Preparing for Daylight Savings Time
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It is that time of the year that every parent dreads.
Yes, the time is changing soon. We will be losing an hour of the day, and that means that you’re going to have to deal with wonky sleep schedules as you try to get your kids up on time to go to school. Daylight savings time can mess up even the best sleeper and throw that schedule that you have perfected completely out of control. Be prepared for daylight savings time by making adjustments in the week leading up to it.
For those parents that live in areas that don’t do daylight savings time, we’re all jealous. While it’s hard enough as an adult to adjust your sleep schedule accordingly, it’s even harder to adjust a child’s sleep schedule. It’s especially hard to do so over the course of a single night. You at least understand what the change in clock is - your child has no concept of what’s going on other than their internal clock is now off.
Daylight savings time will hopefully go away completely at some point. While it was introduced at a time when electricity was scarce, it no longer makes sense in our modern world to try to save time/electricity by changing the clocks to maximize daylight. In this day and age, it doesn’t really matter much whether the sun is up or not - the time will be used accordingly. The time really needs to be kept the same.
However, while it’s still here, we have to deal with it. As such, you should do what you can to prepare for it now. Don’t wait until the day of or the days after to try to implement the change. You’ll quickly find that it doesn’t work well. If you have kids that go to school the next day, or that you have to get out the door to daycare (since you have work), having them sleep in too long will make the days really hard.
Instead of waiting until daylight savings time starts, you should plan to start the week before and start putting your kids to bed 10 to 15 minutes earlier each day (and getting them up 10 to 15 minutes earlier each day). This will be much easier for your kids to go to sleep at night when they’re only going to bed 10 minutes earlier than normal, rather than a full 60 minutes earlier than they’re used to.
We run this same schedule every year when daylight savings begins, and it goes quite smoothly every year. Before we were doing this, our oldest son was simply trying to deal with an hour change in sleep and it didn’t go well. Add on to that that we were also tired as parents from losing an hour of sleep and things simply didn’t go well. Everyone was tired and no one was dealing with it very well.
Unfortunately, there’s really nothing you can do about daylight savings time outside of moving to somewhere that doesn’t follow the changing of the clock. While it’s probably not worth moving just for that, you do need a good strategy for dealing with it. It’s tough as a parent, and we totally get that. Don’t leave the change until the day of daylight savings time and you’ll find that the transition is much smoother.
Get out ahead of daylight savings time this year and start transitioning your sleep schedule the week before.
