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I'll push this one step further: why is our entire society built around the idea that sleep literally doesn't matter? - Elementary school starting so early all

• IB885588 8y ago
  And it's a known biological fact that during teenager years the circadian rhythm is affected and normal sleep is pushed later in the night. Having teens wake up early is literally fighting biology and can't but have negative results on their health, education, socialization, etc.
  • mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    Sure, I barely remember high school seeing how I was half asleep most of it. There was not a day when I did not fall asleep in class early in the morning. I remember having to fake like I was looking down to pick something up just so I could sleep.
    • Verdex_3 8y ago
      I remember trying to sleep in between classes. Like, I would close my eyes and touch the wall in the hallway so that I could "sleep" while I was walking to my next class.
    • rocho 8y ago
      I had the same problem in college. Classes started at 0830 but for me it was still too early. I was always falling asleep and after a while I just stopped attending.
      • topkai22 8y ago
        I just started attending the sections of the same class that started at 930, except on test days. The professors knew I was doing it, but didn't seem to mind.
    • code_duck 8y ago
      I had a math teacher surreptitiously call the office and report that I was a drug user, due to my falling asleep at his 10:30 class. I always felt extremely drowsy 3-4 hours after rising. Now I wonder if it’s related to how I have been diagnosed with celiac disease, which has caused extreme fatigue 2-4 hours after eating in my adult life.
    • irrational 8y ago
      How many desks in high school did I drool on while sleeping I wonder?
• darepublic 8y ago
  I guess on paper going without sleep gives you some kind of competitive advantage? A company that believes otherwise could bet on giving their workers more sleep and they should gain an advantage by doing so.
  • pc86 8y ago
    Most companies (not startups) don't have their employees work much more than 40 hours. Lack of sleep is very rarely an issue with your employer.
    • Konnstann 8y ago
      In which fields? Financial/Law firms are routinely scrutinized because they overwork their employees, just to name a few. Doctors, EMS personnel, Police, all work more than 40 hours. There may not be mandated work hours over 40, but the culture/workload creates that environment anyway.
    • dahfizz 8y ago
      Even with an 8 hour day plus a long commute, there are at least 14-15 hours a day left for you. If you aren't finding time in there to sleep, that's on you.
      • majewsky 8y ago
        Good thing that work is literally my only responsibility as an adult. /s
    • rpedela 8y ago
      As others have said, sleep deprivation is the norm in certain fields like healthcare. There are also jobs where you work 40 hours but the schedules are so random that they can also screw with your sleep such as retail. And a lot of top performing companies in a variety of fields expect people to always be on.
  • babygoat 8y ago
    People shouldn't be so beholden that they need someone else to give them sleep.
• ExBritNStuff 8y ago
  The Elementary school comment rings so true. We have to get my seven year old up at 6:15 to get to school at 7:30. That's if we take him, if he caught the bus he would have to be AT the stop by 6:15. Every day is a battle against exhaustion. On the days that school is delayed due to weather and he can get up naturally at maybe 7:30, he is so much better. He feels better, his attitude is more positive, and he does so much better with learning.
  • dahfizz 8y ago
    Why does the school bus pick him up more than an hour before school starts? That seems ridiculous.
    • BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
      To pick up the other kids on a long route.
      • AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > To pick up the other kids on a long route. The obvious problem then being that the routes are too long. You have to wonder if there isn't some kind of carpool incentive the school could give to parents to get rid of 90-100% of buses. How many stay at home parents with 9-passenger vehicles would be willing to make $500/month by filling their minivan with other kids when they deliver their own kid as they were going to do regardless? Cheaper than buses, kids spend less time sitting in vehicles because there are 8 kids instead of 30, fewer vehicles (and especially fewer huge diesel buses) on the road because those parents were driving their kids anyway.
        • tstrimple 8y ago
          All kinds of liability problems with that. School bus drivers are presumably vetted and trained to deal with not just getting from point A to point B, but dealing with students along the way.
• brightball 8y ago
  My best semester in college I managed to have a schedule of classes that started at 2pm and finished by 8pm. Pretty sure it's the only time in my life where I've literally slept as much as I wanted...and felt great.
  • ams6110 8y ago
    Same. My dorm-mates were confounded that I was getting straight "A" grades and seemingly always sleeping.
  • eecc 8y ago
    My exams were regularly scheduled at 09:00 in the morning. I would regularly gasp when reviewing the errors I made, wondering how drunk I must have been to make such gross ones. Indeed I was drunk... from sleep deprivation. I wonder how much has this affected my overall performance as a student and later as a professional...
• lphnull 8y ago
  I've had some of the best lucid dreams I've ever had while my sleep was disrupted by living in the second story of a building smack dab in the corner of a very busy street corner during broad daylight. I had a night job so my sleep schedule was from 7am to 3pm. All in all I had half a dozen lucid dreams and one mindblowingly extreme out-of-body experience which left me breathless upon waking. I think I even had a night terror or two while I was there. I didn't hate it. Sleeping during the day has taught me how to put a pillow over my head in order to block out all light, and now I can sleep in the brightest loudest room without trouble. I haven't had lucid dreams since then, or if I have, they've been really really rare and extremely hard to remember. Now that I think about it... Could my lucid dreams and OOB have been triggered by smog from the traffic in that area??
  • fatnoah 8y ago
    >I've had some of the best lucid dreams I've ever had while my sleep was disrupted by living in the second story of a building smack dab in the corner of a very busy street corner Though not during the day, I lived in a second floor apartment that overlooked a traffic circle that had an elevated subway stop, was a main route for ambulances going to the hospital a block away, and a crucial interchange for traffic entering/existing that part of the city. I barely slept for the first few days and then got the best sleep of my life. I rarely woke up for anything other than my nightly trip to the restroom. Fast forward a few years and I now live in the suburbs. I've been woken up several times in the past month by the sounds of a mouse scurrying in the ceiling of an adjacent room.
• aetherson 8y ago
  School starts early because most adults have to get to work by 8:30 or 9, and they need to drop off their kids early enough to drive potentially a considerable distance to that work after the drop off.
• obastani 8y ago
  To add to your list, a big one for me is the ritualization of coffee. Can't focus until you've had a cup!
  • TallGuyShort 8y ago
    Which is honestly a lot like not being able to calm down until you've had a cigarette. Doesn't seem to be a problem for those who just never do it.
• Siecje 8y ago
  Instead of elementary school did you mean secondary? Here elementary school starts the latest.
  • shados 8y ago
    Dunno, don't have kids. I just know I see the little kids walking around with their parents whenever I'm unfortunate enough to have to be out that early, and I assume hundreds of 9 years old didn't all have to go to a birthday party at 7 am all at the same time.
• snarf21 8y ago
  The school thing is a challenge. If the parents have to be at work 8-5 plus time to drive there, the kids have to be up at the same time so they can be dropped off either at school or a day care setting to be put on a bus later. If the parent has a longer drive to work, the child must get up that much earlier. I don't really know how to solve this problem.
  • LargeWu 8y ago
    Our school district has a before school program starting as early as 7:00 so kids that need to be can be dropped off early, but most kids arrive much later. Classes don't start until 9:00 at our school.
    • hacym 8y ago
      Isn't that the same thing though? It's a very common problem without an easy solution.
      • LargeWu 8y ago
        Kind of the same, but at least it gives parents options. Most kids arrive just before classes start, instead of forcing everybody to get there really early.
• bpyne 8y ago
  My wife's background is in childhood development. Her job involves keeping up with studies in the field. I remember her talking about this issue. There's evidence that school start times should be flipped for elementary and high school students: elementary going in earlier and high school later. Teenagers need more sleep due to their brains re-wiring, so the reasoning goes. Keep in mind that in our school district, elementary school students need to be in by 8:40 while high school students need to be in by 7:50. Our neighborhood is setup for walking. The elementary school is a six block walk, so most people walk their kids to school. My daughter didn't sleep past 7:00 for most of elementary school. Our experience was that elementary really could have started closer to 8:00. I'm with you on all your other points. But, I think our experience was significantly different for elementary school.
  • fireflash38 8y ago
    I would think that would be because teenagers are more likely to stay up late over elementary school kids.
    • bpyne 8y ago
      It's a combination of a shifted sleep schedule and teenage brains going through significant, exhausting development.
  • bzbarsky 8y ago
    As a counter-anecdote, we have to get our kids up by 7:30 to get them to their elementary school on time, and it's a battle every single morning. Left to their own devices, they would sleep to at least 8:30. Kids are different, and we really don't have very good ways of dealing with that in some ways...
    • usefulcat 8y ago
      So, maybe they would benefit from an earlier bedtime? Not being snarky, am a parent myself.
• LargeWu 8y ago
  A lot of elementary schools start early because of parent pressure to start early, because parents need to get their kids to school so they can get to work themselves. We are lucky that our school district provides before and after school programs since my daughter's elementary school doesn't start until after 9:00 AM.
  • sturgill 8y ago
    I don’t see a lot of evidence that elementary schools have started classes earlier as more households have relied on both parents working. I _have_ seen an increase in after-school programs to make up the gap between school letting out and parents getting off of work. The battle to get up early is about as old as time. We aren’t that far removed from an agrarian-based economy, and farm work has always required very early rising (my father grew up raising dairy cows: he was fond of reminding us as children that the cows don’t care how tired you are). “Early to bed and early to rise” is not a modern day mantra, but I fear we’ve kept the wake up call constant while continuing to push how long we stay up. I don’t know how to fix it: if your kid is in an after-school program until 6, comes home to eat dinner, and then still has to do homework... I don’t see how an early bedtime is even possible.
    • jayd16 8y ago
      >I don’t see a lot of evidence Have you actually looked? Ask some parents and see what replies you get.
      • sturgill 8y ago
        I’m a father of three. I’ve had my kids in schools in four different cities. If we’re playing anecdotes, growing up my elementary school started at 8:00. My kid’s have had school start around 7:45. I don’t think that 15 minutes is the issue. Continuing our story time, as a child a very small number of my classmates were part of after-school programs. Kids today are much more scheduled and for far later into the day. I grew up wandering the streets and maybe had baseball practice one day a week with a game on Saturday. I was home from school around 3:30, had homework done by 4:30-5:00, ate dinner around 5:30, and was put to bed (in elementary school) by 8. I remember the thrill of having my bed time pushed to 9 around 8th grade. Bed time was 10 in high school except for weekends. Very few people rode the bus to school: most had a parent drop them off. This game changes significantly when both parents work. If both parents have to be in the office by 8, kids have to take the bus. Which means they have to get up very early. If both parents work until 5, then kids have to be in after-school programs. They’ll get home by 6-ish and have to fit in dinner, homework, and whatever activities they need to put on their resume to get into college.
• serguzest 8y ago
  Because civilizations are built and ruled by Type A people, who usually sleep less and get up super early, they are known to die younger though. And %3.3 people have DSPS, who are just simply labelled as sleazy.
• hedora 8y ago
  You forgot my favorite. In California (and probably other states), the building codes for apartment sound proofing are much weaker than for condos. If you wanted to sleep, you shouldn’t have chosen to rent. Your landlord couldn’t be expected to pay $1000’s [1] extra to build your apartment, after all. (1) https://www.remodelingexpense.com/costs/cost-soundproof-insulation/ https://www.remodelingexpense.com/costs/cost-soundproof-insu...
  • krrrh 8y ago
    Counterpoint: regulations like these are part of what leads to an affordability crisis. It all adds up.
    • shados 8y ago
      I don't have anything backing this up, buty personal experience is that NIMBY is partly because of the lack of proper building code. People are TERRIFIED of neighbor noise, most of which could be dealt with with better insulation.
  • usaar333 8y ago
    I hear this claim thrown around a lot, but I've never seen the legal code pointing to a difference in minimum standards for apartments vs condo. Section 25 (http://mlacoustics.com/projects/multifamily/CA.noise.final.pdf http://mlacoustics.com/projects/multifamily/CA.noise.final.p...) treats them the same. Do you know where the differing laws are?
• c2h5oh 8y ago
  Add time necessary to get to school when your commute isn't the best and it becomes even more fun. I remember having to get up at 5:20 AM four days a week, to leave 20 minutes later to catch a bus at 5:58 AM to be get to high school in time for classes starting at 7:10 AM. And a teacher complaining to my parents that I often seem tired.
• irrational 8y ago
  Tell me about it. We have to get our high school kids up at 5am to get to school on time while the middle schoolers don't have to get up till 8am or so (school starts at 9:15).
• cortesoft 8y ago
  > College + Sleep? Not gonna happen. Wait, what? I slept so much in college. Way more than at any other point in my life. You schedule your own classes and aren't actually in class that much, gives you plenty of time to sleep.
  • brahmwg 8y ago
    Probably depends what you study and at what rate. Alot of students work fulltime in addition to studying fulltime, which basically puts sleep and eating secondary or even tertiary. Socializing isn't on the radar for many.
    • cortesoft 8y ago
      Working full time and going to school full time is basically having two full time jobs... that would clearly hinder sleep. The statement, however, said college means no sleep. That is a bit disingenuous to say that was meant to imply the person was working full time. That would be like saying "living in an apartment means no sleep!" because you lived in an apartment above a 24 hour bowing alley.
      • brahmwg 8y ago
        Fair enough, but I understood your comment to mean that college was a "point in [your] life" that had ample time for sleep. I was just pointing out that that point in many people's lives has less sleep due to college, not more.
  • moneil971 8y ago
    I worked 3 jobs, was on the newspaper, ran track, and took a full course load on top of commuting home when I could -- I probably slept more than I do now but it was def not enough!
    • cortesoft 8y ago
      Sounds like the college part was only a minor contributor to the no sleep... it was doing all the other things along with it that lead to no sleep.
• rootusrootus 8y ago
  Having to choose a schedule that irritates the least number of people is somewhat different than hospital staff poking and prodding people every hour or so throughout the night, don't you think?
  • shados 8y ago
    No. My point is that I'm every bit of society we consider sleep as something you can cut as opposed to something critical. Yes my examples were different, but they have the same root cause: quality of sleep isn't considered a big deal.
    • rootusrootus 8y ago
      Except your examples (several of them, at least) are essentially unsolvable. We can't find a time that everyone will agree on, so we collectively chose an arbitrary time that most people seem to deal with okay, and ran with it. The hospital staff absolutely knows that sleep is important, but they have competing goals that are deemed important enough to interrupt sleep for. That seems very much different from societal-level / cultural priorities.
• andybak 8y ago
  My theory is that there is an eternal secret war between morning people and evening people and the morning people are winning. Resistance must be done in secret but fight back in every way you can.
  • iambateman 8y ago
    The first rule of the resistance is that we don’t talk about the resistance with people who find 5:30am tolerable. ;)
    • andybak 8y ago
      Cough. Timezones. Cough...
  • superkuh 8y ago
    And both groups don't even acknowledge the existence of 3rd shift workers. It's not even just businesses being closed or noise. As a night person even going on a walk can get you harassed by the cops or ticketed for being in a park. There's an implicit assumption, one that's been baked into law, that anyone doing things at night is up to no good.
  • merpnderp 8y ago
    It's because they keep getting the worm.
  • jfk13 8y ago
    The trouble is that by the time the evening people get going, the morning people have already defined the world's schedules.
  • war1025 8y ago
    As father of three (a 3 year old and 1 year old twins), I've found that when we only had one kid, our schedule remained basically the same. But now with three, we are somewhat forced to shift toward being morning people. With multiple, good luck getting them back down to sleep if the sun is up. By the time you succeed, the others will decide to be awake. Also morning routines take longer, so you need to start your day earlier to compensate. I feel like a big part of it is that very young children are geared towards being early (at least from my perspective) risers. Parents end up shifting their day to account for that. And then as kids get older, their rhythms start moving to starting the day later, but by that time the parents' routine is molded around being up early. Not sure where I'm going with this exactly, just an observation of mine.
• deleted 8y ago
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• headgasket 8y ago
  You might have forgotten to mention our society's addiction to caffeine... Am writing this sleep-deprived, on my fourth espresso, check. :-)
• GCA10 8y ago
  We had a brave school superintendent a few years ago who tried to get our local high school started at 9 a.m. instead of the traditional much earlier start. (Classes at 8 a.m., with many extra-curricular activities like band practice and swim practice at 7 a.m.) This is in the western U.S. All the sleep-cycle research is on his side. And he was friendly, focused and persistent. But his campaign failed. A later school start would have cut into the available daylight for after-school sports practices and events. Perhaps 30% of students participated in these, and perhaps 10% in total (or their parents!) were adamant that anything that short-changed the football team was an evil that needed to be stopped. Still, the don't-do-it crowd was vocal and implacable. Eventually everyone else gave up. So high school students continue to get out of bed, very groggy, at a time that's too early for them, and struggle to get a grip on their morning classes. We wouldn't have it any other way.
  • zanny 8y ago
    Its always bizarre that they don't have activities involving daylight first so that school could run into the dark and nobody would care because you are indoors anyway. Its basically that society used to require daylight to get anything done two centuries ago, and most people worked the farm by daylight, so fast forward generations and centuries and we are still structuring our lives around that - such that we are actually outside in the dark and doing our main activities indoors during the day. Humanity is nothing if not set in its ways.
    • bob_theslob646 8y ago
      >Its always bizarre that they don't have activities involving daylight first so that school could run into the dark and nobody would care because you are indoors anyway. Exactly! Your last sentence could not be more true. The other problem is do you have any idea of how much bureaucratic nonsense would have to be changed in order to make one simple change such as changing the schedule of a school start and stop time. It makes you wonder how hard it is to change things that may be of higher importance than this.
• rhacker 8y ago
  Damn very nice summary. I do think the kids in school thing, however, is more of a symptom of our generation as parents- they love staying up late, thus keeping their kids up late. just sayin... that being said - NOT A PARENT! When I've stayed over at friends house (who are parents) they have very strict go to bed times for their kids. THOSE darn crazy kids are up at 5 or 5:30 banging around the house full of energy.
• deleted 8y ago
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• umvi 8y ago
  > Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class Isn't the amount of sleep you get determined by when you go to sleep? So if elementary school kids need more sleep just... put them to bed earlier?
  • wyldfire 8y ago
    While I think most elementary school kids probably should be put to bed earlier (even if their school doesn't start so early), it's easier said than done. Imagine having to get home from your commute, feed your family, getting the older siblings to/from extracurriculars and then getting the elementary school ones to bed by 7:00/8:00pm.
    • umvi 8y ago
      Yeah but time is zero sum. Let's pretend school now starts at 9. Now everything is shifted by 2 hours. Extracurriculars are now 2 hours later, feeding your family is now 2 hours later, etc. "Imagine having to get home from your commute, feed your family, getting the older siblings to/from extracurriculars and then getting the elementary school ones to bed by 9:00/10:00pm. It's easier said than done! School needs to start at 11!" I must be missing something. How is your family life going to be less hectic after work with school being 2 hours later?
      • dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Let's pretend school now starts at 9. Now everything is shifted by 2 hours. (1) The school day is too long and the school year too short, anyway, so chopping two hours off the end of the day and making it up by extending the school year would be a win. (2) Even if you don't do that, eliminating the end-of-school to end-of-typical-fulltime-work gap would be a different win.
  • shados 8y ago
    Biological clock aside, the kids might not be able to sleep earlier. Can't go to sleep before 7 if the jack hammers are going on until 7, for example.
• sharadov 8y ago
  This is bullshit bravado, even when increasingly studies point out the correlation between all kinds of diseases and poor sleep.
• sahin-boydas 8y ago
  what a good summary. so true.
• philwelch 8y ago
  > Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class. The primary purpose of K-12 education these days is to keep kids locked up so their parents can go to work. If Mom and Dad have to be at work at 8, as is often the case, the kids have to be at school before 8. Teenagers, who naturally sleep in later than younger kids, would be better served starting school at 9, but because our society still infantilizes teenagers and young adults, we can't systemically trust them to fend for themselves in the mornings. This isn't to say that K-12 schools are entirely unconcerned with actual education, but it has to accomplish this goal within the constraint of keeping children locked up.
• xtrimsky1234 8y ago
  "Elementary school starting so early all the kids are half asleep in class" That's the only reason I don't put my daughter on the school bus. I can save her an extra 30 minutes of sleep by driving her to the school myself.
• astrostl 8y ago
  I deadass pre-planned being asleep during my second hour of high school, after recognizing that whatever alertness I summoned in the walk, the bus, and first interactions of the day would dissipate by then. If a study hall was an option, I would take it and sleep at my desk. If it wasn't, I would still sleep at my desk and try to cold-test my way into a D.
• rapjr9 8y ago
  One theory I've heard is that sleep deprivation is used as part of conditioning techniques. Doctors are conditioned to tolerate things most people would not (cutting people open, touching diseased people, dealing with people dying) and sleep deprivation may be one way in which their minds are made malleable. The same with grad students and soldiers. This may be one of the primary methods by which society makes young people behave the way it wants them to; mess with their minds, then tell them what to do, and repeat it long enough until they keep doing it on their own.