Tides generate high frequency variability in eulerian habitat conditions, making it difficult to apply traditional habitat suitability models for estuarine organisms. Thus, scientists are often faced with ambiguity when trying to understand and optimize habitat restoration actions for various estuarine taxon. This is especially true of tidal wetland fishes which are the subject of worldwide restoration action. Decades of research on this taxon have provided key insights into their life history, namely the preferential use of shallow habitat (e.g., 0.4 – 1.4 m) to mediate predation risks and enhance nursery function. Unfortunately, little progress has been made transforming this conceptual understanding into actionable insights. We sought to address this knowledge gap by leveraging behavioral tendencies (e.g., intertidal migration) along with simple input parameters (e.g., tidal elevation and land surface elevation) to quantify dynamic habitat conditions. This approach allowed us to estimate the availability and accessibility of shallow rearing habitat across high frequency units of space and time. We also generated a series of habitat opportunity metrics (e.g., extent, duration, and rate of change in rearing habitat), inspired by the burgeoning field of functional flows in river science. As a case study, we compared our habitat metrics across two restored tidal wetlands with disparate morphologies but adjacent geographic locations. Our results suggest that the presumed positive correlation between shallow habitat and rearing function may be violated when restoration designs lack hydraulic scaling relationships (e.g., dendritic channel networks) often present in natural wetlands. Although fluvial and tidal systems vary in many respects, both possess cyclical environmental cycles (annual versus tidal) which can help reveal important functional relationships between the movement of water and habitat for native aquatic organisms.