An interesting article on sleep

It doesn't mention emotional health as a cause, which is too bad.  The article describes how access to artificial light causes teens to stay up late, which causes them to get inadequate sleep.  As a result, many schools are moving back their start times in an attempt to help their students with their sleep.  The article states that this approach doesn't really work however, because the students just stay up later and mess with their biological clocks even more.  Instead,

“In all cases, cutting back on evening light will greatly amplify the benefits of a delay in school start times,” Philips said. “Any district considering a delay in school start times should therefore also be educating their students on the impacts of using artificial light at night.”

I'd be so interested to see what would happen if a school district really went after this idea.   Move the start time back a bit and then really work to educate the students and their families about decreasing their intake of artificial light in the evenings.  My guess is that they would see some mild improvement, at least for a while.  But over time, I feel confident that this approach would yield little in the way of results.

The reason is that it doesn't address emotional health.  I believe teens stay up late because they are experiencing the full range of human emotions for the first time and have no skills to cope with them.  This causes the teen to feel that issues in their life are unresolved.  They stay up late in an attempt to resolve them.  No amount of starting their day later or limiting their intake of artificial light will fix the issue if the real problem is emotional.  

What teens need is an understanding of how to process their emotions more effectively. This, of course, is very difficult.  If we wait until they are teens to start teaching them, it's a losing battle.  That's why I believe that we should be teaching emotional health skills starting in Kindergarten.  Kids that grow up knowing how to handle their emotions are kids that will have fewer problems in all areas as they get older.