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Navigating the Clock Changes

Posted by Chris McFadden - The Daddy Sleep Consultant on 19th Oct 2020

Navigating the Clock Changes

This week’s blog post is from The Daddy Sleep Consultant who discusses how to manage the clocks going back at the weekend. As any parent having gone through daylight saving with a young baby or toddler will tell you, that one hour difference can disrupt your carefully cultivated sleep routine. We will be teaming up with The Daddy Sleep Consultant across our social media channels in the coming weeks offering advice on all things sleep, helping you get the best nights sleep for baby (and you).

Do you remember the days when the clocks going back in Autumn meant another lazy hour in bed on a Sunday morning? You might have had that extra drink the night before, safe in the knowledge you could sleep it off.

As soon as you become a parent those days are long gone! That blissful hour is replaced by the confusion of how you manage your child’s bedtime routine with the least disruption.

So what do us parents do to ensure that our little ones aren’t waking up even earlier than they normally do? There are two options: one is a bit more progressive and in-keeping with their routine; the other is a bit more of a “crash course” approach. Both work, they just have a different journey in getting there.

Let’s look at the progressive approach first (based on a 7am-7pm routine):

  • On the Wednesday night before the clock change, start adjusting bedtime by 10mins later than normal.
  • Repeat this on Thursday and Friday so that on Friday night, your baby’s bedtime is 30mins later than normal, i.e. 7.30pm.
  • If they wake a little later in the mornings, that is fine.
  • On the Saturday before the clock change, try to keep them awake until 1 hour after their normal bedtime routine, i.e. 8pm.
  • On Sunday morning, they should then wake around 7am as normal, even with the clock change.
  • On Sunday night, put your little one down at the normal routine time.

Now for the crash course:

  • Continue with the normal routine until the Saturday before the clocks change.
  • On the Saturday night, try to keep your little one up a full hour past bedtime (you could let them sleep a little longer in their daytime nap).
  • If they wake an hour before the normal time, leave them in the room if they are settled - they may drop back off to sleep.
  • Over the next couple of days, they should re-adjust to waking at 7am.

My eldest always fell into the “crash course” approach as he was a good sleeper during the night most of the time, but the progressive approach may be better for little ones who are a bit more sensitive to routine changes. Either way, it’s extremely important to not let clock changes allow your child to slip into bad habits which you will still be trying to resolve when the clocks go forward in Spring!