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.

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.

Don’t forget after-school jobs. You can’t work a 3-6 shift unless school gets out significantly before 3.

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.

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.

I rarely stayed up past 10, maybe 11. My dad went to sleep at 9 sharp, so I had to be quiet after that.

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.