Let's Not Do The Time Warp Again
Daylight Savings Time's Spring Forward is an absolute menace to parents
Alien archeologists 10,000 years in the future would examine present-day literature on childrearing and think that young humans from birth to about age three were dangerous creatures who could only be subdued by getting them to sleep. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
I was a little taken aback, as a new parent, by how concerned other parents were about my plan to get my baby on a schedule. Maybe if I’d been a hardass about sleep training methods, become one of those Online Forum Parents who uses abbreviations to describe infant sleep techniques like a member of the military delivering a report to the person relieving them on patrol, maybe then I wouldn’t have a toddler who still wakes up at least twice every night. Ultimately I didn’t have the stomach to sleep train. By the time I had familiarized myself with more “gentle” methods than just letting the baby cry until it gives up, I had kind of gotten used to waking up several times a night.
But even without sleep training, we’ve arrived at a place where Juniper is an absolute champ daytime napper and a middling-to-passable nighttime sleeper. Despite my laziness at getting her on a schedule, we have fallen into a loose schedule-ish arrangement that works for us.
Enter a clock change, aka Sleep-pocalypse, a blessed event that happens for outdated reasons twice a year, always at the worst possible time.
This is Juniper’s second Daylight Savings Time and third clock change. Each time, it’s seemed to happen at the exact moment when we were finally reaching a place that felt slightly more sane, and it’s fucked with our lives just enough to cause a moderate interruption until things can normalize again.
Juniper has a later bedtime than most kids her age, but also wakes up correspondingly late. When we try to put her to bed tonight, it will be at a time that in her brain feels an hour earlier than she’s used to. I’m dreading a meltdown, because we experienced a meltdown last time, and everything is a meltdown when you’re 17 months old and the worst thing that has happened to you is that time your dad gave you a piece of pizza and then took it away because there were things on there that might be choking hazards.
For parents whose kids are early bedtimers and early risers, the more brutal time change is Fall Back. A 6:30 am wake up becomes at 5:30 am wake up, at least until the child’s circadian rhythm adjusts to the time change. Before last year’s Fall Back, one my mom friends wished the rest of the groupchat “Best of luck to the parents on this eve of Sleep-pocalypse.”
There’s been a growing movement in recent years to simply make Daylight Savings Time permanent and do away with the clock change entirely, a cause that’s united such strange bedfellows as Florida Republican Marco Rubio and Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey. The reasoning goes that permanent DST would give people more daylight to enjoy themselves in the evenings after work. People love a 8:30 pm sunset!
But, according to NPR, doctors aren’t on the same page. Sleep experts claim that people actually need it to be lighter early mornings. People are actually meant to rise with the sun, and too much light into the evening can make it more difficult to go to sleep. Yes, biannual clock fiddling is wrong, but the right move for everybody’s health is Standard Time.
"The Senate has it backwards," says Dr. Pedram Navab a neurologist and sleep medicine specialist in Los Angeles. "The natural daily cycle of light and darkness," he says, "is really the most powerful timing cue that we have to synchronize our body clock.” [...]
The [American Academy of Sleep Medicine] points to an "abundance of accumulated evidence" linking the transition from standard time to daylight saving time to an increase in cardiovascular events, mood disorders, and car crashes. For instance, a study from scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder, published in Current Biology in 2020, found an increase in fatal car accidents in the week after the spring forward time change. But their solution is to make standard time permanent.
As for a boom in spending linked to daylight saving time, the nation's convenience stores told a congressional subcommittee last year that they see an uptick in spending when clocks move ahead in the spring. Back in the 1980s the National Association of Convenience Stores lobbied to extend daylight saving time for a longer stretch of the year. "When people come home from work and there's more daylight, they tend to be more active," Lyle Beckwith of the NACS told NPR last year. "They go to sporting events. They play softball. They golf. They barbecue," Beckwith said. And that translates into more people shopping in convenience stores for everything from water, beer or sports drinks, or to pick up charcoal.
Who are you going to believe, doctors, or people whose livelihood depends in part on more people spending money on Night Cheetos?
Regardless of how the clock conundrum is dealt with long term, let me state, on behalf of parents everywhere, that we are begging you to make up your goddamn minds. Daylight Savings, Standard, I don’t care. Just pick a time, and end the biannual sleepocalypse permanently.