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Let Teenagers Sleep In

nytimes.com

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Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#151

Post by wruza »

paulie_a wrote: post #149
vinay427 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't even a definite proposition yet for eliminating DST shifts. There is still a long way ahead for something like this to happen.

Half of my last year is dealing with bugs related to dst. It needs to go away completely. It is a stupid and unnecessary concept. The proposition is very simple "we won't be shifting the clock by an hour, deal with it"

If paid, half of your year may be worth having dst, if it turns out to be important. Hope they make their best decision, since it may affect too many things.

Btw, did you deal with it or it’s still a mess? Long ago I wrote a library that manages dst, leaps, even ancient calendar changes, for fun. Datetime is hard topic, but still manageable. What problems did you meet, specifically?

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#152

Post by hrasyid »

I'm not sure I like the reasoning in this article. They go to bed later because of FB and other stuff, which makes them not have enough sleep before school. Then it's the school, rather than the FB-ing that has to give way?

If they wake up and start school later, what's to say their FB-ing won't shift even later, causing them to sleep even later, and then again we're back where we started?

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#153

Post by emodendroket »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #122
emodendroket wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At government expense

Well until we run out of "other people's money" of course.

Nobody ever raises this concern when they increase the military budget a couple tens of billions of dollars.

It's not some big secret how you'd pay for it. You'd use taxes.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#154

Post by lamontcg »

I used to need 9.5 hours of sleep as a teenager and probably had diagnosable delayed sleep phase disorder.

Rules made by 55 year old early risers that only need 6 hours of sleep a night who have become school officials are just cruel and unusual punishment to a chunk of teenagers out there. In a better world there could be a class action lawsuit to make this stop--but its still considered okay to promote "early to bed, early to rise" and flat-out discriminate against people with sleep disorders.

If you are an early riser, you should know that as someone with a sleep disorder I view "helpful" suggestions like "get some exercise" to be roughly equivalent to suggesting that gay people just need to pray the gay away. I'm never going to become an early riser. I've gotten in somewhat under control with melatonin, tweaks to diet and consistent scheduling, but I'm never going to hop out of bed at 6:30am and its always going to take me 2-3 hours to wake up.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#155

Post by wruza »

watwut wrote: post #55
hrzn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they meant is that we evolved in a way that made teenagers having shifted cycles, going to sleep later and waking up later. We're not living in tribes anymore, but evolution is slow and we still cary these biological traits. It therefore hurts teenagers to wake up as early as adults. The point here is not about leaving them more time to socialize in the evening.

We evolved to be remarkably adaptable species. Our social and environmental conditions influence so much, that there is zero reason to assume that any particular behavior in prehistoric time is fixed and not just adaptation. Moreover, half of those "past evilutionary people were like this or that" is guess made out of flimsy evidence at best. It is best we have maybe, but not accurate. (For that matter, majority of p…

My anecdotal evidence is that when I do sleep at night, eat less and have a regular sex, my body works very well in my 30s. Things change instantly once you lower some grips. Something in me is not just adaptation, but finely tuned core mechanisms. In fact, our current live is very different from what serves well to us. And this is even exploited to large extents – see ads, politics, social irrationality. If it were mere adaptation, then we could be rational and adaptive af.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#156

Post by lnanek2 »

chefkoch wrote: post #134
newnewpdro wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mixing a modern model of family structure and sexual relations with evolutionary timescales. It's very unlikely anyone gave a damn about who was having sex with who and at what age before our population sizes reached levels where paternity mattered.

Isn't who has sex with whom the primary issue in most animal groups?

There actually have been studies of primitive tribes and cultures where it was showed that they just didn't realize pregnancy happens from a single man's sperm, so children were considered the entire tribe's or to have multiple fathers (with actual language terms for the various fathers). There's also some cultures where men first slept with men while growing up before settling down with women due to thinking sperm was a guy giving up his power and younger ones needing it to grow into warriors. So it wasn't really as clear cut as we know it to be today.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#157

Post by randomdata »

wmeredith wrote: post #87
majos wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is true. Yes, adolescence is when childbearing ability and the associated hormonal incentives start, but where is this "sex must happen at night" component coming from? If anything, I would guess that's a modern phenomenon being retrofitted onto the past.

It’s pure conjecture until the commenter posts some sources. Now I feel patronizing pointing it out, but you don’t have to stay up late to have sex. I think this is modern cultural norms being propped with pseudo science.

> but you don’t have to stay up late to have sex.

That doesn't mean that having a 'late night' trait wasn't advantageous to mating. For example, when humans started pair bonding, infidelity may have been more common among those who could sneak out under the cover a darkness while their partner was asleep, spreading that trait further than those who remained monogamous. It is easy to think of many possible reasons why a late night trait could have been advantageous in spreading that trait further than those who naturally followed a more daytime rhythm during teenage years.

Or it could just be random chance. Either way, it's fun to discuss. We don't have to dismiss all fun discussion because it may be conjecture. It is only the comments section of HN, not a respected scientific publication. Time and place.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#158

Post by boomboomsubban »

emodendroket wrote: post #63
boomboomsubban wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Here's the elephant in the room. High schools start and end earlier with the idea that older kids can watch their siblings. I've always been under the impression that start times were staggered for transportation reasons, as you can't drop everyone off at the same time. My experiences are limited to small towns, so I could be way off, but the differences seemed too small for sibling care to be the motive

That means you have to do some kind of staggering. But the order is always older-younger, although younger kids are naturally awake earlier.

So I looked at the CDC paper that seems to have influenced this article[1], the average start time for middle school is 8:04, and for high school 7:59. Elementary schools weren't sampled in it.

A later journal article just sampling Kentucky[2] shows elementary starting at 8:05, middle at 8:00, and high school at 8:0:1. Elementary is also the most likely to start before 8, but their average was raised by ten percent starting after 9.

There doesn't seem to be any forced order currently, and you'd likely see younger students get later starts as well.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6430a1.htm

[2]https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/06/school-start....

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#159

Post by nicolashahn »

My high school started at 7:45am, unless I had zero period, in which case it was 7am. Throughout the entire four years I was there, I was never able to get my sleep schedule to match up. I would wake up at 6am groggy, irritable, and stupid. This would not change throughout the day, and I'm sure many people thought I was just an idiotic asshole all the time. Sometimes I could catch a nap at lunch.

After school, I would immediately pass out for 2-3 hours, and wake with tons of energy. I wouldn't be able to fall asleep until around 2am because of this, and then the cycle continued.

Now as an engineer with a much more flexible schedule that lets me sleep in, I'm a more attentive, happier, and smarter. I'm convinced that if I had gone to a school with a schedule that matched mine, I would have achieved much more.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#160

Post by lnanek2 »

foldr wrote: post #82
digitailor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say visibility, permission avoidance, the excitement, and I'm sure there's more. Just like now, why would it have changed? For what specific reasons? Obviously spring and summer would be easier. I don't think that's retrofitting; I think we're continuing it still and the lack of recognition of that is confusing me. I'm positive they figured out how to have sex in the day as well when possible. But nomadic daytime…

You couldn't do much of anything at night with stone-age lighting technology. Sneaking around at night would be more likely to net you a tryst with a nearby tree branch or ditch than an exciting sexual encounter.

>You couldn't do much of anything at night with stone-age lighting technology

I grew up in upstate New York and could actually run 5 miles around the nearby lake in the woods any night, even moonless ones. You can see the silhouette of the trees against the stars and it isn't even really needed once you memorize the trail anyway. And that was just for exercise. I imagine horny teenagers would be even more hard working.

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