Early starts can be hard on kids — and families

It’s Monday morning at the crack of dawn. The city is still shrouded in a darkness that makes the winter streetscape seem colder and greyer. Time to get the kids up and ready for school.

For many parents, trying to oust children from their warm beds is an agonizing process. Gentle entreaties turn to anxious nagging — even to exasperated pleading — as the minutes tick by and the prospect of being late becomes increasingly likely.

But evidence suggests it may not be our kids’ fault they many have trouble rising and shining. New research from McGill University’s Institute of Health and Social Policy says the typical early start time for most school days is totally out of sync with children’s natural body rhythms.

The study, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, examined data from nearly 30,000 Canadian students between the ages of 10 and 18 at more than 300 schools across the country. Their classes started anywhere from 7:57 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., with the average morning bell ringing at about 8:45 a.m.

Lead author Geneviève Gariépy said the earlier the start of the school day, the less likely tweens and teens are to get enough sleep and the more likely they are to report feeling tired at school. And fatigue can have some surprisingly serious consequences.

“Lack of sleep can contribute to lower grades, health problems, mental health problems, symptoms of anxiety and depression, even more car accidents,” Gariépy said in an interview. (Her next research paper will examine how early school start times affect body weight).

Yet one in three adolescents is failing to meet the minimum sleep recommendations of 9 to 11 hours per night for 5- to 13-yearolds and 8 to 10 hours of shut-eye for 14- to 17-year-olds. Simply telling them to put down their smart phones, turn off the TV and hit the sack early won’t help. Gariépy said many teens have difficulty falling asleep before 11 p.m. and waking up before 8 a.m. because their internal clocks shift by two or three hours as they hit puberty, hard-wiring them to stay up late and sleep in.

“Asking kids to get up at 6 is like asking adults to wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. and be awake and alert and fully engaged by 5,” she said.

Would later start times make a difference in the lives of our drowsy kids? Gariépy makes a convincing case. It’s an idea I’m sure teens who walk around in a fog until noon would welcome. But so, too, I believe, would many parents.

I can attest that waking up early can be rough on younger kids as well. In our household, the 8 a.m. start time during kindergarten was a shock to the system. We live close enough to school that we have to get our daughter up only at 7. Some of her friends have to be out the door by that time to catch buses or take transit. This year, the start of classes was pushed back a whole five minutes to 8:05, but even that has made a difference in our rushed, chaotic mornings. But I know of one primary school in Lachine where the bell rings at a gruelling 7:48 a.m. Ouch.

Some young children are early risers, waking bright-eyed and bushy tailed even on weekends. But not all. (Certainly not mine.) And the younger the child, the more sleep they need to function normally. Yet very few children are getting the recommended amount of slumber, never mind their exhausted parents. Plus it can be a scramble after rushing home from school and work to make dinner, eat as a family, do homework, take baths, brush teeth and read stories in time to get small kids into bed early enough to get a full night of rest.

Later school start times would provide much-needed breathing room for families. Some at least. For parents who need to drop their kids off before heading to work, it might complicate life. So it wouldn’t help children get more sleep if they just end up in before-school daycare.

But delaying the bell for middle- and high-school students, who can get themselves to class independently, makes sense. Gariépy’s study shows teens are the most likely to use the extra time to sleep anyway; for every 10 minutes later classes started, students got an additional 3.2 minutes of shut-eye. The research shows that schools that begin at 9:30 seem to allow the most teens to benefit from their natural sleep patterns.

Of course, there are logistical challenges to changing the time school starts, from teachers’ contracts to parents’ work schedules to the availability of bus transportation. Enough excuses. These have more to do with adult convenience than what’s best for children.

If later start times can help students learn more effectively, improve physical and mental health or help fight depression, then we owe it to our kids to let them sleep in.