Uh - no. You don’t have to be there to ensure the kid gets on. You teach your kid how to be responsible and a good person so that they get on without you having to helicopter over them for everything.

What the F is wrong with Americans. Srsly.

What in the what?

I would wake up after my dad was gone for work, grab a pop-tart or cereal, take a ~1/4 mile walk outside to the bus stop, no longer able to see my house from the suburban sprawl, and hang out with the rest of the kids at my stop for 5-15 minutes before the bus showed up. Then I eventually got a car.

Don't get me wrong, if I was offered a ride (my parents, friends parents, friends with cars) I'd often take it. But ensuring I got on the bus? When the alternative was that my parents would get a phone call about me being missing? Trust that the lessons I'd get at school were far preferable to the lectures I'd get at home if I skipped class.

Where did you go to school where it was the norm for parents to always see their kids board the bus?

That's a fair point for kindergarteners, but by 1st or 2nd grade kids in my district walked to the bus stop on the corner all by themselves just fine. Also, my district had elementary school start the earliest (and middle/high school would start later) which for some reason is uncommon but makes a lot of sense for a whole bunch of reasons and would seem to mostly solve this problem for parents who need to walk their kindergartener to the bus stop before work.

Huh, interesting -- why doesn't California have school buses? I could imagine it might be hard/unsafe in dense urban areas like SF, but otherwise, why?

Could also be more of an urban/rural divide? I grew up in part of California without a "city bus" for hundreds of miles, and school bus usage was pretty widespread. Parents who dropped their kids off usually just did so because it happened to line up with their schedule.

Also your post was a weird reminder of how laisse-faire my own upbringing was, because I was biking to school across and along a state highway in fifth grade.

Every other state has figured out how to have school buses. maybe California should figure out how to rise to the standard of everywhere else instead of insisting that the whole country manipulate their clocks so you can take the extreme inefficiency of driving your kids to school.

I don't understand. If I'm at work, why would I care if it's light out or not? I'm not using that light for anything useful.

So you’re saying you’re fine with them leaving work in the evening in the dark, because that’s the trade-off. Not to mention your post-work leisure time will be in darkness.

You're going to work or at work, so it's irrelevant whether it's sunny outside or not. That hour of sun sitting in morning traffic is completely wasted.

Much better to have the hour of sun after work to do things outside.

I'd rather have all my sunlight at the tail end of the day where the time is all mine, vs having to waste some of it when I'm hustling to get breakfast together and get out of the house. Better for vitamin D deficiencies since I can now do something like an after work walk in the last hour of sunlight of the day vs coming home and it being dark already.

The good news is that there is always daylight every morning. The bad news is that some places have a few months between mornings.

From what I can tell most people do not do anything other than get ready for work in the morning. Yes, there are outliers like yourself who actually utilize that daylight, but that's the minority. Most people want a later sunset.

You wake up 2 hours earlier than the average American (which apparently is about 7:09am). Things aren't and shouldn't be optimized for your abnormal sleep pattern.

> If a kid has to suffer through getting up on 5 hours sleep they probably won't make that mistake again.

... I don't think you've met kids before. The vast majority absolutely won't learn.

> Living a larger part of the day in darkness isn't good for most people's happiness, energy use aside.

Standard time moves sunlight to the morning, when people are sleeping. Permanent DST should give people the same or more sunlight during their waking hours. You'd have the same amount, waking up at 5am and assuming you don't sleep until at least 8:30pm.

> No, learning to get up early forces kids to learn to go to bed on time, that's a valuable skill that teaches discipline. If a kid has to suffer through getting up on 5 hours sleep they probably won't make that mistake again.

You are arguing against many well-documented studies about what school hours work best for kids to learn. "on time" is entirely based on what time you need to get up. The whole point of moving school later is for "on time" to be compatible with the hours that kids are more functional. This is not a matter of discipline; deciding you're going to be up and functional earlier does not change your body or the sun's position in the sky to be compatible with that. (If you want to argue otherwise, argue in published studies refuting the ones that exist, not in replies to this comment.)

Move school hours to start several hours later than they currently do, and then by all means encourage the discipline of getting up in time for school.

In the northern latitudes where day length actually changes substantially nobody is doing that.

Seattle is so far north it’s hard for there to be much daylight no matter what you do with your clocks :/

I don't think I could roll my eyes any harder if I tried.

The demographic center of the US has drifted South over the past 50 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_center_of_the_United_Stat...

Or living in countries north of northern US states. They should come visit a higher latitude in winter

More Americans live South then 50 years ago :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_center_of_the_United_Stat...