I love this clip from The West Wing. it was made before Indiana unified under one time zone, but it is still great. Also, the earnest, lovable Midwestern kid is played by the same actor who played the earnest, lovable Midwestern news producer in Sorkin’s show, the Newsroom.
When I first started fighting to #LockTheClock six years ago, I knew that clock changing was annoying. I have come to learn that it’s also deadly, and we have lots of stats about that on the research page. Then came the day I went to testify in Nebraska, and the young man who testified before me made a statement that was so clear and powerful about how clock changing is hugely exacerbating for his seizure disorder. If a person dies or ends up in the ER, that’s bad. Also bad, but harder to quantify, is the disruption for families like the Fausett family from Nebraska, or the family that you’ll read about below. The writer of this post came to my attention because she contacted her state legislator, and the staff for that legislator then contacted me. When I heard this story, I thought it would be much better to get the story on this blog first-hand, and boy I was right about that. (The photos are from the mom, art creations from her kids.) I hope you find it as moving and touching as I do, and I will keep this family — and all other families that deal with special issues like this — in mind as I fight to finally, once and for ever, put an end to the barbarism of clock changing.
— Scott
Hi there. My name is Amy. My children both have the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, in addition to many other special needs. Life is challenging, and we spend hours every week in therapy and with specialists trying to support my children with their disability. My children require routines and schedules to navigate the world. The routines help them to stay regulated and in control of their emotions and bodies.
Daylight Saving Time (both when it starts in the spring and ends in the fall) is an incredibly challenging time for my family. The impact of arbitrarily changing the time twice a year is disruptive, dysregulating, and presents real safety concerns for my family. While others might find the practice of DST merely annoying or unimportant, to my family it is dangerous.
Let me ask you to think back to the Monday after Daylight Saving Time began in March. How were you feeling that morning? Maybe a little tired because it felt like you lost an hour of sleep? Maybe you wondered why it still felt so dark when it was time for your morning commute? Maybe when you ran out for your coffee you were surprised by how different the quality of the light was? Maybe you were surprised that you didn’t feel as sleepy as you usually do when it was time to turn in?
My children were extremely dysregulated that morning. There were tears, there was screaming, there was aggression, both physical and verbal towards me. I think we can all agree that resetting the body’s sleep pattern is not as easy as resetting a clock. At my house, we try valiantly twice a year to ease the transition, but bodies have their own internal clock. My son could not articulate why he felt so sleepy and off that Monday. This caused my son real physical and emotional stress–the fallout of which is termed a meltdown. For the rest of the day, he was stressed out and felt as if the world was not quite right. For all of us there are little reminders throughout the days after DST begins or ends that we switched the clock—we forget to reset a digital clock on the oven, we aren’t as hungry for our meals, the shadows are a little shorter. For most of us this is no big deal. We know why everything is a little different, and we adjust to the differences pretty quickly. For my children, this is incredibly upsetting and stressful. Nothing feels right to them. They don’t understand why they had to wake up early. They don’t understand why it feels as if their therapists are an hour late in arriving, and they don’t understand the explanations of DST.
For my children, adjusting to the new time takes three weeks to one month. Imagine missed naps, refusal to sleep at bedtime, and groggy mornings for a month! And that’s just their disrupted sleep pattern.
But my children don’t process the world the same way most of us do. The sensory input is far more overwhelming to them and can very easily dysregulate them—leading them to at times shut down and withdraw or at other times to meltdown and tantrum. We’ve all experienced days where little irritations can accumulate and build up until one last straw sets us off. This happens often with my children; however, they have more limited language and more limited social tools to understand how to deal with their emotion. So they meltdown. Aggression towards themselves, their peers, or an adult like me is often part of that meltdown. This is what I mean when I say that DST poses real safety risks to my family. It creates for weeks these situations where my children feel as if things are off, in addition to messing with their sleep, and rather than being able to talk and process this, it builds until there is a meltdown. My children have a hard enough time coping with everyday life, but because we want time to “spring forward” or “fall back” we have to make everything harder for them. Adjusting is hard when you have Autism. The meltdowns that my children experience are not choices. My kids are not naughty, spoiled, or bratty children who are tantruming to get their way. They are special kids, who see and experience the world differently and deserve our help.
So let’s go back to that Monday in March. My son had a meltdown, but for the rest of the day his fight or flight instincts were activated. His stress level, already elevated, continued to build until a sensory stimulus (a car passing by too fast as we were out for a walk, a food that is the wrong shape or color, a smell that is too strong) pushed him over the edge. Then another meltdown happened.
Unfortunately, meltdowns can grow in their duration and severity.
Have you ever had to physically restrain a child for their safety or your own? I have during my son’s meltdowns. Have you needed to be trained and certified in how to physically restrain a child in crisis? I have. And while aggression towards self or others is not always a hallmark of a meltdown (although it is certainly a hallmark of my son’s), it is very common. Also common is property destruction, elopement, verbal aggression, and vocal disruption.
These are sobering experiences, and they motivate me and other parents like me to look for patterns and anticipate situations that could lead to meltdowns. Arbitrarily changing my children’s routines and throwing them off twice every year for DST leads to a whole lot of meltdowns which results in increased incidents of aggression. Daylight Saving Time isn’t worth it, y’all. But helping my children out and other children like them is worth it. I love my children. They are wonderful, intelligent, creative people who see the world in cool and unique ways. They are working hard to learn how to use language and calming strategies to stay regulated and stay in control of their emotions and bodies. We can help them and by locking the clocks and ending the practice of Daylight Saving Time.
My job as a parent of disabled kiddos is to advocate for their special needs. Before you dismiss the movement to #locktheclock as unimportant, consider how the practice is not only really challenging but dangerous for my family and other special needs families.
It’s been six years now that I’ve been following Daylight Saving Time news, and at least a couple that I’ve been paying attention to what’s going on in Europe with a fix for what they call Summertime and Wintertime.
I do not claim to be any kind of expert in the intricacies of European politics, but I was encouraged by news. And now I have to admit that I just got it wrong.
The stories I read made it seem that the E.U. made a decision in 2019 that there would be no more clock changing starting in 2021, and that each country had until then to decide what time zone it would be in permanently.
So as we go into this weekend for the “Fall Back” change in Europe, I went searching for what I was sure to be a raft of stories about what decision each country is making.
Nothing, really.
There was so little coverage, that I actually had to go look on some German-language sites and use Google Translate to figure out what was going on.
It turns out I had one small key piece of the puzzle wrong.
The EU didn’t say to countries that they had to pick, it said that they should pick one time zone and stick with it.
So a lot of the countries started talking about it, but they all wanted to be in synch with other neighboring countries, and all are now waiting for someone to make the first move and so the conversation went about like this classic scene from Jungle Book:
With no clear leadership, the idea has just kind of languished. So, alas, it looks like there will be no #LockTheClock anytime soon in the E.U.
As a side note, the U.S and the E.U., will also remain out of step with each other, as Europe changes clocks a week before America in the fall, and several weeks later in the spring, leading to this kind of mess:
This is all really a shame because I have been touting this brilliant European solution for us in America. It makes sense here.
The federal government could say: In two years (or less, based on when the law is enacted) there will be no more clock changing. If you are on the border of a time zone line, you have until then to figure out if you want to be in permanent Standard Time like we have in the winter, or permanent Daylight Saving Time like we have in the summer. If you do nothing, you will be in permanent Daylight Saving Time.
Why the bias toward permanent DST? Just political reality. There are so many business interests aligned behind keeping more sunlight later in the day that there’s no sense fighting them. Also, there have been nearly 20 states that have passed a bill through their legislature in the last two years, and every single one of them has been a move to stay in DST year round.
Right now, under the law, any state could move into permanent Standard Time right now, and not a single state has done that since Arizona did it in the 1960s.
That’s not to say it couldn’t happen.
I recently made a presentation to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and included these two maps:
My point was to show that it is maybe a little bit nutso that Indiana is in the same time zone as Boston, and is in a different time zone from Chicago.
Facing a situation where the sun wouldn’t come up until 9 a.m. for a few days in the winter, Indiana may make the decision to switch to Central Time permanently. That would be the same as what they have right now for the Standard Time part of the year.
Who should decide that? Me? Some research group? The Federal Government?
No, no and no.
The people of the great state of Indiana, via the established form of government known as the state legislature, should decide. The golf industry, et. al., may make a case that they need the sunlight in the summer, but it will be a hard case to make. The state is so far west in the time zone that there’s plenty of light to go around in the summer.
I’m the first to concede, this answer is a bit complex. Sorry about that. If there was an easy solution, we would have done it already.
Covid is still the main issue that our government needs to deal with, and the elections in the U.S. truly are historic and important.
But visits to my site, emails, and general interest in this issue are rising in the ways they do every year about this time. (It’s true, a lot of people are just looking for Daylight Saving Time memes, and I’ll be sure to make a post with those soon enough.)
And the state legislators are starting to think about what bills they are going to introduce in the coming sessions. Federal lawmakers are plotting how to get something done in what may be a new-look Washington.
My hope is that even though the European solution has not yet actually worked for Europe, with one small tweak it could work here.
That’s what I’ll be pushing for, and I hope you’ll join me.