I keep missing the grandkids before bed

It is not really a time zone you are scheduling around. It is a bath.

There is a stretch after dinner and before the bath where a three-year-old will sit in front of a screen and talk to you. Before it, they are eating. After it, they are overtired and the call is twenty minutes of someone else's stressful evening.

The window is about twenty minutes long. It is in another country. And you keep landing just after it.

Why this is harder than a normal call

Three things make it awkward, and none of them is arithmetic.

The window is short and it belongs to somebody else. It is defined by a routine you are not in the room for, and it moves as the child grows.

You are calling into a busy moment. Whoever is running bedtime is managing a child, a bathroom and a schedule. A call that arrives at the wrong minute is not neutral — it costs them.

You will not be told. Same as calling elderly parents: nobody says "that was a bad time," because the call is welcome even when the timing is not.

Get the window explicitly, in your own time

Ask for it once, specifically, and write it down in your local time so you never have to convert in the moment:

"What's the twenty minutes that actually works? I'll call then and not other times."

Then put it in the calendar as a recurring event with both times in the title:

Call the girls — 11:40 my time / 18:40 theirs

The specificity is the gift here. "Call any time" sounds generous and produces exactly the mistimed calls you are trying to avoid.

Two or three fixed slots a week beats daily attempts

A predictable Tuesday and Saturday is worth more than seven attempts that mostly miss, for everyone involved. The parents can plan around it. The children start expecting it, which is when they actually engage with it.

The part that will break it: the clocks

This is the specific failure this scenario exists for.

Twice a year the clocks change — and if you and they are in different countries, not necessarily on the same weekend. The US switches on the second Sunday in March; the UK and EU wait until the last Sunday. In autumn the order reverses.

So for a couple of weeks each year, your carefully-found window is an hour out. An hour before bedtime is dinner. An hour after is a meltdown. Both feel to you like the routine changed and nobody told you.

If one side does not observe daylight saving at all — much of Asia, Arizona, Queensland — the shift lands entirely on the other side.

Check it in mid-March and late October. One message: "Have the clocks moved you? Is 18:40 still the right moment?"

And when you miss it anyway

Send a short video instead. A ninety-second clip of you saying goodnight gets watched at the right moment, more than once, and does not require anybody to be available. For small children it is often better than the live call.

Related: I keep calling my parents at the wrong hour · Sunday call, two countries

Figures on this page are computed from the IANA time zone database. Last generated 2026-08-18.