Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

[MperorM]

Lack of sleep was definitely the cause of my terrible grades in highschool mathematics. I would stay up late (1-2 am) to play in starcraft tournaments, to have 8 am classes in mathematics. (There's a neat inverse correlation between my highschool grades and starcraft rank)

It's crazy to me just how terrible school systems are at optimizing for learning. I would get terrible headaches from classrooms that had too many people and too little fresh air. I thought it was just me dreading my lessons, but in reality it was from co2 ppm reaching levels that humans can't properly function in.

We wake up students too early, put them in rooms that kill cognitive performance and then have the audacity to complain when they can't follow along!

[EpicEng]

>We wake up students too early

I agree, but... you were staying up until 1-2am playing video games. C'mon.

[umvi]

> We wake up students too early

Based on what you just said, if we moved school to 10am, you would just stay up until 4am playing StarCraft.

I don't think school is too early. I think you just stayed up too late.

[ceejayoz]

> I would get terrible headaches from classrooms that had too many people and too little fresh air.

Did you test this hypothesis at the time with a CO2 monitor? Lack of sleep causes headaches, too.

[arkadiytehgraet]

I bet if you would study mathematics / do your homework instead of just playing SC, you would not have had bad grades.

Source: studied math till 2 AM, played some TF till 4 AM, had math classes at 9 AM in highschool. Did not have bad grades in math classes.

[masonic]

  in reality it was from co2 ppm

How did you measure this?

[sabas123]

Which tournaments did you play in? Good old SC ruined my high school but god damn did I learn much from playing it competitively.

[yellow_postit]

Why We Sleep[1] is a pretty complete look at what we know about sleep today and implies that many of the things I thought like being able to catch up on sleep is just wrong. Did confirm my belief that there are some people that just can operate on less, but they are fewer than might be imagined.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep

[astura]

Kids need a more sleep than adults, sometimes a lot more sleep. I don't think adults realize this sometimes, and kids can silently suffer as a result (and not even really understand they are suffering).

It absolutely amazes me when I see young children out and about late at night because I had a very strict early bedtime as a child - 8pm early in life, 9pm starting my tween years. It was very much to my disdain at the time, but now I strongly believe being well rested served me well in all aspects of my life.

[baron816]

Falling asleep that early is unnatural and very difficult at that age. I recall many nights trying to go to sleep early and lying in bed, stressing about not being able to sleep (making it even harder to sleep).

[jdlyga]

Especially high school students. We had to get up at 5:55 am everyday in the early 2000s, with class starting promptly at 7:35 am. It definitely affected our attention span for the first few classes each day. I count my blessings that nowadays, my first real meeting at work doesn't start until 10:30 am.

[AmVess]

A co-author of the study recommends establishing regular bedtime routines.

I wager the lack of a regular routine is the source of the problem. The school I went to had split shifts. I was on the early shift, and had to be up at 5AM. It wasn't a big deal because I had to be in bed by 9PM or it was my ass.

Perhaps kids would get more sleep if their parents had rules and enforced them.

[bigred100]

Some parents actively prevent their children from sleeping enough. Eg your brother will bother us if you don’t let him play on his computer in your shared bedroom until 3am and we are too tired to deal with it, so figure it out yourself.

[sjg007]

Adolescents are natural night owls. It's probably in our genetics.

[masonic]

  It's probably in our genetics

It's never been reported in pre-industrial societies or even presently in areas where artificial light well into the night is uncommon.

[planetzero]

I really don't think it has anything to do with the hours. Children/teenagers will try to get away with as much as they can. It's more about being rebellious.

My elementary, high school, and middle school all started at different times (and my senior year of high school started much later because I completed enough credits).

Regardless of how late school started, I would just stay up later, the later school started. I usually got around 6 hours of sleep/night and would be very tired during the day. I now know that I need at least 7 hours to be functional.

Now I do think everyone has a different level of sleep they can function on, but the time a person goes to bed has little to do with it.

This is just another excuse that today's parents are giving because they don't want to take screens away or discipline their children.

[jjeaff]

"Research to date has shown that the circadian rhythms of adolescents are simply fundamentally different from those of adults and children,"

"All of the studies of adolescent sleep patterns in the United States are showing that the time at which teens generally fall asleep is biologically determined -- but the time at which they wake up is socially determined,"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/12/181212140741.h...

[armatav]

Nope, it’s not rebelliousness - teens have a biological shift forward in their sleep schedule.

[lsh123]

My kids play hockey and if they don’t ask me to go to bed by 9pm then they need a little more practice next time ;)

[natmaka]

Another cause is believing that, in order to compensate for too-short a night, one only has to sleep more the next day, or even afterwards. AFAIK this is false, sleep doesn't work this way and we all have to sleep adequately each and every day.

[frankieta]

Lately I'm trying to avoid being a "night owl" because I think it's affecting my short but also long term memory. I can't often remember things that I deem simple, like, "who's the lead singer of a band that I love" or I can have a more than normal difficult to remember the name of a colleague.

Or maybe it's my brain developing some Alzheimer like disease.

I'm 36

[SimeVidas]

In college, I remember just dropping on my bed on Fridays at 5 PM and sleeping for a couple of hours. It’s not that I was overworked, I just didn’t take care to get enough sleep during the week.

[known]

Time to revise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curriculum

[Amygaz]

There’s a bell curve here. 1/3 in high school, 2/3 in college, 1/3 in the adult workforce (CDC data).

[subsaharancoder]

Long story short, parents need to consistently enforce strong rules regarding lights out time at an early age and eliminate excessive external stimuli as the day winds down. This idea that teenagers who can't make responsible choices are left to define their sleep time as well as other rules borders on child abuse.

[aussiegreenie]

I would estimate that most Asian children do not get enough sleep.

[flerchin]

Everyone, not just kids. Go the fuck to bed. In my experience, it's the same parents that struggle to make it to 930 standups that also let their kids stay up too late.

[epicureanideal]

There’s no reason a standup needs to be at 930 other than to punish people with later natural sleep cycles.

[casion]

Not everyone can just 'go to bed'. Circadian rhythms are a thing, as are a wide variety of sleeping disorders and psychological disorders with sleep comorbidities.

Many of these affect simply the time of day when you can fall asleep.

[icedchai]

Reschedule the standup to “never.” You’ll have an easier time getting those folks to show up.

[asveikau]

Are you a parent? Getting kids awake, some food, to school on time, and then a work commute is hard. It might just be that you are observing.