Alternative Health Blog

Parents of teenagers are likely to celebrate this news: Research shows delaying the typical early start—like, way early, dude—of middle school and high school until 8:30 or even 9 a.m. can significantly improve students’ ability to stay awake in class. Plus, no small thing, teens who drive to school will stay more alert while operating the car.

Lots of head nodding out there, no doubt, among parents who struggle to wake up their sons and daughters. Funny thing, research clearly shows adolescents have higher levels of a hormone that physiologically prevents them from falling asleep early when compared to their lower-grade years.

It’s a biological fact, upturned by sleep researchers at Northwestern University and University of Minnesota among others, that has been largely ignored by most school districts. One notable exception in the research literature is the Duluth, Minn., school district, which has incorporated later start times to help scientists explore the potential benefits.

The newest study involves a school district in Kansas observed by researchers Barbara Phillips and Fred Danner at the University of Kentucky. Before altering start times, they found just more than a third of middle and high school students in the district (which serves a single and entire county in Kansas) logged at least eight hours of sleep. The start times were 7:30 a.m. for the high school and 8 a.m. at the middle school.

When start times were delayed by one hour, respectively, the percentage of kids getting at least eight hours rose to 50 percent. The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, additionally documented a significant decrease in motor vehicle accidents and crashes among 17- and 18-year-old drivers in the county. More than 10,000 students were part of the study.

While some observers might challenge that kids simply need to retire earlier at night, the hormonal research points to a certain biological futility to that effort. Laying in bed awake doesn’t count as sleep. Another important finding is the students in the study needed less catch-up sleep on weekends, indicating that you can better regulate a child’s sleep habits with a bit later start in the morning.

When allowed on weekends to sleep in, there was less of it because the body wasn’t demanding it. Kids were waking up at roughly the same time each day, which is rated the best sleep habit any of us can follow.

Bob Condor blogs for Alternative Health Journal every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.