> If children benefit from sleeping longer, so should adults.
People at different ages require different amounts of sleep in order to be healthy. Adults require less than children [0].
Also, one of the big problems for teenagers (the subject of the article) is that their circadian rhythm is out of phase from adults, shifted later about 2 hours [1]. Early start times don't just reduce sleep, they're also just the wrong time of day. Telling a teen to wake up at 7am is like telling an adult to wake up at 5am.
It probably would be healthier for a lot of adults. They even find that because of set work start times, the average adult in the western edge of a time zone ends up sleeping less than the one in the eastern edge.
> This leaves the question: why does work start so early? If children benefit from sleeping longer, so should adults.
If you work 7-15h (3pm american), you still have some daylight time left at home, after work so you can do other, non-work stuff that requires daylight. If you sleep until 9 and work 10-18h, you get zero off-work daylight for most of the year.
This leaves the question: why does work start so early? If children benefit from sleeping longer, so should adults.