It won’t be long before we’re setting the clocks back. Daylight Saving Time ends in the predawn hours of Sunday, November 5. There’s no shortage of advice on how to prepare kids for the loss of an hour of sleep that accompanies the “spring forward” in March, but a Northern Virginia pediatrician says there are things you can do to smooth next month’s transition as well.
Dr. Florencia Segura, a pediatrician and the mother of an infant, a 3-year-old, and a 4-year-old, says the shock to the schedule depends largely on age: “In general, small kids will struggle more with falling back in the fall. Teenagers will actually benefit from the falling back; they will struggle with the springing ahead.”
For older kids and teenagers, standard time is “like a nice reset,” says Segura, who practices in Vienna and is one of Northern Virginia Magazine‘s top doctors. “This is actually a good opportunity to get them to get to sleep a little bit earlier.” She added that a full adjustment can take a week or two, according to different sleep experts, “but for some people, it actually ends up helping.”
The problem, in a nutshell: Smaller children don’t really understand the concept of an extra hour of sleep. “They wake up when their body wakes up,” Segura says, so going back to bed isn’t really something they can do.
Solutions for Smaller Kids
She says there are three schools of thought on what to do about the fall time change.
The first one: Get ahead of it. Two or three days before the Saturday night/Sunday morning when the time changes, “start making adjustments to keep your kids up later.”
When you know the clocks are going to move by an hour, it’s tempting to make a one-hour change. That’s not practical, though, so Segura suggests making a half-hour change.
“So if your child normally sleeps 7 p.m. to 6 a.m., the three days before [the end of] daylight savings, move it back to 7:30.” Then bring bedtime back to 7 p.m. on the new standard time. “That tends to work better for kids who are not napping anymore, or kids who have one nap, because there are fewer variables.” She doesn’t advise this for parents of a young baby who takes multiple naps.
The other two solutions stem from the philosophy she follows with her own kids: “I don’t mess with daylight savings until daylight savings.” She waits until the time has changed, then makes the 30-minute move in the opposite direction.
Her own baby’s first nap is typically at 9 a.m. “They aren’t going to be able to make it to 9 a.m. [standard time], because they woke up an hour earlier. I’m going to put them down at 8:30 because their body thinks it’s 9:30. And you’re going to do that with all of the naps. And then at 7 p.m., that’s their bedtime, you’re going to put them to get to bed at 6:30 because their body thinks it feels like it’s 7:30.” Then four or five days later — on the Thursday or Friday after the falling back — move bedtime back to the regular 7 p.m., she says.
The third option is to do nothing: “This works best for kids, or adults, who are more ‘go with the flow.’ I also advise this for parents with newborns or very young babies, zero to 4 or 5 months, where there’s just so many naps … I think it’s just better just to kind of go with the flow.”
Segura says these are simpler solutions than what the old-school advice has recommended: “There’s a lot of different methods out there that are like, ‘You’ll prep for a whole week, and you’ll move everything up by 15 minutes for a week.’ And I don’t know a single parent who has been able to do that.”
Feature image, stock.adobe.com
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