A wave of sleep laws for teens? | Hacker News Reader

A wave of sleep laws for teens?

dylancollins.com

74 pointsdylancollins90 comments

The US is a strange place. On one hand, teachers do not treat academic performance as prominently as those in hyper competitive countries, say, China. Classes in high school are easy. Exams are generally easy. Teachers normally do not spend lots of time coming up with enlightening or challenging problem sets. SAT and ACT are embarrassingly not challenging or differentiating. They have only multiple choices, for fuck's sake -- the simplest form in an exam in other countries! The message from the US education system appears to be that it's okay if you don't want to excel in school but we will give you lots of resources if you're an elite student.

On the other hand, the competition is not going away. It just gets hidden or gets distributed to families. So, kids take 10+ AP courses, if not 15+ as in many of Bay Area schools. Kids participated in hyper competitive ECs to show that they are made to change the world to appease the admission officers. In the meantime, they still need to maintain high, if not perfect, GPAs. As a result, they sacrifice their sleep and therefore their health.

It's as if there are two worlds in the US. When I read the novel Folding Beijing, I felt that I was reading about the US's education system, which is sad.

> It's as if there are two worlds in the US.

The US is very far from a monoculture. Culture and personal values vary greatly from one family to the next, even within the same region.

I worked for a company with a lot of non-US offices with a lot of younger people who always had a lot of questions about US culture. I think they got tired of me explaining that the US is extremely diverse when it comes to culture and values. They always wanted one, singular answer about how people in the US do things in their personal and family lives. When describing their own countries, they’d confidently say “Here, we all do it this way” as if their entire country followed a singular culture. It was interesting to see how this sense of monoculture (however unrealistic) varied from country to country, but rarely applied to discussions about the US.

Of course, internet commenters love to generalize about US people, generally in a negative light. Even US citizens love to criticize the US. However, one of the things I love most about living here is the wide array of values and cultures and the freedom to do your own thing

I like to tell people that a US state is the size of a European country, and USA the country is as large as Europe the continent.

"Oh, you're from Europe? What language do they speak in Europe?"

State to state the US is significantly more similar culturally than Europe is. The distance from my home town to the University I went to is equivalent to London to Jerusalem basically, but the differences between my hometown and the place I went to university are not very significant when compared to the differences between London and Jerusalem.

Yeah, I did not find moving from Massachusetts to California involved a radical reimagining of my behavior, the way I spoke, or in many cases even the places I shopped. The people here are all familiar with the same cultural touchstones, more or less. Distinctive regional accents are harder and harder to hear. US culture might have been more notably diverse in the pre-War period but now basically you're, to put it in vulgar terms, "cosmopolitan" or "hick" and that's about all the differentiation that matters.

FWIW, (Eastern) Massachusetts and (South-Central, Coastal) California are not very different. San Francisco and Boston share a special affinity.

Many of the places in between are more varied.

They’re not but that’s kind of my point. It’s not really that varied, you can go “red” or “blue” and those alternate a lot as you travel around, but the idea of a patchwork of many little very distinctive cultures is on life support.

How much have you actually traveled through the US beyond superficially passing through a few cities? Is “Massachusetts to California” supposed to be satire?

You obviously haven’t met any Cajuns, Appalachians, or any number of American subcultures that are very distinct from your generic metropolitan yuppy. Many of them have dialects and accents thick enough to be practically indecipherable to many Americans. You just won’t find them at your local Trader Joes because they live somewhere else

Yes, I have, but I didn’t think I needed to write my whole life story to make a point. Regional accents (Massachusetts has a couple distinctive ones! While we’re being condescending, surely you are at least vaguely aware of that) are more likely to be used by people middle-aged or older. Regional media is dead. Regional cuisine is far less distinct than it used to be with many specialties gone.

In 1900 it wouldn’t have been common sense that MA and CA are “supposed to be” similar so the fact you’re throwing that in my face is actually making my point.

I think this sort of proves the point that Europe is significantly more varied though. Even if you only travel to major cities in Europe you notice very significant cultural differences between them. Small pockets of distinct cultures are around the US but there are way fewer of them and they are sparsely distributed in a way that most people don't run into them at all.

For example, in Canada the difference between the Haida people, Inuit people, English Canadians are very apparent and obvious, but the vast vast majority of the country (outside of Quebec and northern NB) is small towns where people speak English, play the same few sports, have the same like 8 chain restaurants, and live in broadly similar property styles. Sure culturally BC is different from Ontario slightly, but having traveled to and lived in both for many years, the differences are not very significant unless I were to seek out specific cultural enclaves, and that is a 4500 km difference.

No argument against the idea that the ~continent of Europe is more heterogeneous than the country of the US.

Just that the MA-CA example is vastly underrepresentative of the variation within the US.

Isn’t it a little odd that we can have culturally very similar places 3000 miles apart unless culture has mostly been nationalized in a couple variations?

I mean, superficially odd perhaps, yes. I can think of a dozen reasons why it makes sense.

Regardless, it is not evidence that the culture is homogeneous in the middle.

There is, of course, a national culture. Again I think we might be drawing the line differently. I look for and enjoy the variations. They are there.

But if you want to paint with a broad brush, you can make lots of generalizations too. It's just less interesting.

What forces would we expect to act on the coasts of the United States but not the interior?

Cosmopolitanism- more multicultural cross pollination due to trade and travel. Wealth disparity is another. The coasts are also richer than ‘flyover country.’ There are isolated places in New Mexico, the Deep South, and Appalachia that are grievously poverty stricken, to give some extreme examples.

If we want to get so nitpicky there are poor and isolated areas along the coasts too. And heartland areas outside of major cities are less able to sustain independent media. Modern institutions like the military shuffle people around to and from these less notable areas and many broad trends do not fit the simplistic narrative you're presenting (for instance, many rural areas have large immigrant populations who work in farms, meat-processing facilities, and similar).

(parsing out the prepositions) Agreed, I think: MA-CA are nearly the physically most distant, but perhaps the culturally most similar.

But disagreed that the places in between are not that varied.

Beyond the superficial veneer of a (mostly) common language and political drama and media and sports teams and retailers, there are deeply different predominant ways of thinking about self and life.

We may just be using different criteria on how to measure the magnitude of cultural variation.

You won't see it from the highways, and yes the Internet is normative, and ultimately yes humans share a fairly predictable psychology.

But the cultural variation between regions seems undeniable to me. Thank goodness! I travel a lot, and spend a lot of time in individual strange places, and this is a large part of the reason why I do so.

I would wager that if you sat down people from small, deep-red towns in California, New England, and Texas, they’d agree on much more than they disagreed. And I’d bet you’d get similar results with city dwellers from each region. There are variations on, for instance, how likely people are to strike up a conversation with strangers in an elevator, but to me these are the more superficial differences.

To use your example: I think you'd be correct for the superficial beginning of the conversation.

But this is no different than saying "Metallica fans from ...", or "NASCAR fans from ...". Politics is no longer about what people think. It's a nationalized polemic sport. There are two teams, and an irrelevant number of pretenders.

But if you ever got past the "what you think you think" and into the "why you think the things you think", or "how do you live that expresses the way you think" ... the variations would start to come out.

Like what? I mean what do you think the variations are really going to be? People orient their entire value systems around their political affiliation.

People don't even understand their political affiliation.

Viewing humans through that lens is reductive. I think we've figured out our disagreement here!

Viewing humans through a lens of regional characteristics is also reductive so, so long as you still think that's worthwhile, it's more a question of which reductive categorizations you think are meaningful.

I don't really understand your point.

I'm arguing the case against dismissing regional variations. I don't mean to suggest that regions are the last stop on the differentiation train.

I could easily take a plausible position that people within the same town have so much difference between them that trying to lump regional characteristics together is meaningless. Since you don’t, apparently you’re OK with some reduction.

Of course. People are people, but Bob is Bob.

There's more variation on the street I live on today, than between MA and CA taken as a whole.

I'm not sure what I "don't" in your comment above, but clearly my intent is not clear, so I'll restate:

(Parts of) MA and CA have a lot of similarities. Some of the places physically between them are very different.

You may disagree. If so, you are surely measuring by a different metric than I am, or have not seen the places I've seen. But that's all I intended to say.

It doesn't really seem like you've understood what I've said either, then: I'm saying is that there are essentially two American cultures, the urban one and the non-urban one, and these two parallel national cultures have almost entirely subsumed what were formerly much more varied regional ones. Anyway, you're being glib about how much I must not know about the various other states since CA and MA are "so similar" as if Los Angeles is just like Bakersfield or a California farm town, so it's no less facile.

I moved from non-rural Louisiana to Boston and it involved a radical reimagining of my behavior:

- Understanding how people spoke. There are more, and more different, languages spoken and cultures in Cambridge than even the most diverse parts of Louisiana. I met in Boston for the first time people from, and not just culturally descended from, India, Pakistan, Spain, Israel, Peru, Ethiopia, just off the top of my head. Even if English dominates, it's a very different English, where the same words mean different things, and new words are used that didn't exist in Louisiana.

The kind of English coming out of my mouth, my vocabulary and accent, marked me as a very different kind of person and set first impressions that I didn't want or intend — and it wasn't a "cosmopolitan"/"hick" binary, it was more of a matrix of rich/poor, smart/dumb, educated/not, straight/gay, English first/second, Black/not, local/not ("Worcester"). I confused the hell out of people, both on those dimensions and also with what I was literally saying, if I didn't modulate my speech to be more like theirs. Meanwhile I had some interesting times as a French speaker overhearing conversations about me that were not meant for me, because I didn't look like a French speaker, because most French speakers there were non-white Haitians or from Francophone African nations.

- The places I shopped. Back then Boston had the kinds of stores and markets that I had never actually seen in real life while living in Louisiana. Other than Market Basket, the one true constant in life (except apparently anywhere else in the country).

- The different cultural touchstones. Y'all. "Milkshakes" being liquid, and "frappes" being milkshakes, except at Starbucks. "Regulah" coffee. St. Patrick's Day being a less fun but equally drunk Mardi Gras (and no Mardi Gras despite all the Catholics? Then what's the point of being Catholic?). Baseball — like, we have it, but it's kind of a joke sport people only care about if LSU is good or the Astros were especially bad. Everything that comes from moving from a red state to a blue state — less homophobia, less xenophobia, more classism, more weird and weirdly enforced rules. Candlepin. The whole concept of state-run liquor. Vastly different types and intensities of racism. People in Boston go to live music shows and don't dance. Almost nobody white in Boston knows how to hold a cookout, like a real proper whole-neighborhood meal, and the word "cookout" just means BBQ there.

- How I got around. Public transit! Everyone else is complaining constantly about the MBTA and I'm like, I get to ride a train? Every day??? And if I miss it I can also take one or two buses???? And it might catch on fire??????? Before that I was putting 120 miles a day on my car to commute, almost all of it straight-line highways. I'd never in my life set foot on non-school-bus public transit. It took me a solid month just to understand that I really could get almost anywhere with just walking and transit.

- Conversely, owning a truck is by far the easiest way to make friends in Boston.

- How close everything was. The nearest anything for me in Louisiana was typically 5 to 10 miles away. People in Boston had no concept of distance; transit abstracted it away into minutes. Neighborhoods were walkable; I'd regularly used maybe two or three notable paved sidewalks in my life before I wound up in Boston. Driving the length of my old college commute, which had been almost all highway with little to nothing to even stop for, would send me through a dozen small cities in the NE.

- Snow! Holy shit. Snow!!! My god!!!!! The snow!!!!!!!! Seven feet of snow that doesn't go away! Parking sweeps for snow plows! SNOW PLOWS! Lines out the door to get ice cream when it's a balmy 33 degrees out! Yak Trax! MITTENS

- And in the summer, as the man in the show said, I had to learn to accept that air conditioning was a privilege and not a right.

Lived there three years and it was life-changing. Got married to someone who had travelled far, far more than I had, domestically and abroad, but never to the southeast. Brought them to Louisiana a couple of times and the inverse of all of the above was wild to watch them experience.

I lived a little bit outside of Boston and some of the things you’ve written (things being close, for instance, or diversity, or public transit being a viable option to go places) didn’t really apply at all.

I would guess that most people from outside the states are familiar with the geographical size of the country, and that this frequently comes off as patronising.

Besides, the fact of the matter is that English dominates as the main language in the US to a far greater degree than Europe. I’m not sure that your analogy really highlights anything except that Europe has many more culturally distinct zones than the US.

> I would guess that most people from outside the states are familiar with the geographical size of the country

If they do they don't act like it: my experience has been like the OP's, in that non-Americans tend to assume our society and culture is a lot more homogeneous than it is.

Conversely, as an American, American's tend to assume their culture is a lot more heterogeneous than it really is. Tons of people don't travel outside the country because they think that the US has everything when it doesn't at all.

To be fair, the US doesn't have everything, but it does have a lot, so I can see how you could get this idea if you weren't a particularly imaginative or curious person.

Hmm, but almost everywhere american english is spoken in the US? Also rest assured, travelled quite a bit through the US, and at least the surface view from a tourist is: There are differences (as there are also huge differences as e.g. between Berlin and Bavaria) in culture.. but all the things foreigners find crazy about the US and what I would call "culture" are very similar.

Sure, subcultures exist, but as in every immigrant country. (I would even say that integration works better there, like foreigners wanting to adapt more to the American culture as in other countries).

They have only multiple choices, for fuck's sake -- the simplest form in an exam in other countries!

I’ve found multiple-choice to be as hard as any other format when “none of the above” and “all of the above” are added to every single question.

Multiple choice with none of the above compared to every question is a minor essay? Yeah no

Yes please! I got called lazy as a kid since I had trouble getting up at 5:30am daily so I could walk to school. My generation is already fucked, but maybe we can fix things for the next one.

EDIT: and my school district was staggered the wrong direction. High school started earliest, then middle school, then primary school was latest. That's backwards from how it should have been, if anyone in my city had understood how the circadian rhythm changes during adolescence.

My father used to throw a glass of water on me if I tried to sleep in on the weekends. Twenty years later, I think my brain is still trying to catch up on that lost sleep.

That sounds pretty terrible.. My dad installed a little mini school bell next to my bed with a button he could push from downstairs. I used to hate it and do all sorts of things to disable it. Recently, I was visiting and I pushed the button and it still worked. As a dad, I had a little moment of realizing how hilarious it is in hindsight. Not sure if I'd feel the same way about the water.

Same glass of water from Dad here, although it was on weekdays, when I could hardly stand to face another day of school.

I had trouble adapting to an adult sleep schedule from a very early age, and had some embarrassing episodes, as well as weird stuff like slipping into a dry bathtub late at night because I wanted to read a book.

In high school, I began checking out, and my depression was chronic and major. I had a "girlfriend" (who was abusing me) so I stayed up late at night on the phone or visiting her. I was falling asleep and falling behind in classes. My parents were beside themselves. It didn't get any better.

>High school started earliest, then middle school, then primary school was latest. That's backwards from how it should have been, if anyone in my city had understood how the circadian rhythm changes during adolescence.

The explanation I always heard for this structure, very common in the US, is to allow for after school jobs for high schoolers.

Weirdly teachers and the education system are some of the most anti-science when it comes to how they structure anything, they seem to ignore all recent discoveries about neurological development and refuse to integrate it into their degrees and certifications and the only changes administrations are willing to make are more what benefits them and the teachers (making kids take work home rather than doing it in class and guiding them), not the students.

An observation from my parents (who are now retired but were both career teachers/school administrators) is that for many teachers their entire life is spent in a school or uni, without a lot of "real world workplace experience". As such many teachers can be very rigid in how they expect the world to be and their acceptance of change.

That's one of 3 explanations I've heard. #2 is to make time for after school sports. #3 is so that teens can be home to watch their younger siblings.

The real reason is #4: it's simpler for the school, as they don't have to run several different bus services.

They wouldn't have to if they swapped the schedules.

I figured they did this because it’s desirable for families to have older siblings home earlier.

The conflation between "not a morning person" and "lazy" is completely ridiculous, and seems to prevail mostly in countries with a "protestant work ethic" background.

I've literally been fired from jobs where I was one of the better performers for the singular reason for struggling to be there at 8am every day, and where this didn't matter at all for the position if I started at 8am or 10am (for some positions it obviously does matter). That I often worked longer than many others didn't seem to matter; people take it as a marker and that's that.

5:30am is utterly ridiculous; that's just the middle of the night.

> 5:30am is utterly ridiculous; that's just the middle of the night.

There's actually a time that's generally closest to the middle of the night as measured by the start and end of the night. In fact, it's shortened from that very phrase "middle of the night". It's called midnight.

In summer around here, 5:30am is approximately the end of the night, as measured by the sun.

I can't comment on laws, but I can comment on sleep hygiene. If you are dealing with revenge bedtime procrastination (it's a term) or a non-24 hour circadian rhythm, the later you have to wake up, the later you will go to sleep.

Many people are dealing with things like that. I would regularly see my co-workers online at 2 - 3 am when our core hours were 10 am - 5 pm. My company recently changed core hrs to 12 pm - 2 pm, and unsurprisingly, I see the same co-workers up at 5 am. I would expect to see people online throughout the night if we shifted core hours to 3 pm - 5 pm, even if that schedule perfectly accommodates typical working times.

N = 4 or 5, but I don't think delaying school times will solve much. Going to bed earlier can solve it, though it's difficult for people with RBP or unusual circadian rhythms. But keeping a regular schedule and getting 9+ hours of sleep becomes possible for many after a few weeks of sticking with a good sleep hygiene.

According to the link, the laws say “class must start after 8:30am”, and there’s often an earlier scheduled bus pickup to make, so you have to account for that in waking times, unlike WFH business hours where you can roll out of bed and open slack/zoom in 10 minutes if pressed. I think the concerns are different at that time range.

There was a serious study in the UK where high schoolers should be starting at 10 am school.

They changed school hours for them, so I have to disagree. I was seriously penalized because I was useless early in the morning, so I'm still quite annoyed by this.

> I would regularly see my co-workers online at 2 - 3 am when our core hours were 10 am - 5 pm. My company recently changed core hrs to 12 pm - 2 pm, and unsurprisingly, I see the same co-workers up at 5 am.

Not calling you out, and I mean this kindly… but this is kind of a smelt-it/dealt-it observation right? If you’re observing them awake at hours that aren’t healthy for them, you have to be awake at the same time to observe it?

More productive I hope: if people are shifting their sleep this way as core hours are clamped, it’s probably a sign that the core hours aren’t consistent with working hours, and people are moving demanding work around to fit their schedules as best they can. That’s not a problem the individual workers can address, it’s a process and culture problem.

On the original topic: my circadian rhythm wants to run either 30 or 32 hours. College was absolutely brutal for me, because I could arrange my classes to not start early at least several days a week, and that just made matters worse.

The only thing that got me back into a healthy rhythm was getting a job that forced me to be up at a regular hour every day. Without exaggerating too much, taking that job probably saved my life because the stress of classes on top of the mental and emotional consequences of being so out of the loop were very difficult to deal with.

Nowadays, I still find myself occasionally staying up until 3 in the morning. Sometimes I work late at night just because I can't flow during the day, and I make up for it by taking time off in-between my meetings. That's a personal choice that ends up working fairly well for our family, but also isn't exactly "healthy" in the strictest sense either, I suppose.

In any case, having a regular wake-up time that doesn't vary regardless of when I fall asleep is the only way to stay sane- otherwise I would almost certainly be living in a semi-perpetual fugue state of staying up 20-24 hours straight then sleeping a random amount.

Edit: Conversely, my dad grew up on a farm and was up with the dawn every single day. Cows don't care if you're a teenager or not. He ended up in a solid career and did quite well for himself. Survivorship bias, perhaps, but I often wonder how much better I would have done if I had the same schedule he still does.

I also suffered for a long time with an apparently long circadian rhythm. My experience with how that intersected with fixed schedules went much worse: poor sleep in school descended into insomnia, and absolute terror of the alarm clock. Insomnia persisted and worsened into my 30s. This all fed quite a bit into a whole lot of chronic mental health problems. And I’m not exaggerating, this all did very nearly get me dead.

The things which really helped:

1. Diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. Before which, I never would’ve imagined that a daily dose of amphetamines would help me get anything resembling consistent sleep and rest. Since then, my internal clock has been much more consistent with earth days.

2. Getting my pup. Partly for the reason you describe: she has needs that don’t care about my internal schedule, and my schedule has to accommodate her. Also in large part because she’s been singularly the best sleep aid I’ve ever had or could have imagined. We wake together, do our daily routine, play, wind down, then we snuggle... and it’s the best rest I’ve ever gotten.

Edit: I should add another thing that helped, for anyone who struggles with sleep. I stopped using alarms to wake, almost entirely, except for extraordinary circumstances. My sleep schedule does drift a bit and I have to consciously keep it in check when it does, but I get much more comfortable with the actual act of resting when there isn’t a hard time limit attached to it.

> On the original topic: my circadian rhythm wants to run either 30 or 32 hours.

In my teens and early 20s I had the same. It was fine most of the time, and then I'd crash and miss a day or two. Then I started taking midday naps, whether or not I feel like I need them. Well, it started out that I'd fall asleep in 2:00 lectures, and I noticed that it was some of my best sleep. Weirdly, napping a little (5-30min) during the day helps me sleep at night. When I miss it, it can be impossible to get to sleep -- right around bedtime I suddenly go from normal to buzzy and if I try to force it I just wake up more.

> but this is kind of a smelt-it/dealt-it observation right?

Yeah, I’ve had years in my life when I had poor sleeping habits and years when the habits were okay.

I usually deal with heavy revenge sleep procrastination when I’m crunching at work (games industry) and I try to reclaim some hours for myself at the cost of sleep.

Yeah, it’s a process and culture problem. Though individuals have some say in it. Even with crunch in the games industry, you get to set some personal boundaries. You can always put your health first. And our industry has been crunching less and less because people have started doing that. It used to be that when a company prescribed crunch (6 day a week, 16 hour a day schedules), almost everyone would do it. Now almost everyone quits. And that’s good, people have reasonable control over that. Besides, if someone flat out chooses not to adhere to crunch, they have options. Just not doing it is enough - there are rarely serious consequences.

With schools, it’s different. The question is not about reducing workloads, but about just moving them to a different time in the day. That, in my experience, is meaningless.

    revenge bedtime procrastination

Well, of course I know him. He's me. Wake up late, start work late, end work late, do chores late, go to bed late, then waste hours in bed browsing the internet because I feel that I’ve had no time for myself during the day, so ruining next day by having low quality „me time” browsing the internet feels like somehow reclaiming that missing time.

But when you ruin your sleeping pattern its very hard to fix it. I skip the nigt of sleep so I am very sleepy next night. I fall asleep and wake up in the morning, but when I go to bed next day I just cant fall asleep, starting whole issue from scratch.

That chart shows percentage of students getting at least 9 hours of sleep. Holy crap! In high school I used to go to bed around 11PM because my parents made me, and I would stare at the ceiling until I fell asleep at 2 or 3AM. Then my alarm would ring at 6:15 and I’d drag my ass into the shower and be a zombie through at least my first 3 classes. I’d get home at 2:30 and couldn’t keep from falling asleep since I was so exhausted.

i feel this so much. i didn't know shit about sleep back then, but in retrospective i had such poor sleeping habits and was barely getting 7 hours of sleep at much on most nights for such a long time, it feels terrible to know this now haha.

I hope the ACT/SAT get with the program. Have a teen who just took the SAT and had to be there before 7:45. On a Saturday, so no good reason for such an early start time. Give them until at least 9!

Surely the good reason for the early start on a Saturday, is that all the adults running the exam can finish everything quickly enough to still have a restful weekend.

If I were an adult running an exam on a Saturday I'd be sad if it started any time before 9-10am. It isn't just teenagers who despise waking early or who have night owl aligned chronotypes.

Isn't it their job that they get compensated for? If I am not completely off, if this is a paid job (most likely with overtime and extra for weekend), then they have absolutely no reason to do that early.

My high school offered the SAT during a normal school day, which seems much nicer that having to do it early Saturday morning! (And means the teachers can double as proctors.)

Growing up in India, i went to a School whose timings were 11:30am to 4:40pm (with a 30min break for lunch).

In hindsight it was one of the best things about the school. You slept well, did some studies/homework in the morning when fresh, had a good "brunch" and then left for school all rested/fueled and ready to go.

Getting back from school, you had something to eat and then went out to play with your friends until 6pm (or when it got dark). Washup after play and hit homework from 7pm onwards. Dinner around 8:30/9pm and hit the bed around 10pm.

I think a schedule like the above is just what is needed for today's times.

That sounds perfect! That should be the schedule absolutely.

I think we need such a School/Job schedule for everybody. 11am-5pm (with two 30-min break in between) should be the max study/work hours. It gives us enough time for ourselves in a day to take care of all other things like family time/recreation/sports/etc. This is even more important today because we have so many things (distractions and otherwise) that demand our time.

A lot of illnesses due to poor lifestyles and bad Work-Life balance would simply disappear and we would all be healthier and happier.

Why isn't there a simple study on how delaying school starts improve scores using existing data?

Literally today, most schools start at the exact same "time" (8:00am). But there's a big shift in actual solar time if you're on the far east or far west of a given time zone: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/03/03/article-2572317-1...

Do we see across the US a huge SAT score difference between kids on the most east of Pacific time and kids on west of Central time, and between kids east of Central time and west of Eastern time?

And within a the states that are pretty uniform (not the costal ones, as the socioeconomic differences would probably be too big), is there a big difference of SAT scores between the eastern-most highschoolers and Western-most highschoolers?

I foresee a rise in before school programs. My oldest child’s school starts at 8:20 but you’d better believe he gets dropped off at 7:20 when doors open. It just aligns better with my schedule and he’s awake before 6 AM anyways.

Get rid of artificial lighting during the week, force devices off at 6 pm.

I would say that any solution to solving the American Educational system should start with a dramatic reduction in child care costs. Also were I trying to solve public education, I would give more weight to people who have actually gone to public schools.

>=9h of sleep is imho too much. Regarding sleep there is much contradicting research and books [0], but most stuff I read (not citing anything) points to 7-8h as a sweet spot and some doctors say that some people need less sleep for reasons (tm). Anyway back to my point: A graph on teen sleep showing 9 or more hours in percent is a bad proof of worse sleep schedules in teens since imho more than 9 hours of sleep could be bad for you as well...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519

I mean, you can very easily google and see there is scientific consensus that teenagers require more than 8hrs of sleep, with 9 or 10 being optimal although there will always be outliers.

the 7-8 you reference is for adults 25yrs+. As a general rule humans require less sleep the older they get.

The trick is to go to bed earlier. This doesn't seem to actually solve any problems

We're already telling them to go to bed earlier. However, they aren't rational because they are not yet adults. Therefore, an imperfect solution is better than the current situation.

I've seen this sort of template play out in many contexts, the most recent being fluoridated water ex: We shouldn't fluoridate water, even it if improves dental health because kids should stop ingesting sugar.

I'm curious, where does this mindset comes from?

Fluoride and sugar operate completely independently on dental health. Fluoride is very beneficial, regardless of any other diet or dental hygiene factors. If you eat a lot of sugar, fluoride helps. If you don't eat any sugar, fluoride still helps.

I don't agree with putting fluoride in the water - but it should be available to anyone without a prescription.

What's an adult? I'm late 20s and most of my peers still aren't rational.

But it was worse when you were a teenager, no?

Certainly not before forties. I'm almost forty, and it's still the same in this age group; myself included (just less frequently than in my 20's because I can't afford luxuries such as no-visible-consequences all-nighters anymore, I guess). ;)

I'm not sure how relevant that is. If someone is in their 20s, they're likely not going to find themselves in the situation of having to wake up early for highschool.

The government can't really enforce bedtimes, but it can enforce this.

And as someone who has identified as a night owl my whole life I am thankful that future night owls may be less forced to accommodate the morning bird world we live in.

Circadian rhythms are different between people, and throughout one's life. They also typically vary by demographic.

Adolescents and young adults typically have a circadian rhythm shifted a couple of hours later than younger kids and adults. Even with the best of intentions about sleeping earlier, they're likely to be sleep-deprived by waking up earlier.

I also assume it varies with the season. For example it's half way through june, my body wants to naturally go to bed later and wake up earlier (11pm, 6am wake up time). I have to force myself to go at 9pm (have children), so that I get my 8 hours if sleep.

During winter when it's always dark I have no trouble going to bed at 8pm.

I'm a former night owl, used to go to bed between 4 and 6 am and wake up at 2pm every day of the week, which worked great to work for north america as a remote developer from europe

Yeah, ok. That isn't happening.

The trick is to realize that it's not realistic for teens to go to bed earlier and to let them sleep in to a reasonable hour.

Teens are not easily calibrated machines that respond reliably to conditioning or rationally motivated behaviors. Their needs have nothing to do with the convenient fantasies of adults.

Teens need like 9 hours of sleep a night. Start letting kids sleep more. They need it way more than whatever they are being forced to give it up for by self-serving, broken institutions.

9 hours sleep, getting up at 6am for bus/commute plus early school start and yeah that means going to bed at 9pm. Good luck with enforcing that on any teen.

Combine that with homeworks and it's essentially impossible to achievr

I find the obsession with homework in highschool to be totally ridiculous. It's beyond teaching or memorization, its moved to ceremonial busy work to make educators look good. Because obviously the volume of work kids are doing indicates how good the teacher is, right? It's a case of KPIs gone wrong for sure. When I went to university, my marks improved over HS because the daily BS was forgotten.

I have opposite feelings about it. I was always doing homeworks, but when I stopped doing math homeworks my grades dropped.

On the other side, when I stopped doing latin homeworks, my grades increased.

Then there was art homeworks which were entirely a joke, first time I did them regularly (replicate parthenon front with pencil and then ink it), my rating was 4 over 10 (notice that I was on a STEM course), which is extremely bad. And took me something like 8 hours to draw. Next time I decided to do like everybody else and I used glass, a lamp and drawn with the picture under the paper. Rating was 7 this time and it took me 2 hours of work (inking still takes time). One student photocopied and enlarged the damn drawing and got 8 over 10 as a grade. Like, how are you supposed to get to 10?

Ignores biology where adolescents have increased sensitivity to light when it comes melatonin release.

https://www.neurologylive.com/view/teenage-circadian-rhythm

Ah, "just" thinking rears it's ugly head again, in the classic vein of over-generalizing from personal experience. "Just go to bed earlier." Why didn't anyone else think of that?

In fact they did. Unfortunately, when kids are loaded up with homework, that's not really possible. Late night, after homework, is often the only time they can socialize or do their own thing. Foregoing that would also be bad for mental health. And even when they do have the option of going to bed earlier (e.g. summer) that doesn't necessarily mean they sleep earlier. My daughter used to lie awake for hours trying to get to sleep; I've heard many similar stories from other parents and children. We don't need to offer facile quick fixes. We need to address the things that prevent good sleep by stressing them out and/or putting demands on their time, whether it's screens and social media or school-related stress.

If "just" going to bed earlier works for you, as it mostly has for me (less so since I hit my later 50s), then good for you. But don't act like it's The Answer for everyone.

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