Dealing with Sleep and Daylight Savings
It’s time to “fall back”. We will be setting our clocks back one hour on Sunday November 4th. As adults, we love “falling back” because we get an extra hour of sleep. However, our little ones don’t feel the same! If your baby or child normally wakes up at 7 am, he or she will now be up at 6 am and no one wants to get up any earlier. Here are some great tips on how to help your child adjust to the time change and get back to his or her normal schedule.
When dealing with the time change, the best way to handle it is to “split the difference”.
If for example your little one usually takes a morning nap around 9:30, you will adjust this to 9:00 am for the 3 days after the time change. It will be a bit of a push for your child, but not so much that it will cause much damage to his or her schedule. Do the same for the afternoon nap.
Let’s say your child usually goes to bed at 7 PM, I recommend putting that child to bed at 6:30 PM for the first 3 days following the time change. (This will FEEL like 7:30 to your child.) And it will take about a week for your child’s body to get used to this. It takes everybody’s body roughly one week to adjust any kind of change in sleeping habits.
If you have children over the age of two, you can put a digital clock in the room and put a piece of tape over the minute numerals, so that they can see if it is 6 o’clock or 7 o’clock, but they cannot see the minutes, which often confuses toddlers. I would just set the clock forward half an hour so that at 6:30, it reads 7:00 and I would let them get up a little earlier than normal, knowing that by the end of the week, they would be back on track and sleep until their normal wakeup time.
If you are dealing with a baby, you cannot do that. Do not rush in as soon as you hear your baby waking up, because you do not want to send a message that getting up at 6 a.m. is okay now. So if she normally wakes at 7:00am, but is now up at 6:00, you will wait till ten minutes after on the first day, and then twenty after the next, then 6:30 the next day and, by the end of the week, your baby’s schedule should be adjusted to the new time and waking up at their usual hour.
On the 4th night, just get in line with the new time. So your baby is back to going to bed when the clock says 7:00 pm, and adjust naps to the correct time on day 4 as well.
If you have any questions about how to make this adjustment, please email me at leslie@akissgoodnight.ca.
Sleep Well,
Leslie
