Raise your hand if you’ve been personally victimized by daylight savings time.
I suspect a lot of you had a last 24 hours that looked pretty similar to mine with kids who normally wake up just fine struggling to get out of bed and whole morning and bedtime routines feeling unnecessarily harder than usual.
(As if I needed more proof that the government hates me and wants me dead.)
Twice a year we perform one of the oddest national rituals imaginable.
We change every clock in the house, lose an hour of sleep, throw our schedules out of rhythm, and then pretend like it’s no big deal. It’s actually crazy.
What makes it even weirder is that while most people think they know why we do it, few actually do.
You’ve probably heard this explanation your entire life: Daylight saving time was created to help farmers!
That story has been on repeat for generations. The only problem is that it isn’t true.
At all.
In fact, farmers were actually some of the loudest opponents of daylight saving time when it was introduced. And if you think about it for a minute, of course they were. Farmers don’t plant and harvest by the clock; they follow the sun and the seasons. Moving the clock forward or backward an hour doesn’t help a dairy cow who still expects to be milked when the sun comes up.
So what’s the real story? I’m glad you asked.
The real origin of daylight saving time has everything to do with war, and nothing to do with agriculture.
In 1918, in the middle of World War I, the United States adopted daylight saving time as a way to conserve fuel for the war effort. The theory was simple: if people woke up earlier relative to the sun, they would rely less on artificial lighting in the evening. Less lighting meant less electricity, and less electricity meant more coal and fuel available for factories and military operations.
It was a wartime conservation policy.
And when the war ended, Americans hated it so much that Congress repealed it almost immediately.
For a while the whole thing disappeared, except in scattered local experiments. Then it returned again during World War II under the name “War Time.” (At least they told the truth.) After the war it lingered in a confusing patchwork of local rules until the federal government standardized it nationwide in the 1960s.
And just like that, a temporary wartime policy became a permanent part of American life.
Benjamin Franklin is often credited with inventing daylight saving time. You’ll see his name attached to it in articles and trivia questions.
But Franklin wasn’t proposing a real policy. He was joking!
In 1784 he wrote a satirical essay suggesting Parisians could save money on candles if they woke up earlier to use the sunlight. His tongue-in-cheek suggestions included ringing church bells at sunrise and firing cannons to wake people up.
It was Franklin being Franklin.
Franklin was making fun of people who slept late. He wasn’t suggesting the government literally change the clocks!
But now here we are.
Poor Ben. I wonder if knowing his name is attached to this insanity keeps him from enjoying his eternal rest?
Griping about an hour of sleep lost sounds trivial until you look at what the research says actually happens next.
The shift disrupts our circadian rhythms—the biological clock that regulates sleep, hormones, metabolism, and brain function.
The consequences show up almost immediately.
Researchers have found:
A 24% increase in heart attacks on the Monday after the spring change.
An 8% rise in strokes in the days immediately following the time shift.
About a 6% increase in fatal car crashes in the week after the clocks move forward.
All from losing a single hour of sleep.
Even the economic impact is measurable. One estimate puts the yearly cost of sleep disruption and related health effects at hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S. alone.
Losing just one hour of sleep might not sound like much, but when it happens all at once across an entire population, the effects are actually very real.
(Parents don’t need a study to confirm this—they can see it at breakfast the day after the change.)
We actually touch on this in a Tuttle Twins TV episode where the twins learn about daylight saving time and start asking questions about where it came from. It’s a fun little story, but the lesson behind it is much bigger than changing the clocks.
History is full of stuff like this.
Policies that started for one reason and are promised to be temporary but then become permanent (ahem Patriot Act), origin stories that get twisted over time, historical explanations that slowly drift away from the original facts and become something else entirely.
It’s no wonder so many people don’t know the true story of so many things!
If something as small as daylight saving time can turn into a widely repeated myth about helping farmers, it raises some pretty important questions.
I mean, what other stories about American history aren’t really the true story at all?
Asking questions like this is exactly what led to the creation of our America’s History books and curriculum.
The goal isn’t just to teach kids dates and names, it’s to help them understand how history actually applies to real life—how incentives shape decisions, how policies evolve over time, and how the story we’re told sometimes isn’t actually the real story at all.
We set out to give parents resources to help their kids learn from the past—not just about the past. Something no other curriculum does.
Because once kids learn where they came from, they start seeing the world a little differently.
They see that even something as simple as changing the clocks can open the door to a much bigger conversation, and a much better understanding of why the world around them looks the way it does.
And once they start thinking like that, they’re pretty unstoppable.
And raising a generation of empowered, intelligent, unstoppable kids is just about the best use of time and resources any adult can commit. I know you agree, because I see it in the way you’re raising your kids.
Thanks for letting us help in the vital work you’re doing.
We’re actually changing the world.
— Connor
