ELI5: Why do we have daylight saving time?

We have daylight saving time so that we can steal an hour of sunshine from the early morning and move it to the evening when we are awake to enjoy it.

Imagine you have a cozy blanket, but your toes are sticking out at the bottom. If you pull the blanket down to warm your toes, your shoulders get cold. The blanket didn't actually get any bigger; you just shifted where it covers you.

The sun works the same way during the year:

• In the summer, the sun rises very early in the morning, often while you are still sleeping in bed.
• Most people don't need sunshine at five o'clock in the morning because their eyes are closed and they are having sweet dreams.
• By changing the clocks forward by one hour in the spring, we trick ourselves into waking up earlier.
• This move shifts that extra morning sunlight to the end of the day.

When autumn arrives, the days naturally get shorter and colder. We turn the clocks back by one hour to return to standard time. This gives us that stolen hour back in the morning, making it safer and brighter when you wake up and travel to school, even though it means the sun will go down much earlier in the evening.