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Comment by agomez314 | Hacker News Reader

Is smartphone/digital screen attributable to some degree to teenager's late-night habits, and therefore a need for later school times?

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Research into teenagers' shifted body clocks has been going on since well before smartphones and even laptops, if I recall.

Anecdotally, as sometime who was a teenager in the pre-smartphone era I stayed up late plenty without any personal portable screens. I’d just be staying up to watch TV or read a book instead.

You are correct. I think research started into the effects of TV screens on teenagers sleeping patterns.

Research has indicated that extensive television viewing tends to be associated with sleep problems among children, adolescents, and adults.1-6 However, few studies of risk for sleep problems have assessed television viewing.1 Only 2 studies have investigated the sequencing of the association between television viewing and the development of sleep problems during childhood or early adolescence.2,5 The findings of both studies suggested that television viewing was associated with increased risk for sleep problems during the next 9 to 12 months. However, no prospective longitudinal study has investigated the long-term association of television viewing with the development of sleep problems from early adolescence through early adulthood. Thus, little is known about the nature and direction of the association between television viewing and sleep problems during adolescence and early adulthood.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

I read about it several times in Discover magazine as an early tween/teen. I had a subscription, haha. So, it was a recurring topic 20+ years ago in a fairly popular magazine.

This was well before kids commonly had phones, and while I owned a palm pilot, it didn’t keep me up at night and it was… atypical at best for kids to have or perhaps even want them, haha.

Around the time I turned 18 most kids my age had cell (not smart) phones and computers had become common in households, but I don’t recall them being a major sleep disturber yet. I would stay up on mine learning to program and playing StarCraft around 20 years ago, but again, I don’t think this was nearly as typical as kids watching tv in their rooms back then, let alone using phones or tablets today.

The issue has existed since well before widespread availability of smartphones and cheap laptops.

Here's a clinical review from 2003 (largely citing studies from the late 1990s) where the same issues were already clear:

http://web.mit.edu/writing/2010/July/Wolfson%26Carskadon2003...

One major part of the problem is that teens tend to go to bed at the same time regardless of when school starts the next day. Hence those students in school districts with earlier start times simply get less sleep, resulting in more irregular sleep schedules. In turn, that leads to worse cognitive performance.

I was a pre smart phone teenager. Up into the late late night reading, drawing with pencil and paper, and playing acoustic guitar. Sleep did not accept me early in the night no matter how much I wanted and tried.

Now mornings are the best part of my days. I’m in my later 40s.

Anecdotal, but as a pre-smartphone teenager I was a night owl which has gradually vanished despite the introduction of smartphones, so I think there's more at play

Same here. Always a pretty harsh night owl. The arrival of phones didn't change much for me. It is probably a factor for the average student, though. Question is how much vs. the natural circadian rhythm shift.

I was an avid reader, and my best opportunities to read were late at night. I'd start with a flashlight under the covers, but I found out that the best way to slip by was to go into the bathroom, lie in the dry bathtub with the light on, and read for as long as I wanted. It worked fairly well for a while, I guess. My mom went absolutely nuts over that strategy though. I suppose I was about 10 years old at the time. Later on, when I was 16, I had a so-called "girlfriend" and I would fall asleep during late night phone conversations with her. Or I'd go visit her house and come home late at night.

In high school, I was beginning to feel the onset of a chronic major depression, and I absolutely could not wake up on time. My hair regimen took 60-90 minutes to fix up in the bathroom, and by the time I was driving myself, I found an 11-minute route to rocket to school as fast as possible. Most of the time, it would be my father pouring cold water into my face just to get me roused out of bed. Therefore, mornings became an absolutely traumatic time in addition to all the other childhood traumas I was undergoing, and it took me decades to recover from that.

To some degree, perhaps. But this problem/requirement was around long before smartphones, long before home computers.

I was going to school at 6am and sleeping through class long before everyone had screens in their pockets.

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