Sleepy teens don’t learn much in first-period classes; some don’t wake up till third period. So why not start high school later? From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:
When Naana Mensah opens her eyes, only the occasional house light pierces the darkness of her Maplewood neighborhood.
The Tartan High School senior has strategically placed her alarm clock, set for 5:40 a.m., on a shelf on the other side of the room. It’s Thursday, which means Naana has a quick student council meeting before school starts at 7:25.
Adolescents need about 9 1/2 hours of sleep a night, says Dr. Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorder Center. Few get enough sleep during the week, so they sleep past noon on weekends.
Mahowald said it’s not possible to force a teenager to go to bed earlier. In general, he said, people are most alert in the couple of hours before they go to bed, and they can’t fall asleep until their bodies are ready.
Some Minnesota districts have switched the start times of elementary and high schools; little kids are more alert early in the morning.
So why not start high school later?
Because the primary purpose of schools is sports, not learning.
I don’t really understand the idea that teens can’t go to sleep earlier. Am I missing something obvious here? It’s certainly true that our bodies become accustomed to a certain sleep schedule, so suddenly changing it for part of the time isn’t going to work. But I know when I was in school, I was still expected to be in bed quite early, at least as compared to today’s teens. I don’t remember most of us being sleepy early in the day. It just seems as though more and more parents allow their kids to set their own hours. If they’re allowed to do that, they’re almost always going to make poor decisions, it seems. Teachers who teach middle school tell me that it’s quite common for their students to be up until 11 p.m. or later. Why wouldn’t it work for them to simply get accustomed to going to sleep earlier? Those who used to work on farms certainly started at an early hour and went to bed early.
Of course, I’m realistic enough to know that it’s unreasonable to think that parents are going to start parenting all of a sudden. So a later start might be a pragmatic solution. I just don’t understand the idea that going to sleep earlier isn’t possible.
In our district, ALL schedules are at the mercy of the buses, and since almost all of our drivers have day jobs, they simply will not allow any deviation or change in the times. And, since so many families here depend on their older children to babysit the younger ones before and after school, well, you get the picture.
We have one massively large high school, three middle schools, and twelve elementary schools, and no two have even a similar schedule. Many teachers work up to two hours longer every day than teachers in another building!
I was a sleep-deprived teen, and I would have done so much better in school if only it had begun later in the day. Noon to six: heaven on earth!
So if you start school two hours later, why won’t the teens just go to bed two hours later?
I had a bedtime all the way up to 9th grade, and even during the next three years I still went to bed before 10 simply out of habit.
Teenagers can get to sleep earlier assuming they are trained to do so as they grow up… but just as David McElroy mentioned, few parents are enforcing bedtimes past elementary school (if they even had one in elementary school). I still see 7-10th graders who can tell me about Letterman and Leno the night before on any given day of the week. I’m lucky if I stay up for the evening news.
Studies have found that there really is a biological basis for teens’ odd hours. A little before adolescence their bodies start releasing the hormones which trigger sleepiness a couple of hours later than happens in the average adult. The hormones which our bodies release in the morning to help the waking up process also get released later in teens. This gradually returns to a more regular adult schedule during the college years into the early 20s. I forget if they have figured out why this is, but it’s common across people, cultures and time. So we know that there is a real biological basis for this problem which doesn’t go away just because the school would like to have teens up-and-at-em before the crack of dawn.
Schools which have used a later start time have found that kids did not, in fact, just stay up two hours later. They we better rested, got better grades and better attendance. One school near me started 2 hours later for a year and experienced all the attendant benefits, but the teachers didn’t like getting home 2 hours later, so they switched back to an early start time.
I think I remember seeing articles referring to information similar to what Rebeccat provides. There does appear to be some biological impact. Even before I had kids I remember thinking it was crazy to start teens early and little kids late when their natural habits seemed to be reversed.
I’ve never understood why they send in the elementary school students late, and the high-schoolers early.
Both for the reasons given here, and because the former need parental supervision much more than the latter, and if they left early, it’d be much more convenient for the parents, who could ship them off to school before work, while the teens in highschool could sleep in and send themselves off to school.
I count my lucky stars I went to a private school (not at the mercy of buses) where I, like most, had a car. Classes started at 8:30 and ended at 3:15. It was still earlier than I’d like, but I got to where I could sleep in until 7:45 and still have time to shower, dress, and pick up a friend on the way in to school.
I rarely stayed up past 10, maybe 11. My dad went to sleep at 9 sharp, so I had to be quiet after that.
I never had a problem getting up in the morning, because I went to bed at a reasonable hour. It may be that teenagers have a different biochemistry than adults, but previous generations of teens managed to go to bed, get up, catch a bus, and be awake in the morning.
It’s easier to get up at an early hour if you keep to a schedule, and go to bed and get up at the same time every day, i.e., no staying up late, and no sleeping in on weekends. This is standard advice for migraine sufferers.
Of course, in the old days, no one could stay up past midnight playing computer games or updating Facebook. TV was really boring past a certain hour, and stations actually stopped broadcasting overnight!
All this is to say, we are parenting a generation which faces many more temptations than we had to face. We, as parents,seem to be very good at offering our children more things to do, more ways to entertain themselves, and more quasi-scientific excuses for a lack of self discipline. We are not so good at teaching them self-control, moderation, and restraint. I believe that those skills are essential.
Rebeccat mentions studies that show teens have some natural tendency to push their hours of sleep and work back. Let’s have more details on that. The idea of natural rythms is nothing new. “Circadian rhythms” is the term I believe.
Thinking in evolutionary terms, as I like to do, one might look for some evolutionary advantage for teens to have a shift in their natural rhythms toward the dark side, later into night I mean. One possibility could be that the darkness of night could be conducive to reproduction, so teens who get this gene that makes them stay up later would be a little more productive than their counterparts without this gene, so the gene would spread throughout the species. Increased reproductive success is certainly something to think seriously about. Starting school later could probably augment this natural tendency, increasing reproduction even more. That’s good, in evolutionary terms, for the species.
Then there is the cultural perspective, or at least here’s one cultural perspective. Teens are escaping the restrictions placed on the young. The night is new and exciting territory. They want to explore it. They want to exploit it. It’s very appealing. So they want to stay up late. So they do whenever they can, and that makes it hard for them to get up in the morning.
One might conjecture that both the cultural explanation and the evolutionary explanation lead to the same result, increased rates of reproduction on the part of those teens to stay up late. And that’s good for the species, isn’t it? So by either the biological or the cultural perspective, perhaps it makes sense to indulge the young a little and not ask them to get up so early. There could be problems, of course. Parents who have to get up early for jobs might feel they lose a bit of control over students who can sleep a little later, and thereby stay up, and out, a little later. But maybe that’s a small price to pay for the good of the species, in evolutionary terms of course.
Mrs. Davis,
Don’t forget after-school jobs. You can’t work a 3-6 shift unless school gets out significantly before 3.
Roger Sweeney - I used to work a 4.30 to 6.30, or 9.30 shift after school (the finishing hour varied a bit).
Brian -
“So by either the biological or the cultural perspective, perhaps it makes sense to indulge the young a little and not ask them to get up so early.”
I’m hoping that you’re not arguing that we should let teenagers stay up so they can reproduce…while that might have been the benefit in the past, it’s not exactly desirable now.
Do teenagers have a biological basis to stay up longer? Although there is evidence of a slight hormonal influence across the population absent everythng else… I’d say that the rhythmic influence established by a constant earlier bedtime will have a much greater effect.
On a side note, I do have one major gripe about the habit of teens staying up past 12 and then coming in by 730 - those darn energy drinks, which have so mush caffeine to throw the students off for the rest of the day. As I walk into school I’ll see students double-fisting these things to help them wake up. By 2nd period the students are shot and useless.
I don’t have time to look up the research, but I know that researchers in both America and Europe have found that at puberty teen’s bodies start releasing sleep hormones around 11 to 12 pm rather than 8 to 9 as they did when they were children. Teens don’t have as much variation in the amount of sleep they need as adults - they all pretty much need about 9 hours. Again, research has found that their bodies don’t start releasing the hormones that help us wake up until 8 am or so.
Obviously, the terrible sleep habits (little sleep during the week, sleeping in on weekends) don’t help. Neither does that habit of consuming caffeine.
However, if we know that teens are biologically driven to have sleep habits which are out of sync with what we ask them to do, then we are demonstrating a disregard for the importance of sleep which can only exacerbate the lifestyle choices of teens which are making things worse.
There is some truth to the idea that a person can force changes in their natural circadian rhythms through consistent bedtimes. However, unless you’ve tried this yourself, I’m quite certain that you have no idea how difficult this actually is. I have struggled with being a night person for my whole life (it runs strongly on my father’s side of the family). It has taken 3 years of consistent effort to get myself on a schedule where I am up by 8 am without feeling like I’m going to die. I still struggle to get myself to sleep by 1 am and must sometimes take melatonin to get there. And even now all it would take is one weekend of staying up late and getting up late to completely undo these 3 years of work. The idea that teens would or even should commit themselves to this sort of circadian rhythm modification is just not at all realistic or reasonable.
We know that starting school a bit later works. Heck, back in the mists of time, we did start school later and somehow all those people (ie the baby boomers) managed to grow up and get out of bed at a reasonable hour to go to work. In short, this is far less a matter of parenting than it is a matter of societal disrespect for our biological need for sleep.