Tag: sleep

Research findings that support later high-school start times have been more and more common in recent years. (See also here.) And teachers I know are increasingly vocal about letting teens sleep later.

And yet, when I talk with high school leaders, they ruefully cite sports schedules to explain the impossibility of making serious changes.

(I’ve also read that bus schedules get in the way.)

Here’s another–quite surprising–reason that this change might be hard to accomplish: parental uncertainty. According to this recent study, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, half of parents whose teens start school before 8:30 don’t support a later start time.

The study concludes that we need to do a better job educating parents about the biological changes in adolescent sleep patterns.

The more that parents understand how melatonin onset–and, hence, sleepiness–changes with adolescence, the more they might understand that their awake-at-midnight teens aren’t simply being willful. They are instead responding to powerful chemical signals.

Given all we know about adolescent sleep, and the effect of sleep on learning, teachers and parents should be champions of reasonable high school start times.

Here’s the statement from the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine:

During adolescence, internal circadian rhythms and biological sleep drive change to result in later sleep and wake times. As a result of these changes, early middle school and high school start times curtail sleep, hamper a student’s preparedness to learn, negatively impact physical and mental health, and impair driving safety. Furthermore, a growing body of evidence shows that delaying school start times positively impacts student achievement, health, and safety. Public awareness of the hazards of early school start times and the benefits of later start times are largely unappreciated. As a result, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is calling on communities, school boards, and educational institutions to implement start times of 8:30 AM or later for middle schools and high schools to ensure that every student arrives at school healthy, awake, alert, and ready to learn.

Of course, schools have many reasons not to make this change: bus schedules, sports schedules, parent schedules, perhaps lunar eclipse schedules.

But in the face of the mounting evidence, all these reasons sound like excuses. Schools exist to help students learn; at many schools, our daily schedule inhibits their learning. We can, and should, solve this problem.

[h/t Brad Choyt, Crossroads Academy]

Yes.

Ask Canada. Or, better still, gather data from 30,000 Canadian high school students.