Hi, this is Linda owner of Sleep Tight Consultants. Today on the Sleepy Qs podcast, we’re going to be talking about the beginning of daylight savings, or as some refer to it as springing forward and what this has to do with your child’s sleep and how to make the adjustments so that everything goes smoothly.
Before we get into our topic today, please don’t forget to leave your five-star review and share with us what you love about this podcast so that we can continue making these episodes for everybody’s enjoyment and education.
Time changes in general, tend to really send parents into a panic. The good news is, is that this is the time change that once you’re a parent, you really like. So before you had children, this is the one you may have dreaded. You’re probably realizing, Oh, we got one less hour of sleep tonight. And it means that come Monday, everyone’s going to be a little bit more tired for work because it’s going to feel like it’s an hour earlier.
Your child may sleep in for a bit
However, this is the good one when it comes to children, because what this means is that your child who may wake up a little bit earlier now sleeps a little bit later in the morning or the clock tells you that it’s later. I feel like every year parents are all up in arms about the time change, and there’s some push to lobby legislatures in different cities and states to eliminate the time change because it is sort of an old fashion relic from the past having to do with farmers and daylight. And really none of that applies so much anymore now that we have electricity, nonetheless, the time change remains.
This time change is also good news because that means that we will have more daylight in the evenings. It makes things less depressing. It’s an indication that spring and summer on the way, and that always tends to feel a little bit better than the other one where it’s now getting dark at four o’clock in the afternoon. And it just feels cold and gray, especially here in Chicago.
If you’re the parents of young children having one less hour in the day is often very helpful. This can be particularly the case if you have a child who isn’t a very good napper and by bedtime, they tend to be very, very tired and probably rather cranky. Now I’ll be honest, anybody who has worked with me knows that I find time changes. Very confusing. And quite honestly, it hurts my brain to be figuring out, you know, Oh, what direction are you supposed to go in here? What direction do you go there? Suffice it to say,that you are springing forward, which means that early in the morning, come Sunday, March 14th in the year 2021. That’s where we’re going to be moving the clock forward. Now really what’s probably going to happen is that you’re probably going to be moving the clock forward before you go to bed at bedtime on Saturday night, March 13th. Children tend to adjust pretty well to the time change, usually within a few days, things are pretty straightened out. But like I was saying before, this one tends to be the better one, tends to make things go a little bit more smoothly when children aren’t waking up earlier in the day, they’re actually waking up a little bit later.
Can take up to a week to adjust
That being said, it can still sometimes take up to a week for things to straighten out. And I usually say anything that happens that feels kind of off. If anybody feels kind of grumpy or seems just a little bit moodier in that first week after the time change, just blame it on the time change.
Dark room helps
A couple of things to keep in mind about this change. In particular, you want to make sure that your child’s room is really dark. I usually say on a scale from one to 10, probably somewhere around an 8. And that’s because as we move into spring and summer, the sun’s going to start to go down later which may mean that your child just has a harder time falling asleep because it’s brighter in their room. For toddlers or school children they tend to protest a little bit more when it’s still light outside, because they say well, but the sun is still out. It’s not bedtime. And they don’t necessarily realize that the time when the sun goes down and changes throughout the year, but they still need the same amount of sleep. You want to make their room pretty dark so that it’s easier for them to fall asleep at bedtime. And also ensuring that their room is dark, especially in the early morning when now the sun starts coming up earlier. And in certain places, the sun can be up at, you know, as early as five o’clock. If you live in the Northwest, the sun might actually not even go down until 10 o’clock at night might be back up again at four. So making sure that your child’s room is very dark, is really going to be very helpful, especially in the early morning. When your body is exposed to light, it stops producing melatonin. That’s that hormone that. Causes us to fall asleep and stay asleep. And that is where children start waking up much earlier when now the light streams in, in the morning.
I tend to get pretty crazy flurry of emails from all of my families, in the springtime when all of a sudden children are waking earlier. And the first question I always ask is, is your child’s room truly dark in the early morning.
Continue to be consistent
Also important is that when the time changes, if your child does wake up for any particular reason that you want to continue to respond to them in the same way for night wakenings that you always have, that doesn’t change even though the time adjustment happened.
Time changes are going to have a bigger impact on younger children than they are going to on older children. In fact, for me now that my kids are older, I really find that it has very little effect on them. And it does become something that I definitely do not obsess over quite as much.
Things to keep in mind, you’re going to be changing your clock on Saturday night before you go to sleep. And now when your child wakes up in the morning, it’s now an hour later, which is a good thing. Like I was saying before, if your child tends to wake up in the 5 o’clock hour, now it’s 6. And so you want to keep that later, wake up happening, by continuing to push all of those awake windows so that they’re the same as they were before, but hopefully bedtime can be a little bit later without your child now being overtired. If you go back and listen to the podcast episode about early rising, one of the primary causes of this is when children are overtired at bedtime. So you can use the time change to shift their schedule just a little bit later in the day, which then can prevent that over tiredness at bedtime.
Nap transition points
For many children, if they’re on the verge of a nap transition, this is going to be a day where now they’re probably going to have less naps rather than more. So for instance, if your child’s going from three naps to two and some days are still three nap days, and other days are two nap days with one less hour in the day. It’s probably gonna be a two nap day. If your child’s going from two naps to one, also waking up later in the morning can make it really hard to get that morning nap in. And so now it’s probably gonna be a one nap day.
If your child is no longer napping, what was once 7:00 PM is now 8:00 PM. So if your child usually goes to bed at eight and they aren’t quite ready at seven, or what feels like seven, but really it still says eight o’clock. You might find that you can split the difference and aim for 7:30 on the first day. And then after that, then you’ll be back to eight o’clock from there.
If you want to things on exactly the same schedule as before and not use this time change to push things a little bit later, you can wake your child at their normal wake up time in the new time comes Sunday morning. So what this means is say your child normally wakes up at seven, but now it’s an hour later on that Sunday morning. So instead of it being seven on the clock it now says eight o’clock. And so you can wake them an hour earlier at their usual wake-up time. So now they continue to wake up at seven o’clock. Even though it’s going to feel like six o’clock in their body, and then you go forward from there on the schedule that they normally sleep on prior to the time change.
Adjusting ahead of time
If you really, really want to prepare ahead of time, you can adjust your child’s schedule 15 minutes earlier, starting four days before the time change and everyday shifting it another 15 minutes and another 15 minutes so that by the time you get to Sunday, they’re probably waking up around the same time that they usually do. So you would start this on Wednesday. I gotta be honest. I don’t really recommend that parents do this. I tend to be more from the camp that it works out better if you just change the time, Saturday night, and now Sunday, they wake up an hour later and it takes a day or so for their body to sort it out. But if all else fails, actually you may have a little bit of a later wake up and that’s not a bad thing.
Daycare
Other things to keep in mind, there are going to be instances where, your child’s schedule does go back very quickly to what they were doing before. So even if you want them to start to push things later, if your child goes to daycare, they’re not going to now put them down at one, even though that was 12 o’clock before they’re going to continue to put them down at 12 o’clock. And so that’s going to pretty quickly cause your child to go back to whatever their schedule was from before. So in that instance, it doesn’t help with that early rising adjustment quite so much but that’s one of those things that as you know, if your child is in daycare, you see this all the time. It is somewhat beyond your control.
I hope that the upcoming time change goes smoothly for everybody. Please let us know if you have any questions. And as I said earlier, be sure to write in your review and also send us any of your questions. We’re happy to answer questions about your child’s sleep, or if there’s a topic that you would like discussed, please feel free to fill out a contact form on our website at www.sleepqs.com. Thanks for listening in.
