Apparently, moving the clock one hour is enough to bring our whole household to its knees. Every year, someone cheerfully announces that daylight saving time is ending as if we have all just won an extra hour of sleep. And every year, I wonder who exactly is receiving this free hour, because it is certainly not the parents.
In my house, the time change does not feel like gaining an hour. It feels like someone picked up our entire routine, shook it like an Etch A Sketch, and handed it back with a smile. Dinner is suddenly happening at the wrong time.
Bedtime feels suspicious. Morning arrives before anyone’s brain has agreed to participate. By 5:30 p.m., it’s pitch-black outside and my body is convinced we have missed bedtime by at least three business days.
People tend to talk about the time change as a problem for parents of babies and toddlers. There are entire survival guides devoted to shifting naps by 15-minute increments so a two-year-old does not greet the day at 4:12 a.m. But once your child gets older, everyone seems to assume the problem disappears.
The child just gets taller and develops stronger opinions about why bedtime is a government conspiracy. He understands, intellectually, that we moved it back one hour. None of that means his body, brain, appetite, attention span, or emotional regulation received the memo.
The clock may say 7:00, but his nervous system is operating in its own private time zone… and frankly, so is mine. That is the part I think we miss when we talk about older kids and daylight saving time. We treat it like a scheduling inconvenience instead of what it really is for some families: a disruption to the external cues that help our brains know what comes next.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
