this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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The real reason is to accomodate for parents' routines. You need the kid in a place where someone can watch them for you by the time you leave for work (or not long after). Plus yeah they gotta learn to follow schedules and have responsibilities and such. Not saying I think it's a perfect system, I too hated getting off bed early in the morning.
i disagree. my elementary school started later and thats the age when parents really need to be more present. and as a kid i had no issue getting up early vs as a teen. they should just flip it. teens on a bus route, or hell even witj friends with a car, are way more capable of getting themselves to school
"Should" is doing some heavy lifting here.
Sleep patterns start changing around puberty. Young kids tend to get up earlier, naturally; teenage biorhythms are tuned to stay up later, and sleep late.
But we don't have a society where it's safe to let teens run around by themselves, except for some rural communities, so schedules are based - as GP says - around parent's schedules. And because of workplace demands, whether it's a reasonable requirement because the job demands an in-person presence like the service sector, or because of idiotic, arbitrary in-office policies, that usually means parents need to have their kids in school before 8, or 8:30 if they're lucky, so they can be at their desks by the standard 9am.
Little kids, this is less of an issue, but it really fucks with teenager's biorhythms, because they're designed to be sleeping until 10 and going to sleep at midnight at that age.
There's a ton of studies about this, and there's been a lot of work by K-12 to figure out how to accommodate a balance; and some companies even have policies allowing for flex time to help, but on average - as usual - Corporate America fucks it up.
Really? By all accounts it is safer now than ever AND has tracking if you want. Add to that the fact that every teen I know left to their own devices would not bother running around anyways. They would stay at their computer/tablet/phone as long as they could.
Oh? What's your source for that claim?
The US population in 2014 was 318.3M. In that year, 186 amber alerts for children were issued. Last year (2024), the population was 340.11M, and there were 188 alerts. That's almost unchanged (0.56/0.58) in the past decade. In 2011, there were onu 158 alerts in 311.56M people, lower than today (0.51) (amberalert). There have been years where there were more, and years when there were less; 2006 was pretty bad (0.87).
I can't get reliable statistics from 1880, when 72% of the population lived in rural communities. The population flipped from predominantly rural to urban in 1920 (1910: 54% rural; 49% rural in 1920, c.f https://www.seniorliving.org/ has a handy yearly breakdown), but the next best thing is to count alerts per million by demographic, and the metrics don't break it down like that, unless you count % alerts by state, and measure the population in each state and the rural/urban breakdown. I'm not sure that'd be valid for extrapolating back into history to estimate how much safer children might have been from strangers in 1900. Anyway, amber alerts don't tell us anything about stranger danger, since abductions are as likely to be by family members as not.
The point is, from amber alerts alone, 2011 was safer than 2024. The alerts/pop/year are all over the place, and claiming that it's safer than it ever has been is wild, and I'd like to see some substantiation before I swallow that - even if we count only recent history for which we have reliable metrics, which is necessarily going to exclude anything earlier than, say, 1950.
So if it is family members, it really doesn't matter if they are out and about does it?
Can we take a minute to say how something is very fucked up in Texas? People have talked about his before here. Texas is a fucked up state for children. 54 Amber alerts in Texas in 2024. California, Ohio, and North Carolina have the bulk of the rest, but they are like 15 and 16, not 54!
Remember I said Teens. So looking at Amber alerts as a statistic: the VAST bulk of the kids are 0 - 6 years old. For teens (ages 15-17+) there were only 12.
So have you compared the teen rate over time?
But yeah, it does, because it's usually some estranged family member, grabbing the kid while they're out. It's not who's grabbing them, it's where.
Yeah, Texas is fucked up, in a great many ways. No argument there. It's interesting reading, isn't it?
No, I haven't done an age breakdown. Getting more specific statistics, or culling them out of larger reports is more work than I care to invest in this.
Yes, you have a point about teens. 14 was "young adult" for ages; I'm not always convinced pushing it to 18 has been a wise thing. I kind of think having rites of passage and some more clear interstitial period where we recognize teens as "not children" would result in healthier teens.
and if parents are concerned about their teenager being abducted they could just give them a taser or other weapon and a phone
That makes sense for small kids, but teenagers shouldn’t need an adult holding their hand to the bus stop.
I suspect the real reason some high schools start stupid-early is to make time in the afternoon to accommodate jobs or extracurricular activities. My high school started even earlier than OP’s and kids in other schools would tell me, “At least you get out earlier.” Yeah, I would get out at 1:55 and (if I didn’t have a club or band practice) I’d be so exhausted that I’d promptly go home to nap for several hours. What I would’ve given for a saner schedule.
The problem is that this schedule is literally unhealthy for them. Like, actual health outcome in the long run bad for them. Its fucked up and "parent needs daycare" & "learning schedules and responsibilities" is a terrible justification.
Corporation's routines*. Has nothing to do with what the billions of parents want. It's what like 100 people want.