I don't know about kids, but I'd prefer to enjoy the precious few moments of sunlight after work, rather than catch a glimpse of it on the way to work and then waste away the sunlight hours in an office.

Also, wake up lights.

Agreed. Sunlight before school is only glimpsed through windows, which is not worth sacrificing the opportunity to spend time outside in the evening.

A lot of people are borderline incapable of waking up in the dark and functioning normally throughout the day. There are a lot of physiological triggers sunlight exposure in the morning does to naturally wake most people up, and deviating from those can be quite unhealthy.

Artificial lighting, white not yellow, and lots of it, can help with that.

Anecdotally, when I moved my clothes into the guest room and got ready for the day with all the lights on instead of getting dressed by nightlight, I was much more wakeful. Also made fewer errors with navy/black socks :)

In Australia, Philips sell an LED bulb call SceneSwitch[1] (formerly Choose Scenes), which alternate between cool and warm white when switched off and back on. I've installed in all but the bedrooms.

1. https://www.philips.com.au/c-m-li/choose-a-bulb/sceneswitch

The fifteen minutes of informal recess before school starts is one of the funnest times of the day for them.

Those kind of strategies are much more effective on adults than kids.

The standard tech schedule of ten to seven is insane IMO. Construction workers have it figured out, they work seven to three.

Who gets out of work less than an hour after the sun goes down in the winter?

From November to March, the sun is always down before I get out of work at 5. If I'm going to see the sun, it's in the morning before work.

That was sort of the parent's point: the sun is down for everyone leaving work in the winter. Moreover, it's surely been down for almost all of us for at least an hour, so an extra hour wouldn't really help.

It only wouldn't help for the two weeks before and after the winter solstice.

For me, it's dark by 5:30pm from about mid October (even with daylight savings) to the end of February. It's way more than two weeks.

And that's if you get out of work at 5 every day. Lots of us get out later (say, 6 or 6:30) and then have at least a half hour commute.

The only time I see the sun in winter is in the morning. With daylight savings in effect I lose that too. Those extra few weeks they tacked onto daylight savings at the end of October are dark and brutal.

Exactly.

Me too, which is why I'm asking. In fact, it's usually down by 4, and I typically get out at 6.

I'll take the welfare and educational benefits of children over your "precious few moments" thanks.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Would you please not create accounts to do that with?

If it's possible to change everybody's timezone twice a year, surely it's possible to leave most people alone and just change the school schedule.

The school schedule does not stand alone.

If you start school later then households where all parents are employed and the children are not old enough to handle getting ready and out the door in the morning on their own might need to have their work schedule pushed back.

If work schedules in general then get pushed back to accommodate the school schedule change, pretty much everything else follows because work is such a big and inflexible block of time on most people's schedules nearly everything else has to schedule around it.

What households would that be?

I took the bus to school, on my own, since day two of primary school. It wasn't hard, and I don't recall anyone ever getting lost. Even if they had, it's not the end of the world; they'll find their way back eventually.

It's a peculiar American-ism to assume that children are incapable of handling themselves, and one that's been repeatedly proven false.

You know that, and I know that, but god protect you from the busybodies and CPS if you treat your children like they arent completely incompetent and made out of glass.

Nowadays, that kind of "negligence" will get your children taken away and land you in jail.

That and other related/similar societal changes have me scared of having children. I would get locked up for spanking my kids' butt or letting them play outside or something like that.

It's staggering. My favorite is the people that call the police if parents leave teen-aged children in the car.

From about nine on, I used to beg to be allowed to sit in the car and read instead of getting dragged along through stores.

Recently a dad in BC let his kids take transit by themselves (after a lengthy period of testing before letting them journey on their own), he was banned from letting his kids take the bus.

http://bc.ctvnews.ca/mobile/dad-told-children-too-young-to-r...

I did not say anything about children getting lost on the way to school. I said "getting ready and out the door in the morning", which generally just concerns activities that take place in the home.

Children are not simply small humans, differing from adults only in size. There are significant cognitive differences between very young children and adult humans. They are not fully developed cognitively until the early 20s.

In particular, young children are not good at time management, balancing current actions against future consequences, anticipating and planning for how things could go wrong, and setting priorities.

Don't extrapolate the safety of the neighborhoods you lived in to the safety of all neighborhoods. There are some in my city that I don't feel safe walking alone in as an adult.

Stranger danger is less of a concern than traffic - car accidents are the leading cause of preventable death in children iirc.

it's only even somewhat recent america. in the 70s and 80s I walked to school or rode the bus, as did the hundreds/thousands of other kids in the district. no doubt some kids were personally drive, or carpooled with other families, but it was a rarity. the parking lots simply couldn't have accommodated dozens/hundreds of car dropoffs/pickups, and it didn't happen. i don't quite know when this started...

They manage in Saskatchewan. They do permanent DST and they're at a pretty high latitude.

Only the western half of Saskatchewan is on permanent DST, and that'd be the eastern bit of the Mountain time zone. Ask people in Grand Prairie, Alberta if they'd like to be in the same time as Saskatchewan and they'd think you were nuts.

Both of Sask's major cities in the region that is on permanent Central Time.

Maybe change school times? They finish before 4pm.