So, I agree it's an interesting idea, and I think this small study could hopefully spur more conclusive ones, but...
1) N=45
2) based on "semi-structured phone interview"
Neither of these is a deal-breaker, but what you'd really prefer is some sort of objective measure of sleep quantity, and how it impacted the person. Teenagers are, by and large, entirely aware that when adults ask them questions, they are likely to draw conclusions about policy towards teenagers. They want to sleep later. How likely is it that they would admit it, if they didn't really get any more sleep out of this?
Not saying it's not true, or that it isn't an interesting idea to try to put this "natural experiment" to work somehow, but I'm not sure this is really enough to draw any conclusions, and I actually already agreed with their conclusion before seeing this study.
A better method might be to compare home-school students to public schools, or compare summer-break to school year, and to use some more objective metric than a phone interview.
Agreed with all points. I often find that these sorts of observational studies with weak methods that provide evidence for something the unblinded study participants would want to support (e.g., this study, observational studies of the effect of reduced workweek hours on productivity, many of the observational basic income studies) are really hard to evaluate fairly. It becomes easy to latch onto the conclusions when the intervention is one you're predisposed to believe in and to latch onto the methodological weaknesses when it's one you start of opposed towards, and so I feel like they don't really advance science forward at all.
I think it's useful to think of studies like this as a MVP. They're relatively cheap and fast. If they give a null result, you've failed fast. If they give a non-null, then you can invest in further study and iterate.
They provide dirty data but cheaply which can be used to prod a more rigorous study into life. So they do advance science. It isn't all sterile test tubes and lab coats, at the coal face it gets mucky, it has to.
Interviewing 45 people can provide much more meaningful information than sending a survey to 1000 people. I'm not saying it's the case there, I'm not an expert in this domain. But 45 semi structured phones interviews is perfectly fine for a lot of research.
I made 45 consecutive structured calls in my life, many times actually. I always could interpret the result in many ways, most of the time complete opposites were the leading interpretations. Their actual behavior afterwards told me the reality. People on the phone will say a lot of things, and it's very easy to accidentally make them reply what you want to hear even though they don't mean it.
In Soviet Union and then Russia there was not enough school capacity. So schools worked in two shifts. Half of my school years I started school at 1pm. Wasn’t that bad, I actually preferred it.
As for “natural sleep cycle” and “improved quality” I can tell you that this is self-made (or rather parent-made) problem in this case. If I take my children’s devices away at 8pm, then they go to bed by themselves after 9, have a good sleep and ready for school.
Ironically, similar thing happens to me, but sadly there is nobody to take away my phone, as time of this comment shows.
> As for “natural sleep cycle” and “improved quality” I can tell you that this is self-made (or rather parent-made) problem in this case. If I take my children’s devices away at 8pm, then they go to bed by themselves after 9, have a good sleep and ready for school.
When talking about adolescents, which this study does, this is false since in adolescents the sleep phase is biologically delayed.
Biologically delayed relative to what? Circadian rhythms have to be cued off some external driver, whether that's daylight hours, mealtimes or whatever.
> If I take my children’s devices away at 8pm, then they go to bed by themselves after 9, have a good sleep and ready for school.
You have forgotten to mention the age of your children.
(Noting that there is a change in circadian rhythm - around 20:30 up until puberty, and then much later - 23:00 or so for late teens - and then later it shifts back earlier. This is fairly well understood and agreed science. So for children under 13 or 14, you'd expect comparable sleep patterns to adults - but for that 15-20 range, not so much.)
Anecdotal evidence, but in my school the afternoon shift was associated with more "problematic" behaviour, both boys and girls. More rough and tumble play, that is the technical term I think, more abuse and fighting. Might have something to do with all those mornings without parental supervision.
Vladivostok is UTC+10, Moscow is UTC+3. So 2030 if they wrote it by candlelight in Kamchatka. Still not really that late.
As the other responder said maybe they are in California but didn't give any other hints and left us this puzzle to work out what they heck they meant.
USSR ceased to be a political entity in 1991, but that nitpick aside, it still happens in Russia. It's not ubiquitous but it's not rare - about 20% of schools
> There were 13,100 double shift and 75 triple shift schools in 2007–2008
> In South Africa and Namibia, double-shift schooling is called ‘platooning’ – a term which echoes a usage in the USA dating from 1920 (Kleinhans, 2002: 10).
> In Zimbabwe, double-session schooling is also called ‘hot seating’ because the school seats are said never to have time to cool down
> Double-shift schooling is most common in poor countries. Financial pressures in these countries are so severe that administrators are forced to investigate all ways to minimize costs. But all administrators wish to maximize cost-effectiveness. For this reason, double shifts are also used in relatively prosperous countries such as Brazil
I'm from South Africa and have never heard of it. But if anything I think it's a great idea to make more efficient use of school funding, physical resources etc.
Little bit of a tangent, but I have adopted a novel alarm clock application called "Suntimes Alarms". This alarm clock is programmed according to an offset of solar events (for me the sunrise, but if you want something for noon or sunset that is possible). This recent DST was the smoothest transition in many years. Particularly because I was not beholden to a stringent work schedule. I was free to set my hours a bit more flexibly.
I wonder if the youthful predilection for “sleep late, be active in the late evening” is some sort of evolutionary adaptation. Night raids, the young being tasked with the most annoying night-shifts...
All pure speculation, but there must be something more than “kids are lazy and then they ‘grow’ out of it” - if anything because some people (cough cough) never actually do.
From the book Why we sleep, by Matthew Walker, it's reported that teenager's circadian rhythm is different from the one of their younger siblings. It's shifted progressively forward, so forward that it passes even the timing of adults.
This is something wired in their brain and should be addressed when setting school times.
Moreover, Walker also proposes a socio-evolutionary explanation of why adolescent sleep schedule is shifted:
"Central to the goal of adolescent development is the transition from parental dependence to
independence, all the while learning to navigate the complexities of peer-group relationships and
interactions.
One way in which Mother Nature has perhaps helped adolescents unbuckle
themselves from their parents is to march their circadian rhythms forward in time, past that of
their adult mothers and fathers.
This ingenious biological solution selectively shifts teenagers to a
later phase when they can, for several hours, operate independently—and do so as a peer-group
collective.
It is not a permanent or full dislocation from parental care, but as safe an attempt at
partially separating soon-to-be adults from the eyes of Mother and Father.
There is risk, of course.
But the transition must happen. And the time of day when those independent adolescent wings
unfold, and the first solo flights from the parental nest occur, is not a time of day at all, but rather
a time of night, thanks to a forward-shifted circadian rhythm."
edit: putted a little more space in between sentences
Well, I've skimmed through your link and he makes some legit counterpoints.
The teenager different sleep schedule is not addressed by the link so maybe true at some degree, but still, when there are so many errors one became skeptical.
(This assuming this errors are true and they disprove many of Matthew Walker points, I have not looked at the article deeply as I said)
I am going to read it more carefully when I have more time.
(Jeez, it's really hard to believe something nowdays)
I always see his site mentioned. I am not convinced about this criticism. The author is not an expert on sleep or a neuroscientist. The most you can say is that Walker has not responded to this criticism.
Guilty. Since WFH started I get up at about 12:00 - 13:00. This has been my natural unregulated pattern since I was about 14 (40 years ago). I have no set hours at work and basically zero supervision so it works.
I think the simple answer is just that children need more sleep than adults. It’s not just about a different schedule. The National Sleep Foundation recommends[1] 9-11 hours for school-aged children and 8-10 for teenagers.
But it’s largely tolerated because of the widespread cultural belief that waking up early is “character-building”. As if a late-shifted chronotype is a sign of laziness and sloth.
If our society took a chill pill with all the 'stranger danger' fear mongering, we could simply let kids walk themselves to school, as was once common not too long ago.
Stranger danger happened because women in the suburbs went from being SAHM’s to working professionals. This turned the suburbs from villages (where there were plenty of adults around to keep an eye on everyone) to “bedroom communities” which are largely abandoned during the day.
It’s one thing to let your kids walk to and from school when you know there are lots of other parents around. It’s entirely another thing when you know the place is a ghost town until all the parents get off work and come back home.
How do you explain absence of stranger danger in non suburban communities and countries where women work? Women work not just in America and not just in middle class.
America. I used to walk two miles to school when I was a kid. That school got torn down years ago, but was replaced with another on the same lot. It would be just as easy to walk today as it ever was; there hasn't been some fundamental change in how communities are laid out.
School buses still exist too. Kids in rural areas can stand at the end of their driveway and board a bus without parental supervision, provided their parents aren't totally paranoid.
Also sports! This is a big one, as high school sports are the lifeblood of many a small town. Ending school early lets kids cram in their 2+ hours of bashing each other's heads in for the amusement and profit of locals before they do 2+ hours of homework.
When I was on the swim team, we often had practice in the morning before class. If school started later, morning practice would be even easier (as it was, we were waking up at something like 5am for that.) And competitions can easily be on Saturdays, they needn't be after school on a weekday.
I mean.. swimming didn't conflict with any other sport but diving, and swimming got precedence. We practiced in the morning because it was a good time for it.
At small schools, you're probably going to only have 1-3 members of staff qualified to train students (qualified is a very loose term here).
I suppose I could be mistaken about staffing conflicts. My small school didn't have a pool, so there really wasn't anything resembling any sort of water based sports (unless you just wanted to swim in a lake).
N=45 school-age children suggests that you had some serious problem with randomly selecting them; as does 32/45 girls (p<0.01) and 96% caucasian (p<0.005 against the general population of Montréal).
1) N=45
2) based on "semi-structured phone interview"
Neither of these is a deal-breaker, but what you'd really prefer is some sort of objective measure of sleep quantity, and how it impacted the person. Teenagers are, by and large, entirely aware that when adults ask them questions, they are likely to draw conclusions about policy towards teenagers. They want to sleep later. How likely is it that they would admit it, if they didn't really get any more sleep out of this?
Not saying it's not true, or that it isn't an interesting idea to try to put this "natural experiment" to work somehow, but I'm not sure this is really enough to draw any conclusions, and I actually already agreed with their conclusion before seeing this study.
A better method might be to compare home-school students to public schools, or compare summer-break to school year, and to use some more objective metric than a phone interview.