Should We Stop Changing the Clocks? It’s About More Than Convenience

The main reason governments consider ending the twice-yearly clock change is simple: many people dislike it. But “ending clock changes” is not one policy. The real question is which time we keep - and that choice has consequences for sleep, safety, schools, work, and daily life.

There are three broad approaches:

• Keep changing the clocks: Move forward in spring and back in autumn, as most of Canada currently does.

• Permanent daylight saving time: Keep the summer clock year-round. Evenings stay lighter, but winter mornings become darker.

• Permanent standard time: Keep the winter clock year-round. Mornings are lighter and better aligned with the body’s natural rhythms, but summer evenings are darker earlier.

People value different things: more daylight after work, brighter mornings for children travelling to school, fewer disruptions, and potential effects on sleep and health. That is why this debate is harder than it first appears.

Why Provinces Are Moving

British Columbia has adopted permanent year-round daylight saving time, calling the new arrangement “Pacific time.” The province says the goals are to improve overall health, reduce disruption for families, simplify scheduling, and provide an extra hour of evening light during winter.

Manitoba has also announced that it will remain on daylight saving time permanently, beginning November 1, 2026. Its government framed the decision as a response to public views on seasonal time changes.

Parts of northwestern Ontario - communities west of the 90th meridian, including Kenora and parts of the Rainy River district, are expected to align with Manitoba by not falling back on November 1, 2026. Ontario says the purpose is to avoid disruption for businesses, families, and Indigenous communities in the central time zone.

There is a reasonable case for these changes. Permanent daylight time can mean:

• More usable daylight after the workday and school day.

• Fewer twice-yearly disruptions to routines, appointments, shift schedules, and technology.

• Greater consistency across provincial and regional borders for travel, commerce, and health care.

• A response to clear public frustration with the current system.

In other words, provinces are not acting arbitrarily. They are prioritizing evening light, convenience, continuity, and public preference.

The Concerns We Should Not Skip

But convenience is not the same as health. Canadian researchers have argued that permanent standard time is better aligned with the body's natural circadian rhythms, which are strongly influenced by morning light and evening darkness. Their analysis highlights Canada's northern latitude and the potential consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including darker winter mornings and possible effects on sleep and health [8].

Permanent daylight saving time raises several concerns:

• Darker winter mornings. Children may travel to school, and many more adults may begin work before sunrise for longer stretches of winter. [1, 6]

• Sleep and circadian alignment. Later winter sunrises can make it harder for people—especially adolescents, shift workers, and early risers - to wake, function, and fall asleep on a healthy schedule. [1, 2]

• Winter road conditions. Permanent daylight saving time would mean later sunrises, placing more commuters, school buses, pedestrians, and cyclists on the road in darkness during winter. Morning sunlight can help reveal hazards and may help warm or dry road surfaces; with more people travelling before sunrise, snow, slush, and black ice could become harder to detect. A recent Canadian Medical Association Journal analysis notes that permanent daylight time would leave more Canadians commuting to school and work in darkness during the coldest months, and recommends monitoring injuries and other health outcomes if jurisdictions adopt it. [1, 6, 7].

• Road and pedestrian safety. Darker mornings can affect visibility for young pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and school-bus routes. [1, 3]

• Equity. The benefits and burdens are not evenly distributed. Outdoor workers, rural commuters, parents of young children, and people with early start times may experience the trade-offs differently.

• Regional fragmentation. If provinces and regions adopt different systems, Canada could end up with a patchwork of time rules. That may create confusion for businesses, families, broadcasters, transportation, and cross-border coordination.

• Oversimplified health claims. It would be misleading to say permanent daylight time is either clearly harmful or clearly beneficial in every respect. A recent systematic review found that the evidence is limited and mixed: spring transitions have been associated with short-term increases in heart attacks and fatal traffic crashes, while some outcomes differ depending on the transition, season, and population studied. [3]

That last point matters. The strongest consensus among sleep researchers is not simply “daylight saving time is bad.” It is that seasonal switching carries costs, and that permanent standard time is the option most consistent with human biology.

The road-safety evidence is also more nuanced than headlines sometimes suggest. Canadian research has found a short-term increase in collisions following the spring clock change, while broader reviews find mixed results on whether shifting light from morning to evening improves or worsens overall road safety. That uncertainty is exactly why jurisdictions considering a change should monitor real-world outcomes rather than assume either a benefit or a harm

What We Should Measure Going Forward

If provinces move to permanent daylight saving time, they should not treat the decision as finished. They should commit to gathering evidence afterward, especially on how darker winter mornings affect students, families, and workers.

School boards, public-health units, and provincial ministries could track:

• Absenteeism and late arrivals, particularly during the darkest weeks of winter.

• Student alertness, fatigue, and well-being, using anonymous staff, parent, and student feedback.

• Traffic and pedestrian safety around schools, bus stops, and rural routes.

• Winter road-safety data, including collisions during morning and afternoon commuting periods, pedestrian and cyclist incidents, school-zone incidents, and crashes involving snow, slush, or ice.

• Effects on adolescents, whose sleep patterns already shift later and who may be especially vulnerable to early, dark morning commutes.

• Impacts on shift workers, outdoor workers, and families with early childcare or work routines.

This matters because school timing and light exposure are not minor details. Research on later school start times has found associations with better attendance, less tardiness, improved sleep, and stronger academic outcomes; conversely, permanent daylight saving time can push more students into pre-sunrise travel during winter. [4, 5]

A recent Canadian analysis also recommended that jurisdictions choosing permanent daylight time should evaluate the change and monitor possible effects on schooling outcomes, particularly for adolescents. [1, 7]

In practical terms, that could mean a scheduled review after one or two winters: comparing attendance, punctuality, incident reports, and wellbeing data before and after the change, while paying particular attention to rural and northern communities where sunrise arrives later.

My View

Ending the clock changes may make life simpler. It may also give people more evening daylight, reduce disruption, and respond to a widely shared frustration.

But simplicity alone does not tell us which time best protects sleep, safety, learning, mental health, and daily functioning. If provinces move to permanent daylight saving time, we should build in a commitment to measure the results - absenteeism, late arrivals, safety, sleep, and student well-being - rather than assuming the benefits will outweigh the costs.

That is the part worth examining carefully.

References

Here are the core references with the links embedded directly in the titles:

1. Canadian Medical Association Journal, Analysis of health impacts associated with adopting permanent standard time or permanent daylight saving time to inform policy in Canada

2. Sleep Research Society, It Is Time to Abolish the Clock Change and Adopt Permanent Standard Time

3. Systematic Review, Daylight-Saving Time and Health: Beneficial and Adverse Effects

4. Implications of Sleep Health Policy: Daylight Saving and School Start Times

5. Middle School Start Times and Young Adolescent Sleep, Behaviour, and Outcomes

6. Permanent Daylight Saving Time and Dark Morning School Commutes

7. Canadian Analysis: Clocks Stay in Daylight Saving, but Evidence Backs Permanent Standard Time

8. De Koninck, J., Nixon, A., & Godbout, R. (2024). The practice of Daylight Saving Time in Canada: Its suitability with respect to sleep and circadian rhythms. Canadian Journal of Public Health.

Before Everyone Runs Out the Door… One question. One connection.

Years ago, someone shared a simple family tradition with me that I’ve never forgotten.

Every morning, before everyone heads out the door, each person answers one question:

“What is one thing you’re looking forward to today?”

Everyone answers.

Not just the kids.

The adults too.

Maybe it’s something at school. Maybe it’s seeing a friend. Maybe it’s a meeting. Maybe it’s recess.

Then everyone heads out the door.

But the conversation doesn’t end there.

At dinner, they ask the follow-up:

“How did that thing you were looking forward to go?”

Maybe it went wonderfully. Maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe it was a complete disaster.

And that’s okay.

Everything is on the table.

I love this simple tradition because it isn’t really about the question.

It’s about what the question creates. It creates a reason to talk.

It tells children:

What happens in your day matters to me.

Research on parent-child conversations about setbacks gives us a reason to think about this. In a study of 231 mother-child pairs, researchers found that when mothers acknowledged their children’s emotions and discussed ways to work collaboratively on future problems, this was associated with less fear of making mistakes in children. [1]

But there is another piece of this that I think is especially important.

Children are watching us.

If we expect children to be able to say:

“That didn’t go the way I hoped.”

“I made a mistake.”

“I’m disappointed.”

“I don’t know what to do next.”

Then perhaps they need to see that we can say those things too.

Not because children need to carry our adult problems. They don’t. But because they need to know that being human isn’t the same thing as being perfect.

Research on parental emotion socialization has found that the ways parents respond to, discuss, and express emotions are connected with children’s emotional and social development. [2]

Additional research by Haimovitz and Dweck found that parents’ views of failure were related to their children’s developing beliefs about learning and intelligence. In other words, children notice how we think and talk about failure. [3]

That matters.

Because I don’t want children to grow up believing that success means never getting it wrong.

Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we don’t know. Sometimes we have to try again. And sometimes the thing we were looking forward to doesn’t turn out the way we imagined.

That’s life.

Our job isn’t to remove every disappointment. It’s to help children know that they can move through it.

And perhaps that’s what I love most about this family’s morning question. It starts before anything has gone wrong and creates connection when things are good.

And then, when the day doesn’t go according to plan, there is already a pathway back to the conversation.

“Tell me about it.”

No fixing. No judgment. No pretending. Just a family making room for the good, the hard, the unexpected, and everything in between.

So, as families head out the door for a new school year, perhaps try one simple question:

“What’s one thing you’re looking forward to today?” And then remember to ask about it later.

Because sometimes one small question can become a much bigger conversation.

A little research behind this idea

[1] Peterson, E. R., Sharma, T., Bird, A., Henderson, A. M. E., Ramgopal, V., Reese, E., & Morton, S. M. B. (2024). How mothers talk to their children about failure, mistakes and setbacks is related to their children’s fear of failure. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), 124–142. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12685 (PubMed Central (PMC))

[2] Eisenberg, N., Cumberland, A., & Spinrad, T. L. (1998). Parental socialization of emotion. Psychological Inquiry, 9(4), 241–273. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI0904_1 (PubMed)

[3] Haimovitz, K., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Parents’ views of failure predict children’s fixed and growth intelligence mind-sets. Psychological Science, 27(6), 859–869. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616639727 (Association for Psychological Science)

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Why Student Well-Being Must Move from ‘Add-On’ to Core Practice in Schools

This article was also published on LInkedIn, authored by Lynn McLaughlin.

Introduction

Across classrooms worldwide, educators are asking: "How do we help children not just succeed academically, but thrive as human beings?"

The evidence is clear - student well-being is not a “nice-to-have,” add on to the curriculum, it’s essential. This research study is one of many I have posted on my website.

What the Research Shows

A systematic review and meta-analysis by Cipriano et al. (2023) analyzed dozens of school-based SEL programs. The findings are powerful:

💥 Universal programs boost student outcomes in social-emotional skills, behavior, and even academics.

💥 Benefits are long-lasting, when SEL is built into the culture of a school.

💥 Results are strongest when programs are delivered with fidelity - meaning staff are well-trained and supported.

What Needs to Be Done

The researchers are clear about the steps forward:

1. Adopt evidence-based SEL universally - every student should have access, not just those already struggling.

2. Invest in teacher training and coaching - give educators tools, strategies, and ongoing support.

3. Measure outcomes and fidelity - track both student progress and how well programs are being delivered.

4. Embed SEL into school culture - policies, daily routines, staff meetings, and classroom practices.

SEL must move from being a weekly “add-on” lesson to the foundation of how schools operate.

Why This Matters

When children learn to regulate emotions, problem-solve, and build relationships, everything else improves. The shift is about cultivating a whole-school culture of well-being.

💥 Classrooms are calmer.

💥 Teachers can focus more on learning.

💥 Students gain the resilience and empathy they need for life beyond school.

This isn’t just about education - it’s about preparing the next generation to navigate challenges with strength and compassion.

Conclusion

In my own work, I’ve seen how proactive schools that make well-being the priority transform classrooms and children.

The research confirms what many of us know: well-being is the foundation for learning. We have decades of evidence through peer reviewed, published research studies to supportmy quest to have it embedded in every curriculum.

Reference: The state of evidence for social and emotional learning: A contemporary meta-analysis of universal school-based SEL interventions. Child Development. 2023 Sep-Oct; 94