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Sleep Deprivation Lowers School Achievement In Children
New submitter josedu writes:"Sleep deprivation is a great, hidden problem that afflicts a great percentage of children in affluent countries. About 73% of 9- and 10-year-old children in the U.S. are sleep deprived, as are 80% of 13- and 14-year-olds. The new study thinks this is linked to the increased access to devices such as mobile phones and laptops late at night. One of the researchers put it very simply: 'Our data show that across countries internationally, on average, children who have more sleep achieve higher in maths, science and reading.' This disruption is also causing schools to dumb-down their instruction to accomodate the reduced capacity of these kids. Thus, even the kids who are getting enough sleep will suffer. The long-term impact of sleep deprivation on nationwide education levels is enormous."
Duh!
Water is wet, news at 11.
So at some point before graduate school it turns the other way around...
I'd wager ambient urban noise levels have increased tremendously over the last while as well. Given increasingly shoddy construction, antisocial behaviour from the party set and general vehicular activity you'd have to be living in a rural area to get a decent night's sleep in most places. It's a very serious business with major health implications for children and adults.
Does anyone truly care about performance in public schools when public schools are obviously pure garbage? They're rote memorization paradises and little more than that.
Agreed, they're the worst way to systematically educate every single person.*
*Except for all the other ways we've tried.
Trying to match a bunch of kids' sleep schedules to that of adults, who need less sleep, is a really dumb idea. Having a nap time in school or shortening the school day would do wonders.
Did you even read the summary? Kids are getting dumber because of social/cultural/technological/material reasons. The schools are getting dumber to accommodate the kids who are getting dumber, and the problem is a downward self-propagating spiral.
This will prepare them for a future of diminished expectations, round-the-clock micromanagement by their employers and reflexive consumerism.
They managed to reproduce results fifteen or twenty years, and offer a stupid interpretation. Not bad!
The sleep-deprivation thing is well known, and not new. However, there's nothing tying it to "mobile devices". Rather, there's strong evidence that teenagers tend to have a circadian rhythm which favors being up later and not getting up that early. Schools have historically shoved their schedules extra-early so that extracurricular events like sports can occur before the sun goes down, but after school. Last time I heard about this, a school district had tried simply moving the high school day an hour later, and gotten a very noticable improvement in basically every measure of achievement available to them.
Now that I'm an adult, I sleep until I feel like getting up, and if I'm up a bit late, fine. I pretty much wake up between 11 and noon, and I work "late" most nights... But I get a heck of a lot more done, and a lot better, than I did when I was trying to work 9-5.
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Given increasingly shoddy construction
I'd wager you don't work in construction nor have you ever studied recent materials science in sound dampening.
"I wish I had a much older house." - said no one ever
while it might be "duh", government agencies, et al, won't respond to anecdotal stories about the effects of sleep deprivation. They need data to back it.
There are many other "duh" topics, but no one ever bothers to actually study it. And for the ones who do, regular folks aren't surprised at the answer and wonder why the govt. is funding such "obvious" research.
Well, analyzing "duh" data is tedious. And hard to do without preconceived bias.
Start school at 9:30am and go until 4:30, just like the stock market. Have a 8-9:15 'social' class or work on your own class for those students that have to get there early for whatever reason.
I may seem like a fuddy-duddy to some other parents with the ~somewhat~ early (or at least not late) bedtimes we have established for our grade school aged kids during the week, but the further I go, the more I believe we're doing the right thing. I may not be able to control whether they get sick or not, or if they always eat all their veggies, but the one thing I CAN make sure of is that they always get a good night's sleep. And the older they get, the more important the benefits of being well rested are, considering the increasing academic rigor that comes with the higher grades. Considering how sleep deprived most kids are, they'll be Well Rested Supermen by the time they arrive at high school.
And I've already tried to instill in them that all-nighters to cram for an exam are, without a doubt, absolutely counter-productive. Been there, done that - fell asleep during a Physics final. Staying up all night to try and learn a semester's worth of material simply doesn't work. If you haven't done the work all along and don't know the material before the final arrives, adding a serious level of fatigue won't help.
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...kids, is that many parents don't put their kids to sleep the same way they did when I was a child (70's/80's.)
My kids go to sleep between 7:30PM and 8:30PM depending upon their ages (ranging from 5-9.)
At 9PM at night during the week I'll hear quite a lot of our neighbors' kids still playing outside, much less getting ready for bed.
School starts VERY early here as well (kids have to be at school by 7:30AM.)
Now, some of these kids who are staying up later are doing quite well in school, so who knows. It's just different from when I was a kid and it seemed to be a pervasive adult conspiracy to put all children to bed early...
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The beauty of it is that they will grow up to have kids of their own and will do an even sorrier job of raising them than their parents did with them. It's like watching water flow down a drain. Thank God for immigration. Without it the US would be doomed. In particular the oriental immigrants seem to do well due no doubt to actually having a solid family oriented culture. Here in the US most kids seemed to be raised by electronic devices.
It's easy to blame computers and cell phones, how about not giving out 5+ hours of homework a night? To make it worse most of it was busy work in addition to the nightly reading assignments. When you have 6+ classes per day with reading and assignments, that stuff adds up pretty quickly. In high school, I was lucky to get 4 hours a night.
Even my heaviest college semesters weren't anywhere near as busy as my average high school week.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
..."sleep deprivation lowers all achievement in everyone"?
Who's surprised?
(Mind you, I'm all for conducting experiments to test things we all "know". I just don't usually expect to see those experiments classified as newsworthy.)
A simple solution would be to start school a few hours later...
In my experiance it was never getting distracted by flashy objects (which is the new thing to blame everything on these days) It was simply that the school schedule was crappy for me. When you are younger you sleep more than you do as an adult. The closer you get to adulthood the less sleep you need. if school started 2 hours later that would have made a huge difference. I naturaly want to go to sleep around midnight to 1, and they want to force me awake before 6am to get ready in time for school? I don't have to be at work till 9
School lowers school achievement in children.
...kids, is that many parents don't put their kids to sleep the same way they did when I was a child (70's/80's.)
My kids go to sleep between 7:30PM and 8:30PM depending upon their ages (ranging from 5-9.)
At 9PM at night during the week I'll hear quite a lot of our neighbors' kids still playing outside, much less getting ready for bed.
School starts VERY early here as well (kids have to be at school by 7:30AM.)
Now, some of these kids who are staying up later are doing quite well in school, so who knows. It's just different from when I was a kid and it seemed to be a pervasive adult conspiracy to put all children to bed early...
My parents made me go to bed at 7:30 till I was in middle school. It was evil. I didn't need that much sleep, and the sun was still shining most the time. It would take me hours to fall asleep. If that help my grades, I don't know. I was the kid who always had the "can't pay attention" in class. But later, in middle school and beyond, when I wasn't going to bed at 7:30 (it was then more 9-10ish) I got B+ grades without trying.
Be seeing you...
For teens you might want to make sure they have privacy for a full release massage at night. The lack of privacy growing up made this difficult. I literately slept in the living room of a one bedroom apartment. with parents to worked a midday shift. Just a thought. Other adults, I've talk to had trouble getting the release they craved as teens due to parents checking on them every couple of minutes after they where supposed to be asleep. And yes they felt it affected their GPAs too.
Damn, that sounds rough. I think when I was 10 I could stay up to 9PM.
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"increasingly shoddy construction"
Care to back that with something? Last I knew, building standards keep rising, not falling.
It's just different from when I was a kid and it seemed to be a pervasive adult conspiracy to put all children to bed early...
This attitude was probably a vestige of the days before TV, when awake children were children who required attention and supervision.
The book 'the end of homework' explained this pretty well. Research has found that school starts an hour before children are typically awake. School starts so early so that there can be long afternoons of sports practice. Prioritizing learning over sports would thus lead to improved learning.
I recall Junior year of high school. Biology and Geometry were my first two classes, and I would fall asleep during the latter due to late nights exploring the nascent Interweb. Late at night there are no parents nagging you, you can go to sleep whenever you want, it's quiet and you can think or do whatever you want. And, ya know, less sleep means more free time, of which high schoolers feel quickly slipping away as their homework load increases.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Actually I read once that teenagers are better "profiled" to perform during the mid day and hence they should really be sleeping much later at night and into the early morning, class for teenagers should be starting at noon not 9am. Well I'm not going to argue a good night sleep is important, it is very important, we need to be setting class times that revolve more around the natural clock of the body and not what works best for the adults. If science can show that 12 - 7pm works better for teenagers then I think we should move class times to work in that area. It would also be worth figuring out when the best natural class time is children, I have a problem when we base sleep patterns for the teachers rather then the students.
This link from the BBC talks about it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7932950.stm
So I think the solution, at least for teenagers is to move the class time back so they can best perform when biologically they're ready to.
I lived in Rome for two years. We often saw young kids (4-8 or so) on the streets with family around midnight. Our 4-year-old was tucked up and snoring. Heck, I should have been tucked up and snoring...
Rule for life: Don't impose your viewpoints on others. This also applies to wanting the schools to start later to suit the kids who go to bed late. (Maybe start a different class with the same stuff, staggered by two hours... hey, there's in money in this... I hold the copyright, remember).
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Common sense would tell anyone that it is parents fault for allowing their children to stay up all hours of the night. Simply confiscate all electronic devices at bedtime. It is the parents responsibility to raise their children, not the state.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Would love to see the sleep deprivation stats on college students...
No kidding. Lack of sleep makes you dumber. Big revelation.
Did you even read the summary? Kids are getting dumber because of social/cultural/technological/material reasons.
Actually I read the article, but had to go back to the summary to find the inaccurate characterization of the article that you cite. Perhaps sleep deprivation adversely affected the submitter's reading comprehension.
The schools are getting dumber to accommodate the kids who are getting dumber, and the problem is a downward self-propagating spiral.
That's not even in the summary - it's purely your invention. Maybe you need a good night's sleep.
When I was a teen I stayed up listening to Loveline every night until 2am. I'm pretty sure I would have stayed up listening to a fan blow if it weren't for that radio. I think my point is that smartphones aren't inherently to blame, but I'm sure they don't help.
Obligatory post to inform those who may not otherwise know. Apart from the usual about not using the computer for an hour or two before going to sleep (which I often ignore), the following may help:
1: Install F.lux - a popular utility to reduce the colour temperature of your PC's screen at night.
2: Get a cooling fan to provide pink noise. This helps drown out any random noises. Also helps during the summer to have it cool your face as you sleep. During the winter, I have a heater right next to it, so warm air is wafted at me.
3: Get blackout curtains to prevent light pollution.
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Blame electronic devices? How is it a devices fault a kid is sleep deprived? Oh wait, it isn't because it is just an inanimate object that has no effect on anyone.
Want to blame something for the kids sleep deprivation? Blame the parents who don't have their kids in bed earlier, pay more attention to their sleep habits, their school performance and so on. So here is a tip. If your kid is sleep deprived because he is up late playing a game or using a tablet, then tell them to stop, failing that you take it away.
In fact most of kids problems today stem from bad parenting. Granted parenting isn't always fun but it really isn't very hard for most cases as long as you pay attention to your child, talk to them, correct them when they do wrong, teach them and well, be a parent. Problem is though most parents are lazy and stupid.
Water is wet, news at 11.
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The beauty of it is that they will grow up to have kids of their own and will do an even sorrier job of raising them than their parents did with them. It's like watching water flow down a drain.
So each generation has been getting worse, and this has been going on since at least the days of Ancient Greece.
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.
-- Hesiod, 8th century BC
Thank God for immigration. Without it the US would be doomed. In particular the oriental immigrants seem to do well due no doubt to actually having a solid family oriented culture.
"Oriental"? Is this the 19th century?
More pointedly, you have to love those positive stereotypes. Presumably you realize that every positive stereotype is just a counterpoint to a negative stereotype. Forget the stereotyping of native born Americans. People who would cringe at the mere hint of a negative stereotype of any other nation will happily embrace the most negative stereotypes of Americans, and parrot that the only virtuous people left in America are immigrants (which kind of makes you wonder why virtuous family oriented immigrants stay here). So, given that native born Americans are trash, what about the non-"Oriental" immigrants? Do Hispanic immigrants, for example, not have a solid family oriented culture?
Also, if you sleep less, you get less sleep.
How much of that "can't pay attention" is due to the one-size-fits-all education levels by age/grade in American education? We have programs for slower students very early on, but gifted students are expected to stay behind and be bored to tears doing lessons and homework for concepts they already grasp. The first time many students are really challenged are high school honors classes.
To be fair, most kids have been raised by the state for several generations. We have long been an orphanage culture. So, biological parents being children's actual parent has been a rare thing for some time.
Did you even read the summary? Kids are getting dumber because of social/cultural/technological/material reasons.
R you sure it's technological? I'd rather think it is the "social" part of it that is the cause, no matter the other factors that trigger it.
Let me put it in other words: maybe it's not "No kids let behind" but "Not kid gets ahead".
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Insufficient sleep may also affect belly fat deposition, obesity, heart disease, and type II diabetes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Frankly dumbing down is dumb. The reality of education is that it is designed to push students out of the educational system when they reach a failure point. That is why we all are not wandering about with a fist full of Ph.D. diplomas.
Unhappily some students present a failure point a bit earlier than others. That does not imply that we should not assist them in exiting the world of school. We simply might consider greasing the exit ramps for them. That way we don't have to dumb down the system over and over again until the few young scholars who actually want to learn get so disgusted that they leave the school system.
Behind all of this are lousy parents with a "me to" attitude that indicates that their kid should get great grades no matter what. The second plunge of the dagger is the "G.E.D." . Ever try to keep a kid in school when the surf is up and his hot as heck girl friend has her bikini on and some pot and wants your boy to go to the beach every day because he can always get that G.E.D. later and it is easier anyway.
The simple fact is that about one third of the kids will never be anything more than a plague that destroys society. School drop outs and failures should appear before a court and be sentenced to menial service, the mines, or the front lines in time of war. You can bet that we would need far less drug rehabs, far less prisons, far less alcohol related diseases, far less unwanted pregnancies and unwise births, far less welfare expenses and a host of other good things if we make schools difficult and the price of failure a serious and life long pain.
We get home from work about 5:30. Without pausing for breath, one of us cooks dinner while the other plays with the kid. Then we eat dinner. That takes us to about 7:00.
Then it's bath time. Again, one of us bathes the kid, while the other cleans up. That takes us to 7:30 or later, depending how much cleaning up needs to be done.
Then we start the process of settling him down. No stimulation, subdued lighting, no play more exciting than a jigsaw puzzle. After about an hour of this treatment he's ready for bed.
So even at the most optimistic assumptions, there's no realistic way he's going to be in bed before 8:30. Usually it's after 9.
Where, exactly, can we cut time out of that schedule? I'm genuinely asking, because I hear other parents get their offspring to bed by 7:30 and I'd love to do that, but I really don't see how it's possible. Ye cannae change the laws o' physics, as a wise man once said.
...kids, is that many parents don't put their kids to sleep the same way they did when I was a child (70's/80's.)
My kids go to sleep between 7:30PM and 8:30PM depending upon their ages (ranging from 5-9.)
At 9PM at night during the week I'll hear quite a lot of our neighbors' kids still playing outside, much less getting ready for bed.
School starts VERY early here as well (kids have to be at school by 7:30AM.)
Now, some of these kids who are staying up later are doing quite well in school, so who knows. It's just different from when I was a kid and it seemed to be a pervasive adult conspiracy to put all children to bed early...
Not every child needs the same amount of sleep. Put our children to bed at 7:30pm and you'll be up for the day somewhere between 3am and 4am, guaranteed. And they're 2 and 4. My wife didn't believe that kids from my family don't require much sleep....until she ended up sleep deprived and messed up trying to do things as per recommendation.
By the way I went to bed at 12pm as a kid, and I was dux of my school in yr 10 and came equal 3rd in the grade in yr 12. I have a bachelor's degree and master's degree. And to put another spanner in the works I did most of my homework in front of the TV. Put a soapie on and it bored me so much I found the work much more stimulating.
About Martian tied sleep cycles...
I don't know what you humans are talking about...
Relax. These things are cyclical. There are good things that come from people hating their parents.
So you want high school to run like a college. Ok, I'm good with that. A very logical argument.
However when you say there is no good reason I have to disagree. You will disagree with this assement but it is founded out here in the real world and not from ideological texts. Baby sitters. The way our economy has developed since the Brady Bunch years of the 1950's, a family really can't afford to have a stay at home mom. So both parents have to work. In case you haven't noticed school really is a glorified babysitter who happens to also teach kids a few things. Allowing the students to have flexibility directly effects the adults abilities to have order. Parents bring home the money, they keep the kids fed. So yeah, their schedule takes priority over the child's no matter how much sense it may make. I think we as a society have forgotten one of the key lessons of life. Life is a cold hearted bitch. The very worst thing a parent can do is try to make thier kids worldproof. I gotta get my ass up at 0530 to go to work then dammit you are gonna get your ass up at 0530 to go to school. I don't like it, you don't like it, but it's just what you have to do to survive in the real world. When I go to this job, I am gonna work, make some money, and not get fired. When you go to school, you are gonna work, make passing grades, and not get expelled. If you can't because you are too tired from gaming or whatever then I am gonna take those phones/xboxen/whatever and back over them with a truck. You will hate me now, but thank me later. You don't cater the world to fit the kids, you make the kids fit the world. THAT ensures survivabilty.
And yeah I know you said by the time they are old enough. You neglect that some parents just don't ever trust thier kids. Ever. I got great stories about about people in thier 30s and 40s who still get told by thier parents where they will go and when they'll go to bed. But that's for another thread.
And thus the prophecy is fulfilled.
Have gnu, will travel.
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Stereotype. Heh. Whatever dude. It's an average, you do know about averaging things don't you? Simple math you can do at home with pencil and paper. On average Asian immigrants do better in school. Not a stereotype just a fact. Exceptions abound no doubt, it's just on average you know. I personally think it is because they seem to be more likely to have a home environment that encourages this to happen but I readily admit that is just conjecture on my part and I have no facts to back it up. As for the rest, the destruction of the American family unit is a post WWII phenomenon. The last couple of decades it has been a runaway train.
It would be nice if they actually knew them well enough to hate them.
Give the kid a bath whilst dinner is being cooked. You could shave off half an hour that way.
Lets let the kids fail... then the parents will have to do something about their kids.
I make sure my son gets 10-1 hours sleep EVERY night and guess what he gets A's and is bored in his classes because they are so dumbed down.
Does anyone truly care about performance in public schools when public schools are obviously pure garbage? They're rote memorization paradises and little more than that.
So? they're still better than nothing.
Or home schooling. * shudders *
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yeah, reading this discussion, teenagers (and apparently also elementary school children lately) are genetically predisposed to go to sleep after midnight, cause they cardiac rhyme would not adjust if they would start to go to sleep at ten regularly. Not even in winter, when there is dark outside at freaking six. The sun is still not allowing them to get that regular sleep, never mind it disappeared hours ago.
Btw, I'm not morning person. But if you go to sleep regularly and have those 8 hours available, you will wake up without alarm in around 8 hours. The key is regularly so your rhytmes actually have time to adapt.
The homework arguments are even more funny. The day has 24 hours regardless of when the school starts. Moving school start to later on will not magically make the homework disappear. It will not reduce sport practice time, music practice time or whatever you are into. If 24 - (homework + school classes + extracurricular activities + movies + facebook + shower + eating) is less then 9, you are going to be sleep deprived no matter how much you move those activities around.
School starts VERY early here as well (kids have to be at school by 7:30AM.)
This happens in hot Mediterranean countries, but the kids get a proper siesta and finish early too.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
a kid that
does not have
1 a pair of guardians that give a flip
2 a decent bedroom and bed
3 Food at MRE grade or better
4 a decent number of seasonal outfits
WILL NOT DO WELL IN SCHOOL
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Is it the fact that the children are missing sleep effecting their scholastic work? Premise seems to make sense.
However maybe it has more to do with the fact that those that have effective parenting (i.e. not letting your kids stay up to all hours of the night), also do a better job ensuring their children have all the things they need to excel, like parental help with homework, tutors, diet, exercise, etc...
Is there some cleanup that can be done after bedtime? Also, I know all kids are different, but ours doesn't seem to need that much of a cooldown period. Ten or fifteen minutes of reading right at the end sets the tone for bedtime. We can even have tickle fights after the bath, and by the time we're done with books she's okay. If yours doesn't work that way, I realize that won't help, but you might try condensing it a little and see if you get anything out of it?
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Who commissioned this study and how much did it cost to tell us something every parent and teacher knows?
Because it couldn't be the need to tailor the school day to fit Mom and Dad's work schedules -
Or the mountains of un-necessary homework that the kids (even in grade school) get -
Or the constant barrage from teachers and coaches that the kids need to have at least one if not two extra curricular activities -
Or the insane concept that kids have to attend a minimum of seven classes every day -
Research has shown that the average child between the ages of 10 and 20 require more sleep than previously thought to accommodate for their physical and mental changes. But instead of tailoring the school day to account for that, we'll blame laptops, smartphones, tablets and console gaming.
Here's some ideas:
1. Just like in college, have some classes offered MWF and some offered TR. That way, there's more time in the day for a kid to work on homework, and find their teacher if they have a question.
2. Let's put more money towards buses, and allow kids to go to school from 9 am to 4 pm, instead of forcing them to get up at 5am to get ready for school.
3. How about some teachers (I'm looking at you, math teachers) stick with assigning homework that teaches the basics and offers the more advanced concepts as extra credit. If I'm new to Calculus, it's better that you make sure I understand the basics of Calculus before "challenging" me with advanced topics before I'm ready.
4. With less classes per day, extracurricular activities could be pursued during the school day, rather than forcing kids to do them after school and delaying when they can get to their homework.
The problem isn't the distractions, it's the organization of the school day itself.
He was talking about carpets, obviously. They do well in family settings.
On average Asian immigrants do better in school.
Considering the rote memorization over there, how is that meaningful? It's not. They don't understand why or how many things work; they just memorize facts and spew them all back on a test, much like we do in the US. Asian students just happen to be particularly good at memorization, apparently.
So? they're still better than nothing.
And yet they're garbage. How does the fact that they're better than nothing help?
Or home schooling. * shudders *
Just an anecdote, but the home schooled kids I've seen were far more educated than just about any product of the public education system. I hear all sorts of lies ranging from "Without professional teachers, you can't get an education!" to "Kids who home school won't ever learn to socialize," but they're just that: lies and misinformation.