Daylight Saving Time Is Back to Mess Up Your Kid's Schedule
ElenaNichizhenova/iStock- If you're like me, you have a hard time remembering when daylight saving time begins or ends, or whether you're supposed to move the clock forward or backward, or exactly what time the official switch happens and we're supposed to start fiddling with our clocks. So let me just help us all out here: Daylight saving begins this Sunday (at 2 a.m., so you might want to switch your clocks at bedtime on Saturday night). You move your clock forward one hour in the spring — spring forward — and unfortunately, lose an hour of sleep on Sunday morning. Unless you're a parent.
While those people without kids are simply planning to sleep in, we parents are steeling ourselves for a period of time in which our kids' schedules are totally disrupted. Because although we grown-ups can will ourselves into adjusting to the new regime pretty quickly, our kids may be slower to internalize the switch.
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How will we survive? And, oh yeah, how can we help them adjust?
In fact, child-sleep experts say it can take between 7 and 10 days for a kid to adjust when daylight saving time kicks in or comes to its annual abrupt halt: It can throw off kids' sleep and appetite and make them cranky, ill-behaved terrors. Which can make their parents cranky, ill-behaved terrors. (You know what I'm talking about.)
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Some experts advocate beginning to shift your child's schedule gradually, a few days before the change.
So if she usually goes down for a nap at noon, put her down a few minutes later each day for a few days before the scheduled clock shift. Then, when the shift back happens, it will be a bit easier.
I personally have always taken a hard-line approach, much the way I do when I travel to a different time zone.
I change my watch on the airplane and try not to do the local-time/my-time calculation in my head, but rather to live in the local-time moment from the second I get off the plane.
That means if my kids go to bed at 8 p.m. on Saturday night before the clocks change, they go to bed at 8 p.m. on Sunday night after they change.
It may take them a bit longer to fall asleep after they've been tucked in that first night. But eventually, they'll get with the program, just like the rest of us.
