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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

It’s not the state in control of when children sleep, it’s business owners.

Children are dropped off at school at the time that allows the parents to get to work at the time required by their boss. And they’re picked up when their boss let’s them go.

The school day (in the form of sports/clubs etc) is extended to keep up with longer working days and the second parent having to work full time instead of part time.

And two parents have to work because they need the combined salary to make the mortgage work, for a home big enough for everyone.

We work too long and too much for too little and if we don’t address the root causes then little is going to really change

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> And two parents have to work because they need the combined salary to make the mortgage work, for a home big enough for everyone.

This is the key right here.

I blame monetary policy for too-low interest rates, which drive up housing prices. I also blame over-restrictive zoning and other restrictions on building that cause houses to be more expensive.

> I blame monetary policy for too-low interest rates, which drive up housing prices. I also blame over-restrictive zoning and other restrictions on building that cause houses to be more expensive.

medium-term monetary policy hardly has anything to do with it. Rather, the paradigm of single-family zoning makes it pretty hard to build dense communities en-mass, so the shortage of supply has lead to ever-increasing home prices.

> Children are dropped off at school at the time that allows the parents to get to work at the time required by their boss. And they’re picked up when their boss let’s them go.

If only there were some way for students to get to school that wasn't their parents dropping them off. Some kind of bus maybe, but for students. We could call it a "school bus" perhaps.

Where I live, middle school aged kids still run the risk of big trouble for being unsupervised. 6th grade starts at 11 years old. So the bus can drop them off and pick them up, but better be there when they leave and when they get home.

Man, living in Germany, we started walking to school or taking the bus alone on the third day of first grade (6yo)

It was the same for me in the US in the 1970s. I rode the bus to school from first grade. Yes my parents were home in the morning and helped me get ready but I walked to the bus stop in the morning and back home in the afternoon.

This notion that parents have to hover over kids and make sure they "get on the bus" is quite recent.

Kids walk to and from school at like 5 years old in Europe. In some countries they also walk home for lunch, since there is a break with no childcare where they have to go home to eat.

If children are never allowed to learn independence, then you end up in this never-ending feedback loop of required supervision.

in some places in the US it’s actually illegal to leave you kid unsupervised if they’re under 12, it’s pure insanity

Snark doesn't solve problems. When I was in middle school, it was a 45 minute bus ride. The same bus had to drop us off at 7:30 am so they could get back in time to pick up the elementary kids and get them to school on time. So the bus picked us up at 6:45 am which means we are waking up around 6:15 at the latest. That isn't sleeping in. The GP is right, the parents still need to be there for the 6th grader to get on the bus and ALSO make it to work on time at 8:00. Not everyone lives 5 minutes from work. In some rural areas parents have an hour drive even after their kids get on the bus or get dropped at daycare.

That’s because the school is still scheduled around driving parents. If children majority took the bus, they could start school at 10:00 and leave it up to the remaining car users to make that work.

And some edge case about rural towns doesn’t mean much when even urban schools have this issue.

I can only speak to where I went to school, but even now, 90% of kids ride the bus. I'm not sure how school can start at 10:00 if the parents have to be there to get an 8 year old safely on the bus but somehow still make it to work by even 9:00.

For the minority of people getting dropped off early, provide a before school care program.

It is teens who due to changes they undergo during adolescence that would greatly benefit from much later school starts, and they should also be old enough to be able to get to the bus without parents supervising them.

Elementary school is fine with its current schedule because all the students there are pre-adolescent, so the parents could still deal with getting an 8 year old to the bus.

Middle school is in the middle so might not have a good answer. It will likely have many students who have started adolescence and would do better with a late start but are not yet independent enough to be able to handle getting ready and getting to the bus without their parents still around. So probably need to keep early starts for middle school.

Do parents need to be there to get an 8 year old safely on the bus? Really?

I recall taking the bus, on my own, since the second day of first grade. So did everyone else. Nothing terrible happened.

Parents have had CPS get involved if they're not at home to see their kids off to school, or are not home when their kids get home.

In the country I live in, we have a pretty good public transport service. I still had to get up at like 5:30 in the morning, to get to grade 9+ on time. (8 ish in the morning for the first period) From taking a long time to properly get up (constant sleep deprivation) to taking a bus to get me to the bus that takes me to a third bus that takes me to school, plus some wait times in between... And also a lot of heavy books...

Children/teens don't have it easy.

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