run a school, except I've met the people who run the public schools in this country...

Advocate. Public institutions are strong when locals are engaged in their success.

The high school I teach at starts at 7:30 and ends at 2 pm.

A quasi-religious belief in the virtue of work, ably summarized here: https://www.chron.com/life/houston-belief/article/Protestant...

My head just can't operate on max level at morning for years. "go to bed earlier" isn't helpful here, working at nights too. Tried several times to change my owl-type nature, but without any viable success. The fix is easy: pretend to be productive, and be a rock star at the end of day.

I vehemently disagree with this. The problem is that there are only 24 hours in the day. That's just not enough time to go to school, sleep 9.25 hours (recommended for teens, as I've been told), and still participate in sports, do homework, and (god forbid) play video games.

This would only move the problem later, not solve it. Even worse, parents would have to move around their own work schedules to get kids to school on time. The real problem, in my opinion, is the massive unchecked amounts of homework that get piled on students every year. Each teacher thinks that their amount of homework is reasonable but it only takes one bad teacher to cripple a kid's schedule. Writing a 5-6 page paper in middle school never taught anyone anything, but it did take away time that could have been used constructively.

What is the "this" that you don't agree with? The theorized causality? It's not a question of whether the kids in the Seattle study slept more or not. They did sleep more. The question is why, and I think most people agree that it is clearly because of the later school start time.

There's a study that indicates that your theory is either incorrect or incomplete, as grades improved with a 1 hour delay in school start time. What part of the study do you not find convincing?

What do you disagree with? This is something that actually happened. They changed start times and the students slept more.

As a datapoint, I once wrote a paper for biology and learned about the existence of salt-rising bread [0], a bread leavened by hydrogen instead of the usual carbon dioxide, with a bacteria known for food poisoning as the rising agent [1]. It is just trivia, of course, though...

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt-rising_bread

[1]: https://www.popsci.com/article/science/clostridium-it-can-ki...

> This would only move the problem later, not solve it.

And for teens, that would be a huge improvement. Their sleep schedules are biologically offset to be about 2 hours later than and adult's [0] so the different between having to wake up at say 08:30 instead of 07:30 is the equivalent, for an adult, to waking up at 06:30 instead of 05:30.

> The problem is that there are only 24 hours in the day.

That's also a problem but it's a different problem. Even if we reduce the workload, sleep still can't be healthy because teenagers are being forced to consistently wake up at biologically unnatural times.

[0]: https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/sleep-and-teens

Students being given too much homework is a separate issue.

Students' circadian rhythm is shifted later compared to adults. Why shouldn't we let them sleep later? Why do you disagree with this?

Writing a 5-6 page paper in middle school never taught anyone anything, but it did take away time that could have been used constructively.

Is this seriously something that a HN user would write?

I'm sure that I could find a single example of a research paper assignment "teaching" a middle schooler something. I bet I could find a million of those examples too.

Except, kids in the UK seem to manage fine. Here, both primary (4/5 to 11/12) and secondary (12/13 to 17/18) start at 09h00 and have done so for a long time with no detrimental effects. Although, there are apparently plans for some secondary schools to instead start at 10h00, so there is that...!

I got pretty mediocre grades in middle school. I always stayed up way too late on my computer. However I noticed looking back there was one exceptional quarter: when my first class was PE.

I think running a mile at the start of every day did something to my brain. I advocate PE as the first class for all students.

And yet, school start times won't change.

School time is optimized for adult conveinience, not child/teen learning.

It's a matter of incomplete metrics. What impact do later school start times have on parents? How about parents' workplaces, especially for shift work? Regulatory capture means convenience for businesses is likely to trump children's health and performance.

I feel it's also a bit about perspective. Is school for learning, or is it a state sponsored day care with a guise of learning? Especially in the early years.

We ask schools to be all things for all people, so it is, of course, both and neither.

They have changed already in some districts. If you want them to change, you can help inform the public in your area and work to legislate something healthier for our children.

FWIW, my Colorado district's high schools are going to start class around 9 to 9:30-ish next year (proposed, at least) all based around research like this.

When I was in college, the best semester I had was one in which my first classes every day were at 2pm.

I’m pretty sure that’s the best I’ve felt in my entire life.

I would like to point out that this is part of the reason that daylight savings time (not just the clock changes associated with daylight savings time) is so dangerous. This is one thing that a state could do today to implement a change for the better: outlaw daylight savings time, giving teenagers and children (not to mention adults) another hour to sleep for much of the year.

Would they use it to sleep? Or would they squander it on an extra hour of entertainment?

Research suggests that people use it to sleep. It's even been found that people on the eastern edge of a time zone sleep more than on the western edge because the sun goes down "sooner" for them.

A big problem here in US is kids logistics -- parents spend way too much time getting their kids somewhere and back.

In Eastern Europe I remember parents just told me to not forget about pool after school, so I get on the bus and went 6 stops to the pool after school myself.

That only worked since age of 8 for me, of course, before that logistics was probably a problem for my parents as well.

Ah the joys of societal chauvinism, where your opinion is a priori wrong because of what you are regardless of evidence or any massive benefits they could possibly get. And the kicker is if you ever point out that you are maltreated they will deny it while maltreating you for daring to point out their casual cruelty.

I'm curious if it the benefit comes from starting late compared to your environment or starting late in an absolute sense. The whole of China has just one timezone, so it could be a good place to look at.

I was homeschooled so I missed out on a lot of public school stuff, but talking to adults my age and younger I’m continually shocked and horrified about what we’re putting kids through; it’s unacceptable.

I used to wake up around 6:30-40 for a 7:55 start time. I didn't officially "wake up" until after 9:30 or so.

The high school juniors had statewide exams every year so the rest of the high schoolers got to go in after 9/9:30. I woke up much more well-rested and oddly enough, I felt happier. I really wished that a later start time was the norm.

I doubt it'll be, since one of the reasons why schools start early is due to parents' schedules, but who knows.

Said more times than I care to count: "My brain is not fully on until 10:00 am. Do you want me writing 1 hour of code in that state, or 2 hours of code?"

(A couple jobs, showing up regularly at 9:45 was tolerated, if not exactly appreciated. Those were glorious times.)

They don't care though. School was never about learning, but discipline. Through that lens, the fact its uncomfortable without purpose is by design.

A high school educator once told me that the impetus for the early schedule was businesses who wanted teens to be able to work for them in the afternoon.

My high school started at 7:17am and I would have given anything for a 9am, or even an 8am, start time.

7:17am? Really? Not 7:15am, not 7:30am?

Not quite as odd, but my high school started at 8:10

Not op but my middle school had a lot of odd schedule times to avoid students memorizing when a class ended. It didn't really work. Some teachers couldn't figure out when classes ended though.

> Not op but my middle school had a lot of odd schedule times to avoid students memorizing when a class ended.

But wouldn't that also mean a lot of students didn't know when classes started?

I've never heard of school starting at 7:17. It was always a round number like 7 am or quarter intervals ( 7:15, 7:30, 7:45 ).

I don't think I've ever had anything like that for work meetings or interviews. If someone scheduled a meeting for 7:37, he'd get laughed at.

You (hopefully!) don't have six or seven 45 minute back-to-back meetings, with a few minutes of designated "passing time" to travel between them.

With those constraints, it's hard to develop a schedule that sticks to round numbers. This is especially true if you want to minimize downtime: your officemates can be trusted to productively--or at least quietly--occupy a few minutes of downtime, but many schools don't seem to think kids can.

My high school, for example, ended at 2:18pm (I can still picture the clock), but I think this was a consequence of starting at 7:30am.

> My high school, for example, ended at 2:18pm (I can still picture the clock), but I think this was a consequence of starting at 7:30am.

That's interesting. If your classes are 45 mins or an hour long and you get 5, 10 or 15 minutes to get to your next class, how do you end up with 2:18pm? Also, even if it was 2:18pm, I'd imagine most schools would just round that up to 2:20pm or let you leave a few minutes earlier at 2:15pm.

I don't ever recall any of my classes ending in a none-round number ( time that didn't end with a 0 or a 5 ). I don't recall any school letting me out at a none-round number.

As a matter of fact, I don't recall any stores, government offices or tv shows that didn't open or start at a "round number".

And every meeting I've had ( even multiple meetings in a day ) always was at a "round number". I can't imagine saying lets start the meeting at 2:17pm. Most of the time we'd bump it to 2:30pm. And if we were constrained for time to 2:20pm.

I can't remember how long we got between classes (it was /many/ years ago), but it was far, far less than fifteen minutes, and maybe not even five. You had to hustle between distant classes.

Just for kicks, I searched for "high school bell schedule" and about half seem to run on round numbers and half seem to be totally bizarre. For example:

- Starts at 7:45 but heads off the rails quickly: https://lchs.lpsd.ca/about/bell-schedule - 5/15/50 minute blocks: http://beaconsfield.lbpsb.qc.ca/Parents/Bell-Schedule

Why didn't they want people to know when it ended?

I think we had something like 17 minutes for announcements and attendance, then 5 minutes to get to our first period class that started at 7:40?

As someone who attended high school during the afternoon, I am not shocked.

Having to attend six am classes in college is the sole reason I didn't graduate cum laude. I had the gpa for it, but I had to repeat a subject just because it was that early and I'd rather miss the classes.

Why We Sleep is a good book on this topic and addresses many of the comments and concerns in this thread.

It's an entertaining book, and I like some of the things that it is trying to do, but it has some issues that it really shouldn't have.

https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

"Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors"

Thanks for posting this (upvoted you).

I was just about to order that book, but I usually research critiques of the book before buying it. I found yours here just because I'm the original poster (OP) and was reading through comments.

I am not going to buy the book, at least for now. Thanks again.

Edit: There's also a HN thread about the blog post that you shared [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850

When I was a teenager we had some natural disaster and the highschools had to share sites, the way they did it was we did school 12-6. We would eat dinner togeather after school I think we enjoyed it despite not being the norm

It’s an interesting thought experiment, what is harder for society?

-Going to bed earlier? -Rescheduling everything to be later?

As we know from many parts of Latin America and other equatorial countries, the eventual result is dinner at 9 or 10 pm.

I have no idea what is better...

There are so many ways in which school is not optimized for learning.

I have always had noon school..so the timings were from 10-5 pm. Many of my friends had morning school from 7-3 pm. I do not see any difference in sleep or performance due to this.

And yet work start times won't adjust.

How about just get kids to go to bed earlier?

I’m sure someone has previously had the thought.

There's evidence that some people are biologically pre-disposed towards waking up late, aka "owls" [0]. During adolescence, the tendency for delayed sleep phase rises to 7-16% [1], though it drops down to 1 in 600 for adults.

While never formally diagnosed with DSPD, I've struggled with chronotype/sleep issues my whole life, and it made public education a nightmare. I'm often still in a high-energy mental state at 2am (possibly heritable, my mother is the same way). Putting my head on the pillow is a futile gesture; I'll get tired faster if I get up and do something. I've found mitigation strategies (limiting blue light is the biggest), but it doesn't change that my energy starts low in the morning and steadily accumulates, while "larks" are the exact opposite.

I've only managed to function in my career due to much of the tech industry being highly flexible on scheduling; probably 30-40% of my output happens after 10pm, on average.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder

I suppose later school start times would also be associated with problematically late work start times, as such the school start times must be structured to give the optimal work start time under capitalism - and probably under most systems that require lots of people to work at specific times of the day.

I guess I'm in a bad mood today (splitting headache 5th day in a row), but why did the above get downvoted? It isn't apparent and I was wrong to claim it was? I'm wrong that later work times would be problematic for most employers? Is it the use of the word capitalism (I didn't capitalize it? It's a noun so I shouldn't) which is a reasonable description of the system that most of the Western world runs under, and really most of the world. Is it that I then went on to qualify my use of capitalism by saying lots of systems would also work the same way, is it that my qualification was sort of imprecise?

What possible reason, under the Hacker News guidelines would cause the above comment to be downvoted?

I never buy these stories. Why is it that an 18 year old high school student has trouble getting up and off to school by 7:30/ 8:00 am, but an 18 year old marine has no problems getting up at 4:30 am?

> an 18 year old marine has no problems getting up at 4:30

Define "no problems"

Also, most high school students are under 18.

Self-selection? I imagine those are biologically wired for a late-night chronotype either don't join the Marines, or wash out relatively quickly.

Or maybe the more structured environment of the military enforces early bedtimes vs. lax family life where parents zone out on smartphones while their kids are left to their own devices (pun intended) to enforce their own bedtimes.

Correct. It’s all discipline. When the school has late start, do the kids go to bed at the same time and get more rest? Nope. They stay up later.

You sign up voluntarily for the military in my lifetime. No so much for school. People tend to submit more readily when they aren't being compelled to do something. Even if they don't end up liking it, there's a tendency to act in accordance with a choice you made.

There shouldn't be any self-selection if these people don't exist. We're being told that "adolescents" all require sleeping late, thus school should start later for all students.

My ex was a night owl. He never stopped being a night owl in twenty-two years of military service.

Most people are night owls. So I imagine he's not the only one who was a night owl and had a successful military career.

My father was a morning person and spent 26.5 years in the army. At one point, they had him working in the kitchen because you had to be there at 2am to have breakfast ready by 5am or whatever and most soldiers could not cope with it. I think he did that for something like a year.

This is well known, but it also has impact on lots of other interconnected issues. Such as parents work schedules, that effect stability, that effect students learning as well. It will also impact school budgets, which then influences what kind of supplies and teachers a school gets, which also has a big impact on learning, and on and on and on.

Not saying we shouldn't do it, I just feel like sometimes we see an idea that would help things and then jump to, obviously there is no reason not to do it, it must be evil <insert bogyman here government, corporations, lazy teachers unions, Illuminati, leprechauns>. We must remember we live in an incredibly complex system and pushing for changes in just one part will have ramifications that must be considered downstream.

Are you arguing that the ramifications for society of correcting for this issue are net negative? I would guess the opposite and think that we are going to see ever more schools pushing back start times in the next several decades. We are already seeing some acting.

Oh, Jesus Christ—so let's force kids into another Procrustes Bed, eh? Let a different tail wag the dog?

There are those of us who naturally wake up early (I'm one, and I know plenty of others), and there are those of use who naturally sleep until noon.

Obviously, later start times would be awesome for late sleepers. They would also suck hard for those of us who have already been up for hours before school even starts.

A German friend of mine told me her school started at 07:00 every day and finished at noon. She said she preferred it that way, and so would I have.

What's wrong with having staggered start times for high schools? Some students could choose to start at 07:00, others as late as the afternoon. We'd fit more classes into the same school buildings, making potentially more efficient use of public resources.

> They would also suck hard for those of us who have already been up for hours before school even starts.

Why? If you are up early, you can use the morning to do whatever you want to.

You're not a morning person, are you?

I sure wouldn't have been getting a part-time job or been out playing with my friends at 06:00 in the morning, so, no, I couldn't "use the morning to do whatever [I] want to".

Especially if "what I want to do" is get my classes done and out of the way.

I am not a morning person, but my 2 year old is :). We have a few hours free every morning before she has to be at preschool. We read books, go for bike rides, go to the park, make large breakfasts, etc.

There’s lots to do in the morning. The only disadvantages are that it is sometimes cold, and nobody else is up yet.

"The only disadvantages" you say, when I've already given you a few. There are fewer options in the mornings—and one of those fewer options is "getting classes over with" (to bring this back on topic), with people suggesting pushing classes back even later.

This is ridiculous. What has anything of these to do with time? If you live at the east coast of the US, just set your time to GMT, and you can enjoy waking up at noon.

We need a culture of encouraging school student to go to sleep early and wake up early, and not overtaxing their health by staying up late and wasting time.

Teenagers are biologically driven to stay up late and wake up late, as shown in studies of sleep schedules in laboratory conditions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2820578/

> Adolescents continue to show a delayed circadian (or internal clock) phase as indicated by daily endocrine rhythms even after several weeks of regulated schedules that allow for sufficient sleep. This delay is maintained under controlled laboratory conditions in which there is limited possibility for social influence.

Plenty of adolescents are not "biologically driven to stay up late and wake up late". I woke up at 05:00 or so nearly every morning when I was a teenager—per my internal clock—and I'm not alone.

The article discusses that circadian rhythms in teens changes such that later sleep is normal

Nah, we need a culture that utilizes the best data and adjusts for that, not some preconceived notion about when everyone should be waking up and being productive.

how about a culture that understands people are just different, and all of them will likely wake up at different times

I suggested this below, and within minutes was mercilessly downvoted. Apparently statistical averages are to be employed as Procrustes Beds against these deviants who don't conform to the statistical average.

You are ignoring the sun.

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