First Of Its Kind Study Evaluates The Impact Of Later School Start Times On Parents

Dr. Lisa Meltzer, a sleep psychologist at National Jewish Health discusses the issue of sleep debt. After a local school district moved high school and middle school start times later, experts were able to evaluate the impacts this had on parents’ and kids’ sleep-wake patterns over a three-year period. They found that this policy change had a positive impact on parent sleep and had far-reaching benefits on the wellbeing of families as a whole. 

Dr. Lisa Meltzer is a Professor of Pediatrics at National Jewish Health and Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical and Health Psychology from the University of Florida, and completed her clinical internship and post-doctoral fellowship at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She was selected as a Pickwick Postdoctoral Fellow in Sleep Research by the National Sleep Foundation, studying sleep patterns in parents of children with chronic illnesses. Dr. Meltzer is board certified in Behavioral Sleep Medicine by the American Board of Sleep Medicine, and directs the Pediatric Behavioral Sleep Clinic and Actigraphy Clinic at National Jewish Health. She is also the co-author of Pediatric Sleep Problems: A Clinician’s Guide to Behavioral Interventions. Dr. Meltzer currently serves as the Sleep Education Fellow for the National Sleep Foundation, developing programs to educate primary care providers about sleep health. Finally, Dr. Meltzer has a funded program of research examining sleep in children with chronic illnesses and their parents, the impact of deficient sleep on health outcomes in adolescents with asthma, as well as the development and validation of objective and subjective measures of pediatric sleep.