‘Burden’ of homework leaves Chinese pupils sleep-deprived, study finds (2024)

For 12-year-old Tao Jiaxuan, a decent night’s sleep is an unimaginable luxury.

The grade 6 student in Shanghai finishes his homework no earlier than midnight every day, and sometimes as late as 1am.

He wakes up at 6.30am and leaves home at 7am to get a taxi to an elite, privately run middle school about 15km (9 miles) away.

“I have too much homework to do. Each subject’s teacher assigns us lots of exercises and test papers to finish every day,” Jiaxuan said. “I am struggling to do them all.”

He said many of his classmates had the same problem, often grumbling they were sleepy in the afternoon.

Heavy academic pressure means a high percentage of mainland children do not get enough sleep, according to a study by the Chinese Sleep Research Society, a sleep-issues research NGO.

The Ministry of Education says primary school pupils should get at least 10 hours’ sleep per night, junior middle school students nine hours and high school students eight hours.

But more than 60 per cent of Chinese aged between 6 and 17 get no more than eight hours of sleep, according to the study.

The results, drawn from an online poll of 66,000 students and 1,900 parents, were released ahead of World Sleep Day, an annual awareness event that is held around the time of the spring equinox and fell this year on March 15.

According to the study, 81 per cent of students aged 13 to 17, who are generally at junior or high schools, do not get eight hours of sleep. Among primary school pupils, aged six to 12, the proportion is 32 per cent.

But the degree of sleep deprivation among China’s schoolchildren may be even greater than those statistics suggest.

The real worry for sleepy Hong Kong students

Gao Xuemei, deputy director general of the Chinese Sleep Research Society and deputy director of the Sleep Medicine Centre at Peking University, said the study’s findings might be understated because only students with spare time would have been able to take part in the online poll.

She said that about three years ago, a group of Shanghai doctors polled grade 5 and 6 students in the city on their sleeping habits and found they were getting just six to seven hours’ sleep per night, a far cry from the nine or 10 hours recommended.

“I think compared with their counterparts in Northern Europe and Australia, kids in East Asian countries like China, Japan and South Korea all lack sleep,” Gao said. “It’s because of the culture here that every parent attaches importance to their kids’ studies and hopes their child can achieve success.”

She said pupils remained awake late mainly because they had to do homework assigned either by their schools or after-school academic coaching institutions.

Must Hong Kong students sacrifice health to make the grade?

Maggie Jiang, the mother of a 13-year-old girl in Shenzhen, said her daughter had a “serious shortage of sleep”.

The girl usually completes an excessive amount of homework by 11pm or midnight and gets up at 6am, but sometimes she has to be woken as early as 4am to finish her assignments.

“If she’s still unable to finish it, I will do the homework on her behalf,” Jiang said.

But the study also suggested it is a mistake to blame the students’ sleep shortage solely on the sheer volume of homework. Some students went to bed late because of bad work habits which prevented them from doing their homework efficiently, Gao said.

A Shanghai mother surnamed Zuo said her 14-year-old daughter was in the habit of starting her homework only after dinner, leading to her going to bed between 10.30pm and 11pm.

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“Without my supervision beside her, she won’t do it seriously,” Zuo said.

Gao said lack of sleep would affect children’s growth and their ability to remember things.

“Only when a child is at the deep sleeping stage will their brain secrete growth hormone,” she said. “If a child sleeps for a very short time, it’s possible that they won’t grow taller.”

Sleep-deprived students will struggle to remember or understand what teachers say in class, and that, in turn, will lead to their doing homework more slowly.

“They then have to sleep late. It’s a vicious circle,” Gao said.

Wang Guoqing, a spokesman for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the mainland’s top advisory body, said in March last year that Chinese primary and middle school pupils spent an average of 2.82 hours per day doing homework, about three times the global average.

Do better sleep habits mean better grades at school?

For years, the national education authority has been issuing orders aimed at reducing the homework burden for children, but the directives have not been implemented well, according to Zhang Duanhong, an associate professor at Tongji University’s Higher Education Research Institute in Shanghai.

“School principals and parents hope other schools or parents will lessen students’ workloads, but they won’t do it themselves [because they believe] it will give their pupils an advantage [in tests if they do more homework],” Zhang said.