Transcript for Later start time for high school students
?????? Welcome back to “Gma” and in today’s weekend download, revisiting the issue of whether school should start later for teenagers on this day when of course, we’re all feeling a little sleep-deprived. Daylight saving, thank you. Joining us is ABC’s chief health correspondent, Dr. Jen Ashton. Always a pleasure to have you Good morning, whit. A lot of people — my kids not quite teenagers yet. I know that day is coming, but the problem is teens seem to want to go to bed late and never want to wake up early. Right. It seems like a good concept to start school later, but is there research to back it up? That’s the thing. Not a lot, but the bulk of it has been done at the university of Washington in Seattle. What it suggests is that teenagers have different circadian rhythms that make it harder to fall asleep with regular time cues like darkness and they actually also studied setting the school time to a later school and they found that on average, it increased the amount of sleep by 34 minutes a night which doesn’t sound like a lot, but attendance went up, academic performance went up slightly, so interesting findings. Here’s the argument from opponents. They think this is a lazy copout, right? Isn’t high school supposed to prepare teenagers for the real world? That’s one of the kind of issues, but the other one is for a lot of parents, they drop their kids off at school and then head to work so if they push back start time, will that be affected? But we have to remember this is a serious issue. According to the CDC, 1 out of every 4 American teenagers is not getting the recommended minimum eight hours a night, and that can then affect everything from their mood to their immune system to their grades. People are looking at this. Remind us of the numbers we need and how can we improve those? Look at the recommendations. These are from the CDC and average guidelines. For adults, 7 to 9 hours every night. For teenagers, 8 to 10 and for school-aged children, 9 to 12 hours, whit. I always say, sleep has a P.R. We think of it as a luxury. We need to prioritize this. For those of us morning anchors on the weekend of daylight saving, good luck. Thank you so much.
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