Warm weather is on its way, which I’m always most excited about. So, how do you manage daylight savings in the spring while balancing ensuring that your child doesn’t have total sleep derailment and can adhere to a new sleep schedule?
First things first, take a deep breath. I see a lot of different blogs and Facebook posts about daylight savings. And parents get very nervous that things are all of a sudden going to go awry for months and months and months.
In this video and below in the post, I explain to process for adjusting sleep with Daylight Savings and Sample Schedules to Balance based on your child’s age:
The first thing that I’ll tell you is there are two schools of thought around the adjustment for daylight savings, there’s going to be the team pre-daylight savings, who adjust everything before the big day happens so that when the big day happens, everything is aligned, then you have team actual daylight savings, meaning that they don’t do anything until that Sunday when they wake up in the morning to a ‘new time.’
That is the team that I’m on. One, I don’t feel it’s necessary to cause undue stress for several days leading up to daylight savings, it can cause increased anxiety in parents, really just trying to plan for something that hasn’t even happened yet. Let it happen, it’s much easier to conform, especially because your body clock is aligned with the sun. So what you’re going to do is the morning of daylight savings, your little one is now going to be springing forward.
So let’s assume that they used to get up at 7 am in the morning. It is now according to the clock 8 am. And what you don’t want to do as a parent is permanently adjust their entire schedule to an 8 am to 8 pm type of sleep schedule. And if you keep the schedule aligned exactly as it is now, but just adjust for daylight savings, that’s exactly what you’re gonna do. I encourage parents to go around the entire house and adjust the clocks. From there, you’re going to start to adjust maps by splitting the difference, and here is just how to do it.
Sample Sleep Schedules for Daylight Savings Time in the Spring:
So what it looks like is for the next three to four days, you keep with this new adjusted schedule, essentially splitting the difference between what the original time was and what the new time is, in order to balance out and slowly adjust the body clock. What happens is after three to four days, you want to go back to your original time and you will be in great shape with a lot more sun and warmth in your day!
If you continue to struggle, join my Free Sleep Community on Facebook, where every Tuesday, I host a Live Sleep Q&A!
