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Comment by kyawzazaw | Hacker News Reader

1. I think it's only earlier this way in the US because of school buses and parents need to go to school.

Here in my country, most start at either 8 or 9.

My kids are elementary students, both wake up at 8:30 naturally (go to bed at 7:30). To eat, get ready and bike to school for a 840 start, they need to be up by 7:30 at the very latest. Couldn't imagine having an 8am start, let alone earlier, especially as they age.

They sleep for 13 hours a day?

Yeah that's a good bit more than the 9-12 average. As a parent of elementary age kids myself, I'd suspect there was some amount of not-sleeping actually happening overnight. My son is particularly adept at playing with legos and such even in the dark. My daughter is fond of waking up at 1am and reading for a couple hours, then going back to sleep until 8:30am.

I am not sure exactly how widespread it is/was, but as I understand that biphasic sleep was pretty common before artificial light and the rise of civilization. With the recent dropping of external pressure to get up as early or go to bed as late, it's not terribly surprising that some people would gravitate towards that; Kids even more so -- their sleep patterns are not quite as well established.

It's pretty likely they're not actually sleeping all those 13 hours. If they were, I would be suspicious of some other underlying cause.

So I had messed up my sleep really bad this year, to the point where I was ending up not sleeping for days or sleeping the whole day (on weekends for example) and have been slowly trying to bring myself to a more sane baseline. At one point a sort of bi-phasic schedule where I would initially sleep in the mid-late afternoon and then again either very late at night or early morning. If i had more flexibility in my schedule, I'm convicned it wouldn't be that bad.

I had some friends who’s kids were like that and couldn’t believe it. Ours went to sleep at 8 and woke up at 5:30-6am just naturally.

As they get older of course, they want to sleep a lot later.

Yes. They are in the same room, and we live in a small house. We know when they wake up. They're louder than average, and very busy during the day.

Why not?

(We started at 7:00 and it was... fine? Quite possible to imagine?)

My son (HS age) is naturally an early riser and rarely sleeps past 8am, even on weekends. I have noticed a marked improvement in his mood and reduction in his tendency to fall asleep within 5 minutes of riding in a car since quarantine began and he can get up when he prefers rather than having to leave the house by 7am every morning.

Between 5 AP courses and after school activities that kept him there until 9pm a few times a week, he was burning himself out last year. We'll be doing remote school until at least February and it's been great (for him).

because even waking up an hour earlier than normal was a huge pain. Everyone was moodier, less capable and more distracted.

School times in many areas are set to please teachers' unions; this was the subject of some recent controversy in California (but the teachers won).

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