I’m deprived of sleep and that’s no secret, I go to sleep at 10:30 or 11:00 most every night. And if I’m going to sleep at 11:00 and waking up at 7:00 I’m just barely hitting the minimum of 8 hours of sleep teenagers are recommend to get. Windy Troxel a sleep researcher, clinician and mother of a teenager believes school start times are depriving adolescents of sleep during the time they need it the most. She uses her TED talk give prime examples and useful statistics regarding sleep deprivation in teenagers and what we need to be doing instead. So what needs to be done to give teenagers back their lives?
Many parents want to believe that their children’s phone is the problem for their sleep deprivation, but snap-chat and other social media apps are not the issue. The issue is how early students have to be awake in order to get ready for school so that they are there on time. We need our sleep as teenagers “Around the time of puberty, teenagers experience a delay in their biological clock. Driven in part by a shift in the release of the hormone melatonin. Teenagers melatonin starts releasing at around 11pm. Which is 2 hours later than what we see in adults and young children. Waking up a teenager at 6am is the equivalent of waking up an adult at 4am.” I know you don’t want to be woken up at 4am so why should we be woken up so early? We are literally fighting our bodies biology to hardly even pass as a functional human being, at this early in the morning we relate more to the undead than ever before. The answer to the problem is to start school at a later time, for instance 8:30. Schools around the world have found that moving school times to 8:30 have immense benefits for student heath and performance, and our collective public safety. Now you may wonder why public safety increases after changing school times to later in the day, for teenager’s depression rates go down along with suicide attempts and the amount of car accidents plummets. “Studies have shown that getting 5 hours or less of sleep per a night is the equivalent of driving with a blood alcohol content above the legal limit.” But yet with all this information I’m still waking up at 7am and going to school.
Her main point is basically saying schools are waking us up to early and throwing our bodies out of it in order to function, so why not start school at 8:30? I have confidence that this time adjustment could greatly affect Cobb County school district for the better. Wendy Troxel has an excellent proposal that is well backed up with many examples and factual information. I haven’t yet met anyone who would be opposed to a later start in the day in order for them to get extra sleep. Even if it is just an hour, imagine the things we could do if our bodies were fully awake at the beginning of our day. I liked this video because it was taking about something I consider an issue in my own life, maybe not going as far to say that suicide seems like an option because of my amount of sleep lost. But definitely gives examples that I can relate to. From this video I take away the statistics of sleep deprivation in teenagers and a new way to look at the problem. I can also take away many options to help me get more than the minimum of 8 hours of sleep that I’ve been getting.
Earlier in the semester we talked amount the American Dream, and we watched a video from ABC News called ‘My Reality: A Hidden America’. In the video a man by the name of Ronnie Thomas is known as a super commuter who wakes up at 3:30am to get to work on time. This reminded me of when Troxel says that a teenager waking up at 6am is the equivalent to an adult waking up at 4am. So essentially me and Ronnie Thomas’ bodies are waking up at equally the time. His American Dream was to own a home close to where he worked or even own a car so he didn’t have to wake up at 3:30 to bike to work to get there on time. This can closely be related to students who don’t need to or want to be waking up at 6am, before their bodies start, just to make it to school on time. Things can change, things need to change, and not just for students if the time changed then hopefully the time teachers had to be at work would change too.