Fordham psychology professor Tiffany Yip, Ph.D., the mother of two teenage students herself, said she wanted to know how much research on school start times had actually been published. So, for a paper she published in Pediatrics in May, she decided to gather as many studies as she could find and analyze the data as a whole, in addition to exploring something that many researchers hadn’t studied—the impact of delayed school start times on students from different communities, particularly children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. 

“Some research suggests that people from higher socioeconomic communities already have better sleep, due to factors like safer neighborhoods, less noise and light pollution, and more regular work hours. In addition, parents from these communities may be more likely to advocate for delays in school start times,” said Yip. “In this analysis, I wondered whether delaying school start times would continue to exacerbate these disparities between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.”

The Importance of Sleep for Young People

The average start time for U.S. public high schools is 8 a.m. This is too early for teenagers, says the American Academy of Pediatrics. When adolescents don’t get enough sleep, they can experience several health risks, including being overweight and using drugs, as well as poor grades in school. 

“Sleep is important at all points in the developmental lifespan, but there’s a lot of focus on adolescents because sleep coincides with their biological changes. Their circadian rhythms are shifted, which means they go to bed later and naturally want to wake up later,” said Yip. “But this change in their body clocks doesn’t coincide with our current school start times.” 

Impact of Delayed Start Times  

Yip’s recently published paper offered several conclusions. Her team of researchers analyzed data from 28 studies and nearly two million study participants—mostly middle and high school students, with some elementary school children. They found that data showed that delaying school start times to between 8:30 and 9 a.m. has better developmental outcomes for young students. 

“Specifically, we found that kids sleep longer, and we also found that their negative mood was lower. Indicators of anxiety, depressive symptoms, and other negative psychological mood outcomes were lower when they had later start times,” she said.

Unfortunately, her team found that there wasn’t enough data collected on student demographics to make a well-informed conclusion on how students classified by sex, race, school size, and percent free/reduced lunch are impacted by delayed school start times. But Yip said research suggests that private school students tend to benefit more from later start times than public school students. 

“There is some sort of suggestion that kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds will benefit more from a delay in school start times. This means that potentially, a delay can exacerbate some of the sleep disparities that we’ve seen in other research. We need more data to figure that out,” said Yip. “But we know that as parents and educators, we need to be careful about how implementing delays in school start times in higher socioeconomic communities might contribute to existing disparities in sleep health.” 

A Controversial Topic Among Students and Their Families

As students return to classrooms this fall, this topic will reenter many conversations, said Yip. Many of those discussions are intense, she said.

“This subject gets people riled up like crazy because it has huge ripple effects,” said Yip. “Parents need to get to work on time, particularly those who commute into New York City … But for kids who have a 7 a.m. start time, we have to factor in how long it takes for them to get to school. In Manhattan, some kids commute really far—sometimes an hour and a half to certain magnet schools. What time are they waking up?”

Yip has a personal opinion, too. She has two children—a middle schooler and a high schooler—whose schools started to delay their start times in the 2021-2022 academic year. The middle school changed its start time from 8 to 8:30 a.m., and the high school switched from 7:30 to 8 a.m., she said. 

“My kids are probably not representative because I already study sleep, and I’m really strict about bedtime and all this other stuff. But I do think the delayed school start times help with the chaos of the morning,” said Yip. “It’s hard to wake up super early, especially when it’s winter and it’s dark outside. I think my kids like the new policy quite a bit. I like it, too.”

It’ll take more effort for other schools to delay their start times, said Yip. After all, there are many stakeholders involved, including parents, educators, and bus drivers. But when it comes down to it, the biggest motivator will likely be the students themselves, she said. 

“Having data like this is one piece. But what’s going to really drive this is what kids are telling us,” said Yip. “If they’re saying, ‘I want to sleep in’ or ‘I feel better when I get a little bit more sleep,’ I think those sorts of things are going to really help us move the needle on school start times.”

Several years ago, Baltimore-based abstract artist Farida Hughes began her Blends series of paintings in which she overlaps oil paints and resin to create multilayered works. The colors remain distinct but also form, in any one piece, a rainbow of contrasting and complementing hues created by the bonds among them. Hughes, who earned a B.A. in studio art and English at Fordham and an M.F.A. in painting at the University of Chicago, creates the works as a way to explore her own background as a “uniquely blended individual,” she said—her father immigrated to the U.S. from India, and her mother is of German descent. She also has been collecting stories from friends and acquaintances of their own multicultural backgrounds, and using them to create abstract portraits in which “all the colors together are important,” she said. “Each one has a role to play with the other.”

Hughes’ Blends paintings were recently featured in an exhibition, “A Line Doesn’t End with Me,” at the Athenaeum in Alexandria, Virginia.

Sleep with Me
created and hosted by Drew Ackerman, FCRH ’96

For most podcasters, putting listeners to sleep would be considered a failure. For Drew Ackerman, it’s the whole point. Ackerman started this popular, twice-weekly podcast in 2003, inspired by his own struggles with insomnia and the late-night comedy radio shows he listened to as a child to help himself doze off. With a stated goal to “help grownups fall asleep in the deep, dark night,” each episode is a stream-of-consciousness exercise in distracted storytelling, with Ackerman’s deep, monotonous voice guiding listeners through a “bedtime story” filled with one less-than-thrilling tangent after another, all in an effort to bore—and comfort—people into slumber. Sleep with Me averages more than 3 million listeners a month and has more than 6,000 supporters on Patreon—a level of success that has allowed Ackerman, who had long balanced the podcast with a job as a librarian, to devote himself to the show full time. And he has attracted the attention of The New York Times, which recently described the podcast as “close to a sleeping pill in audio form.” With the same self-deprecating spirit that imbues Sleep with Me, Ackerman, who refers to himself as “Scooter” on the show, recently told The Sydney Morning Herald, “I’m naturally boring, so I think that helps.”
—Adam Kaufman

What’s Mine and Yours
by Naima Coster, GSAS ’12

Soon after it was published in March, Naima Coster’s second novel became a New York Times bestseller. It’s an emotionally complex, resonant story of the integration of a North Carolina public high school—and the lasting consequences it has on two families. The narrative shifts back and forth in time, from the early 1990s to 2020. At the heart of it are Gee, a Black teenager whose mother, Jade, fights to get him into the predominantly white high school on the west side of town, and Noelle, a white-presenting Latina whose mother leads an effort to keep the new students out. Each family fights to overcome poverty and trauma—when Gee was 6, he saw his mother’s boyfriend, Ray, shot and killed; Noelle’s father, Robby, spends most of her and her sisters’ childhood in jail or absent due to drug addiction. But when they participate in a school production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Gee and Noelle fall in love, drawing their families together in ways big and small for years to come. It’s an affecting coming-of-age story, highlighting how race and racism, love and loss shape the characters’ lives.
—Ryan Stellabotte

The $400,000 developmental grant is a supplement to an existing grant that focuses on discrimination and sleep patterns of African-American and Latino adolescents. With the new funding from the National Institutes of Health, Yip hopes to include the experiences of Chinese students.

“There has been a lot of research on discrimination among young African Americans and Latinos, but there isn’t much research on Asian-American teens,” said Yip, who directs the Applied Developmental Psychology Program at Fordham.

According to the limited research that does exist, Asian youth report levels of discrimination that are similar to, if not greater than, those experienced by African-American and Latino teens.

Yip is particularly interested in how discrimination among racial and ethnic teens affects sleeping patterns and health since “sleep is so important for the foundation and development of one’s memory over time.”

24-Hour Monitoring

Once a year, ninth-grade students chosen for the two-year study will wear wristwatches for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for two-week periods. They will complete surveys on their daily interactions, emotions, and school activities every evening.

“Think of the watches as more high-tech, data-capturing Fitbits,” said Yip.

She anticipates stronger physical effects, rather than psychological, for the Asian students, such as headaches, stomachaches, loss of appetite, and other physical expressions of stress. That is because research suggests that rather than verbalizing emotions, Asians/Asian Americans are more likely to express their feelings in somatic ways. Therefore, while their levels of depression and anxiety may seem unaffected by discrimination, “we may see stronger effects on sleep and other physical health outcomes,” she said.

“The idea is that if kids experience discrimination in school, they may think less well when they are doing homework that evening,” said Yip. “Over time, discrimination and disturbed sleeping habits may affect focus, and students start to underperform.”

“The social, cultural, and historical context of Asian-American teens is very different from African-American and Latino teens,” said Yip, adding that there are more variables to consider, such as immigration status and cultural relationships.

Yip said it was a more difficult process to make a case for studying Asian-American teens, acknowledging the stereotype that Asian Americans have higher performance and academic readiness.

 A Rising Ethnic Group

But for Yip, who is Asian American, the study is critical at this time because Asian Americans are the fastest growing ethnic group in the nation.

She hopes that her findings will encourage further global conversations on how to mitigate the effects of discrimination.

“If we find that someone calling you a name makes you sleep poorly at night, it really speaks to the whole connection between the social experiences we have and what happens in our body and to our health.”

-Angie Chen, FCLC ’11