Spring Ahead: Help Kids Adjust to Daylight Savings Time

This is an updated re-post of my popular Daylight Savings Post from last year. Get a jump on it, folks!

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On Sunday, March 10, the clocks will jump forward one hour for Daylight Savings Time. Without fail, this biannual clock-changing ritual cues a chorus of complaints from parents. For parents of babies, tots, and preschoolers, “springing forward” and “falling back” aren’t just hassles—changing the clock can quite literally can undo the hard work you’ve put into your child’s sleep routine.

Many moms and dads of young kids find that DST changes throw off kids’ bedtimes and naptimes. An hour’s worth of time change is a lot for little bodies to handle, and some particularly sensitive kids (or those who are already overtired or undertired to begin with) can take days—or weeks—to adapt.

Want to help your little one take the time change in stride? Here’s how to “spring forward” without missing a beat.

(For this example, I’ll use a 7 am wake-up and a 7 pm bedtime. I realize that many kids wake and go to bed at different times, so adjust as needed for your personal situation).

• When the clock moves forward in the spring, the most common complaint from parents is that kids won’t go to bed “on time.” It’s not hard to understand why: When the clock reads 8 pm, your child’s body thinks that it’s 7. When 9 or 10 pm rolls around and kids still aren’t tired, parents get understandably grumpy.

• The key to helping your child fall asleep at his normal time is waking him up earlier in the morning. See, if he sleeps until his body's regular wake-up time (say, 7 am) on clock-change day, the clock will read 8. If you try to put him to bed that night at 7 pm, his regular bedtime, only 11 hours have elapsed since he woke up, and he’s not likely to be tired enough to go to sleep. This is especially true if he slept a bit later than normal that morning. DST occurs on a weekend, so that’s not uncommon for parents to let their kids sleep later than normal. Sleeping in on weekends isn’t a big deal, but when you add the time change, things can quickly go awry.

• Beginning a couple of days before the change, start waking your child 30 minutes earlier in the morning, and putting her to bed 30 minutes earlier at night. Make corresponding adjustments to nap(s) by moving them 30 minutes earlier as well. In this example, that would mean waking your child at 6:30 am and putting her to bed at 6:30 pm.  It may sound extreme, but remember, it’s only for a couple of days.

• On the morning of DST, wake your child at his normal wakeup time. If he normally wakes at 7 am standard time, wake him at 7 daylight time. (This will actually be 6 am, according to his body clock, but you’ve prepped him for this change already with a couple days of early wake-ups.)

• Offer nap(s) at the normal times. No need to make adjustments here.

• Having woken up at 7 am, she’ll be ready for sleep at her normal bedtime. No DST adjustment required.

• If you’re starting last-minute and you don’t have time to prep your child a couple of days before the time change, no problem. Just remember to wake your child at his normal wake-up time on clock-change day. He will be tired, because he “lost” an hour of sleep. But he will be ready to snooze at his regular bedtime and you won’t have a wide-awake kid bouncing off the walls while you’re trying to watch Weekend Update on DVR.

Daylight Savings Time, done!

I’m a nationally published sleep expert, health journalist, and mom. My articles about sleep, health, and parenting appear regularly in over 80 national and regional magazines and on television. Can I help you? Subscribe to The Well Rested Family to have sleep news, tips, and tactics delivered to your inbox or feed reader by clicking here.

Need more sleep? My e-book Ready, Set, Sleep: 50 Ways to Help Your Child Sleep So You Can Sleep Too is chock-full of mom-tested solutions to help babies and toddlers start sleeping well, tonight!

My new e-book Sleep Tight, Every Night: Helping Toddlers & Preschoolers Sleep Well Without Tears, Tricks, or Tirades is available now!

Falling Back: Help Kids Adjust to Daylight Savings Time

Sunday, November 4 will be about more than football and political ads—it also marks the end of daylight savings time. In the weeks leading up to DST’s “spring forward” or “fall back” dates, I get lots of reader questions about prepping young children for the change.

Ideally, “fall back” day means you turn the clocks backwards and enjoy an extra hour of luxurious sleep—unless you happen to have young children, that is. Youngsters don’t have any clue (and don’t care a bit) that a clock change occurred.  Children’s bodies are sensitive to even small amounts of lost sleep, so the clock change can throw off their sleep routines for days, even weeks.

When clocks shift back in the fall, parents often complain that kids begin waking too early. It’s understandable; after all, when clocks move back, a child’s body clock says 7 a.m. when the actual clock says 6. That means he wakes up an hour before you’d like (and so do you).

The good news: the autumn “fall back” is a great opportunity to help reset the internal clock of a child who snoozes too late in the a.m. and fights bedtime at night (which is a pain if, like most of us, you have places to go in the morning and would like a bit of time to yourself in the evenings). That’s because on clock-change day and during the days that follow, your child’s body clock will be an hour ahead of the clock’s time (because you turned the clock back…still with me?). When your child’s body thinks it’s 9 a.m., the clock will read 8. If you do absolutely nothing, your child will naturally shift to an earlier wake time and an earlier bedtime.

What if you’re happy with the time your child currently gets up in the morning and conks out at night, and you’d like to keep the routine on track after the change? I can help.

The key to helping your child fall asleep and wake up at his normal time is keeping him up later at night; that is, gradually moving his bedtime one hour later over the course of a few days. Why does this work? For this example, I’ll use a 7 p.m. bedtime and a 7 a.m. wake-up time. After the clock change, you want a child who used to wake at 7 to continue waking at 7, which requires a shift to a bedtime and wake-up time that is one hour later that normal (say, 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.). That way, when you wind the clock back, your child’s 7 a.m. bedtime and 7 a.m. wake time are magically preserved. Voila!

Don’t try to shift your child’s bedtime later in one day—do it over three to four days, in 15 to 20-minute chunks. If you only have two days, you can make the change in two 30-minute chunks, but beware overtiredness, especially in young babies and toddlers. Another tip: keep your focus on bedtime without worrying too much about wake-up time. As your child adjusts to a later bedtime, his wake-up time will naturally sort itself out by moving later too. Don’t you love it when that happens?

I’m a nationally published sleep expert, health journalist, and mom. My articles about sleep and health appear regularly in over 80 national and regional magazines and on television. Can I help you? Subscribe to The Well Rested Family to have sleep news, tips, and tactics delivered to your inbox or feed reader by clicking here.

Need more sleep? My e-book Ready, Set, Sleep: 50 Ways to Help Your Child Sleep So You Can Sleep Too is chock-full of mom-tested solutions to help babies and toddlers start sleeping well, tonight!