Death to Daylight Saving Time

end daylight saving timeYou’ve spent the last few months implementing every sleep training strategy you could find in books and on the internet. You’ve bribed your kids to go to bed and purchased special alarm clocks that indicate the exact moment they can get break out of their Pottery Barn prisons overflowing with toys, coordinated bedding, and educational books. But now looming on the horizon is your annual battle with Closed Eyes Interruptus. And all that hard work? Gone.

It’s not only about the loss of 60 minutes of highly coveted REM sleep. It’s not even about the Day That Never Ends: breakfast, church (late!), lunch, naps (ha! just kidding!) – maybe you read a book or d0 some menu-planning. You look at the clock and see that it’s only 2:30! Or is it 1:30? You changed all the upstairs clocks, but did you remember  the downstairs clocks? No, no you didn’t. It’s 3:30…probably. Only a few more hours until the tiny bodies of your tiny humans are not hungry at dinner time and not sleepy at bedtime.

THE SUN IS OUT, MOMMY! THE SUN ISN’T SLEEPY, AND NEITHER AM I!

Death to Daylight Saving Time | Wichita Moms Blog

Despite what you may have learned in school, Daylight Saving Time is not about farmers – in fact, many of them were never really on board with the idea. An arguable majority of farmers have historically opposed DST as it leaves them with one less hour of daylight for business – and dairy farmers in particular find that the milking schedules of their cows are adversely affected. Coal conservation during the first and second World Wards was a better reason for keeping DST around, but today? Our increased use of petroleum and electricity cancel out any real savings DST might offer.

In the fallout, our bodies enter a slight zombie-like state. Sure, it doesn’t matter when one mom of a teething baby loses sleep. But when everyone in the entire country (except Arizona and Hawaii) loses an hour of their day, there are more car accidents. Heart attacks spike. Productivity in the workplace goes down. And parents like myself take to the internet insisting that if we want to enjoy an extra hour of daylight in the summer, we can do it without changing our clocks.

Why? Because we’re adults who can stay up late when we want to and get up early when we have to.

So I say, “Death to DST!” Eight months of the year – March through November – we are “saving” time. How does that make the remaining 4 months the norm? It doesn’t. I vote to go with the 2/3 majority.

End the pain of DST by not ending it.

Give us more sunshine! Let us sleep train our children without throwing a wrench in the process twice a year. Let our bodies embrace the time change this spring and continue in a state of Daylight Saving forever and ever, amen. Spring forward one final time, and fall back no more – let our clocks and circadian rhythms remain as they are.

Let future generations of parents sleep in until 5:30 a.m. all winter long, blissfully unaware that that their ancestors were once jolted awake at 4:30 a.m. for the sake of candles, coal, and a joke that nobody understood.

Erin Bartel
Erin is a marketing consultant in Wichita KS. She spends her days helping local businesses and non-profits navigate the ever-changing waters of digital marketing and homeschooling her kids. She and her daughter also own Sassy Squid Ink, an imprint designing notebooks, journals, and sketchbooks. Married to her college sweetheart and the mother of 2, Erin's hobbies include bribing herself to exercise, traveling with (and without) her family, and trying to remember where she hid the chocolate.