I dont see what the issue is, the kids have plenty of time to sleep, if they go to bed at 9 they can wake up at 6 with 8 hours of sleep and one hour to spare.
The point is that we now know this to be true. Rather than try to shoehorn our biological needs in whatever spare pockets of time we can scrounge, we should focus on better adapting our society and it’s systems to our needs at all stages of life.
there is no time period which teenagers are more able to fall asleep
This is unequivocally false. That’s literally a part of the circadian cycle. We can more easily fall asleep at particular spans of our 24 hour cycle. These spans shift depending on our age.
I have a hypothesis that adolescents staying up late and the elderly waking up early is an an evolutionary holdover from a time when someone needed to be awake to watch for lion attacks.
Tbf it’s not gonna fix anything, teens need a LOT of sleep and their rhythm stray to as far as 4-5AM, so even when starting at 9 they won’t get a lot of sleep
What in my opinion would work is reducing school times a bit and have morning and evening batches with different staffs and the student could choose which time they want to attend, the productivity would be much higher making the lower time period not a problem, tho i am pretty sure there might be some issues in this system remembers CGP grey’s rule
one solution would be longer school years (doesn't have to be a 'year-round' calendar) with maybe an hour or hour-and-a-half less class time per day. but that costs more in terms of food service, transportation, building upkeep, and so forth; plus extra child care burden on parents when most families don't have a 'stay at home' parent these days.
is this an americabrained comment? here in sweden, and this is not some urbanist paradise, kids can absolutely get to school on their own, whether that be walking biking or taking public transport.
it’s in fact bog standard for kids to take the bus to school in my town, to the point that you really want to avoid their travel times because buses will be jam packed with annoying children.
In some states it’s illegal to leave children of a certain age unsupervised. I think it’s 11 and below here? People do it anyway and no one’s looking to prosecute, but it’s a thing.
I can’t speak for every municipality in America, but the elementary schools around here do not allow kids to walk or bike to school. Either that, or every single parent, no exceptions, disallows it, because I’ve never seen a child that young coming into or leaving the school on their own. FFS, when I used to pick up my stepson, same car every day, the teacher had to put their hand on the roof and look me in the eye through a rolled-down window. That was literally the rule.
So like I said, “some of the younger ones aren’t mature enough or raised independently enough”. It sucks, but it’s true.
I have an 8 and 10-yo. They love my house because I allow them freedom. We went to a huge camping place to get married this weekend, local outfitter sort of thing. I gave them some instructions and warnings, cut them loose. Their helicopter mom would shit her pants if she knew they walked all over the woods alone.
(And of course we got the usual comment below crying about capitalism. I’m not sure if these people expect that no one works for a living, or they don’t do it on a coordinated schedule, or what.)
This is actually a good question that people may not read into very well, and the OP probably knows but didn’t indicate: Humans have a circidian rhthym which is a component that indicates when you naturally want to wake up and sleep. Thoughout our lives it changes at different points, but the important point is that for teenagers, they want to be up at night and also wake up later(almost the exact opposite of elderly people).
So trying to make students sleep at 10pm is very difficult vs having school start later to allow classes to better match their sleep cycle.
From an evolutionary point of view, I wonder if it has to do with giving them plenty of evening time for sexual activities. Especially since 30 used to be old age at one point in our past, so teenage years were the childbearing years…
In terms of what time they go to bed? I might be missing something here but what I meant was that they’d just go to bed since school doesn’t start that early, so they’d lack sleep again anyways.
The idea is that teenagers find it really hard to go to bed early. But school still starts very early. So they end up sleeping less than they should to function. The anti biology stance of “they should go to bed earlier” is not helpful. What’s helpful is starting school later, let them have their vigil time into later hours, then they can sleep and recover fully, and do better at school. Thus potentially creating better educated adults.
See there’s your problem. We can’t have all these better educated adults in a functioning society. They’ll become all liberal and ruin our perfectly established capitalism with their cries for a living wage or whatever peasants call for these days.
I had a whole semester where classes where all in the morning (there was no choice until I had failed on the following years) and that whole semester I didn’t go to any classes. Great times sleeping.
Um no, because teens are naturally on a later schedule with their circadian rhythm. They are natural night owls. Their circadian rhythm signals their body to go to sleep later than children or adults. Read into it, this is well researched.
Something everyone here seems to be forgetting is that even if you are getting the same amount of sleep, sleeping at a time which fits your biological clock better is better for you. I can get some amount of sleep and wake up at 5am and be tired the whole day, and yet if I wake up at 8-9am with the same amount of sleep I am perfectly functional the whole day.
I noticed exactly this since starting WFH. Even if I suffer a bout of insomnia – where I get maybe 3 hours of sleep – just being able to sleep in to 0800 makes it so much more tolerable.
It goes from feeling tormented to just feeling rough around the edges.
God but I remember fighting to keep my eyes open at school and at work back then.
i still have to fight back sleeping anytime i am in a meeting. i actually started hallucinating once. doesnt even matter how much sleep i actually got or if its at the right time, i just automatically get tired sitting down listening to people talk
Man. I can handle 30 min pretty easy. After that I have to stand up at the back of the room cause otherwise I’d be nodding off so hard I would hurt my neck.
I mean this kindly: have you had a sleep study recently? That doesn’t sound typical and you may have a sleep disorder like sleep apnea. Diagnosis and treatment could give you more energy during the day. Take care!
Circadian rhythms are rooted in our very cells and dominate our lives. Defying them always comes at a penalty. Adding to the complexity here is that everyone is different; social norms be damned.
Jetlag is probably the best studied phenomenon for trying to “break the rules”, and surprise, there is no remedy other than waiting a few days to acclimate to a different solar cycle.
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