Clock change 'stops outdoor play'

[xchrom]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15646812

Not putting the clocks back would help in the fight against child obesity, a study suggests.

According to research, children are more influenced by daylight than the weather when deciding whether or not to play outside.

UK researchers report that not changing the clocks would give more opportunities for active play.

It strengthens the public health arguments for proposed changes to daylight saving, they say.

[LeftishBrit]

1. Interesting, and sounds plausible

Probably not just the children's choice, but parents worry much more about their child playing out when it's dark.

I'm reminded of the old nursery rhyme:

'Boys and girls come out to play.
The moon does shine as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your sleep,
And join your playfellows in the street.'

But few parents would encourage this nowadays!

[xchrom]

2. i can't remember the last time i heard or read that rhyme.

and some great illustrations that went w/ that & the land of nod.

[Silent3]

3. We're back on Standard Time now...

If people don't the amount of daylight leftover at the end of the school day or work day during Standard Time, SCHEDULE EVERYTHING AN HOUR EARLIER.

If you want year-round Daylight Saving Time, what you're essentially saying is that you think midnight should be 1AM and noon should be at 1PM. Permanently shifting an hour forward is like pretending to live one timezone west of where you really are. It's like deciding since you don't like how much you weigh that you're going to lose weight by changing the numbers on your scale.

[truedelphi]

4. Very good points, except that when someone screws around with their

Weight scale settings, no one's life is altered by having car accidents become more prevalent for a full 48 hours.

[Lex]

7. People get off work at 5pm, generally. It's dark by then.

Hours are just agreed upon measures anyway. If we agree that it's daylight savings time all year around and then call it "standard time", nothing scientifically changes in the least.

[Silent3]

8. But why 5:00 PM?

If we always want more daylight at the end of the work day, year round, why not work 8-4 instead of 9-5?

Work/school hours and the way we number the hours are both matters of tradition. The traditional idea that 12:00 noon is roughly when the sun is highest in the sky makes a lot more sense to me than deciding that 4:00 PM is for some reason simply "too early" to go home, but that if you shift the clock around and call the same very time of day 5:00 PM, it's no longer "too early".

To the extent that Daylight Saving Time makes any sense at all (I'd rather get rid of it myself), playing around with the clock does make some sense because it would be much more complicated to change agreed-upon work hours, school hours, store hours, bus schedules, etc., back and forth twice per year. If we decide, however, that we always want to go home with more daylight at the end of the day all year round, it's the already somewhat arbitrary schedules themselves which are wrong, not the way the hours are numbered on the clock.

[astral]

5. yeah it seem silly to me to have DST.

Why do we need the extra light in the morning? We would make more use of it after work, for the majority of us that are daytime people.

[Silent3]

6. The daylight we have now is what you get by NOT messing with the clocks.

We just went back to NOT adding an extra hour of daylight in the evening. Turning the clocks back isn't for the purpose of adding more light in the morning, it's just the end result of ending Daylight Saving Time and returning to Standard Time.

[area51]

9. Time changes

How about if we stop bouncing back and forth between the two time changes, pick one, and just stick with it? No more BS.