Who actually benefits from changing the clocks?

[shockwaze]

Kids up at 5:30. Pretty sure that the same thing has happened in many, many houses this morning.

It's just an hour, but so disruptive to children.

Who benefits? Winds me up every year.

They can’t be managing on Mainland Europe because even though most of it is along the same longitude as the U.K., their clocks are an hour ahead of ours all the time. So our GMT is their BST, and their BST is our BST+1. In addition, being south of us, their latitude position means that their range of daylight to nighttime hours is more stable than ours…in the same way Scotland’s is more extreme than Southern England’s.

The experiment you remember at the end of the sixties was BST all year round, not GMT. That's why it was so much darker in the winter mornings.

If we had GMT all year round then summer sunrises would be at an ungodly hour of the morning when the daylight would benefit nobody except the presenters of breakfast TV. By switching to BST we get that daylight in the evenings when many more people can enjoy or make use of it.

Scottish kids Benefit

Most of Europe isn't focused on the little darlings being driven round the corner in case they get wet or cold walking (there was a parent at the primary school my children attended who drove her children from the next street).

Where I live in Scotland it's dark in afternoon and then dark getting up, bits of extra light help but it wreaks havoc on my body.

I never understand this angst about children waking early. They should be just told to go back to bed - that’s what we did with ours. If they’re bored, tough shit - read a book, think of a story, count your times tables. Just be quiet until mummy and daddy are ready to get up.

Well people in the south would. Here in Scotland we'd still have lovely light evenings...

Ds's school finished at 1615 ( he's at university now) and dd3's school finishes at 1600.

State schools ?

Yeah an 18 month old really gets that.... no. They sit in their cots and scream.

It's light until 10pm with BST midsummer in the South, so it would be 9pm GMT
Hardly plunged into darkness!

Plus we have much nicer weather so we enjoy the outdoors more sitting drinking our Pimms

It's more the mornings are so light so early,no-one wants to be awake at 3am

All up at 5:30 in our house too, actually 5am for me today. It's half term for us, and I am off work, so we should all be having lovely lazy mornings!!

06:04 this morning, less grumpy, but only slightly.

How are the super mums today?

I was on a scout camp at the weekend. Had 37 of them awake at 5am. Made it a very very long day!

Oh no what sadist planned that camp ? In other news jaydog slept till 6.50 feel quire refreshed this morning 😄

Isn’t 6am a perfectly normal time for children to wake up?
my eldest was an early riser, 5ish every day for about 8 years. My youngest is a sleeper and is still asleep now (given the eldest I don’t take her for granted at all!) so I have no knowledge of what is actually the norm. But I’d assume somewhere between the two which is 6am ish?

They will be at 7 by the weekend or is that pushing it 😄

My second ds is 9 months. I spent 6 months waking at 5am. He finally shifted to a 6:30 wake up. The last three mornings have been 5/5:30 again. I'm shattered. DH and I will be back to taking turns at the weekend to let the other sleep in.

It's not really the summer as much as the "shoulder" seasons. If clocks went forward at the beginning of March, it would be light until 7pm and currently we have more light in April in the evenings as a result of putting the clocks forward. And the fact that they don't go back until the end of October means we have light until 6pm (where I live, you might get even more benefit in other areas).

It isn't that relevant in May/June/July when the evenings are long anyway.

No, but they still have to make their way home

Yes, also this, there is no point having daylight at 3am when you could have it at 8pm. Most people benefit more from having it in the evening.

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, northern parts of Germany....? Yes they maybe be an hour ahead but it's still largely dark and often murky when they're walking to school at 7.30 in winter. Many of them start school at 8am.

Thank you, I understand latitude and longitude. In Oslo for example within the next ten days or so sunrise won't be until 8.16 (just checked). In Stockholm by mid December it's 8.40 ish . I know it's not "mainland" but in Reykjavik already the sun isn't riding until after 9am.

But again they have better systems for "crocodiles" and supervised walking and often better planning for pedestrians.

93% of children attend state schools. I think it's reasonable to arrange society around them rather than the 7% who choose to pay for longer school days.

Evening is evening and morning is morning regardless what position the hands on the clock are pointing to.

It's utterly absurd that just because the clock says it's too early you'd complain about the sun being up and wasted/of no benefit.