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Social Media Activity And Texting Essay

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On a typical weekday morning, over 15 million adolescents will wake up to attend school in the United States, at an average starting time of 8:00 a.m, which is often considerably earlier than their starting time during primary education (Wheaton 2012). Although social media activity and texting are often blamed for causing sleeplessness in adolescents, these "distractions" are actually not to blame for students inability to get an appropriate amount of sleep or bad grades in school. In fact, the cause of students ' relatively worse performance when starting school earlier is at least in part due to biological factors outside of their control. Students ' circadian rhythms cause them to be less alert early in the morning, and as a result, those who attend schools that start later in the day tend to perform better academically than those whose schools begin earlier in the day (American Academy of Pediatrics 2014). While students ' circadian rhythms cause them to less alert in the morning, they cause them to be more alert late at night, preventing them from getting a sufficient amount of sleep (American Academy of Pediatrics 2014). Although it may seem simple for school districts to move their start times back, there have been many forms of resistance. Many parents rely on the their adolescent children to supervise their younger siblings while they are at work, requiring them to be home before elementary school students are released for the day (Start School Later 2016).

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