Daylight Savings Changes

It is the end of summer again, which means it will soon be the end of daylight savings too and time to put the clock back an hour.

But what does that mean for your child’s sleep? Don’t worry, it doesn’t need to interfere with all of the hard work you have done!

Your baby’s 7pm bedtime doesn’t need to be 6pm, and their 5:30am wake up doesn’t have to be a terrifying 4:30am!

Babies’ biological rhythms are set by food, light and social interaction, so by using these three elements, you have two options to solve the problem. This is what you can do to:

The aim is to move your child’s sleep, food and social interactions forward in small increments of time over the period of a week.

You can do this either the week before daylight savings ends, or afterwards.

To help your child cope with the change, distract them with quiet cuddles or fun games. It also helps to be in the sunlight first thing in the morning and late in the afternoon.

You will need to work on re-settling to encourage these adjustments, they are unlikely to automatically happen. 

If you need a re-settling technique, try our online sleep program.

These tables assume that your child is on a 7am-7pm schedule. If that’s not the case, adjust it to suit.

If you start the week before daylight savings ends:

If your child was previously a much too early riser, the time change can be a blessing in disguise.

Because there is now an extra hour to re-settle your child from 5-7am, you will be far more likely to be able to move the wake up time to 7am than you would have been with the previous 1-hour window.

If you need help with an early wake up, try our master class and join hundreds of other mums who have successfully solved their early wake up!

If you have the opposite problem, and your child’s bedtime was too late, an extra early bedtime will help them to go to sleep and sleep more soundly.

Watch the Instagram Video on this daylight savings topic.