Opinion: End Daylight Saving Time, for the children's sake

Illustration by Paige Vickers for The Washington Post

As the U.S. prepares to end daylight saving time at 2 a.m. Sunday, until March 12, the nation should think about ending its biennial clock-changing routine, Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright write in The Washington Post.

Many Americans want year-round daylight time, and the Senate passed a bill to do that (hurriedly and without debate). The better change would be permanent standard time, write Turgeon and Wright, the authors of Generation Sleepless: Why Tweens and Teens Aren’t Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them. "Eternal daylight saving time is not the answer. Especially if we want to protect young people."

"Humans evolved outside, in nature, and our brain clocks are exquisitely attuned to the sun. Standard time is an approximation of the solar day and is more or less in line with the rising and setting sun. Decades of research shows we’re at our best when we live harmoniously this way," they argue. "Daylight saving time, on the other hand, is essentially mandated jet lag. Permanent daylight time would leave us perpetually out of sync with our powerful internal clocks and would deny us the sun’s rays when our brains and bodies need them most: in the mornings."

They note that the sun "would rise unnaturally late, particularly in the northwestern part of every time zone: 9 a.m. in parts of Texas, 9:15 a.m. in Indiana, 9:45 a.m. in parts of Michigan. Students wouldn’t see the sun until well into their school day. This experiment happened in the United States in 1974. People found it so painful, it was abandoned after one winter."

Teens and tweens would be affected most, they say: "Because of the later biological pacing of the teenage brain, waking at 7 a.m. already feels to young people like waking at 5 a.m. With permanent daylight saving time, it would feel like 4 a.m. This would put a serious strain on teen mental health. The result would be, among other things, shortened sleep for a population that is already severely sleep deprived and a potential uptick in rates of depression, when teens are already struggling with elevated levels of depressive symptoms and suicidal thinking. And let’s not forget: A policy that’s bad for teens is bad for the rest of us. Sleep-deprived teens are driving next to us on the freeway. Sleep-deprived teens are twice as likely to experience mental health symptoms, which affect families, schools and health-care systems."

The sun is part of our biology, Wright and Turgeon write: "Morning sun tells every cell and organ in the body to start its daily work; in our repertoire of daily habits, morning sun is the slam dunk. Daylight saving time takes this from us. . . . Daylight saving time in winter would make every morning a dark, dreary struggle — and people’s health and moods would unravel."