How to keep your sleep with the time change

If this is your first fall-back time change with a baby, or you have parenting-induced amnesia about last year, here’s what’s going to happen:

This Saturday, the clocks turn back an hour, meaning your child’s perfectly great 7:30 bedtime is suddenly 6:30 p.m. the next day. After 1.5 seconds of celebrating that idea, your bubble bursts with the realization that they’ll also be waking up a whole hour earlier, which could be 6 a.m. Or maybe 5. Yuck.

But you can fight the time-change chaos! The key is to start early:

Starting the week ahead of time-change weekend, put your baby or young child to bed 10 or 15 minutes later than usual. Their bodies won’t usually notice a change that small. Then do the same thing two nights later, and two nights after that. If you do it gradually enough (and you’ve got solid blackout blinds in your child’s bedroom), their morning wakeup time should be moving a little later as well.

The idea is that by the time Sunday rolls around, your little one will already be on the new time (or only 15 minutes off) and not rearing to go when the clock shows 5:30 a.m.

If your child is already waking up too early in the morning, there are lots of things you can do to change that: you can book a free call with me any time to talk it through.