We gain an hour’s sleep when the clocks go back at 2am on Sunday 31st October, which is great for us, but not so great when our little ones wake at 5am or earlier! This can be a challenge at both ends of the night as you try to keep your tired child up the night before, and then struggle with an early wake. This is how you can adjust their body clock in advance, based on a 7pm-7am sleep to wake cycle (adjust accordingly for your child’s routine):
1. On Wednesday, move your whole bedtime routine 15 mins later (from bath time – not just lights off) so that bedtime is 7.15pm.
2. To make this easier for your baby or toddler (the younger the baby, the less flexibility with awake windows before getting overtired) you can try to elongate one of their naps by 15 mins or, if you have an older child, they should just be able to manage to stay up slightly later.
3. On Thursday, if you’re waking your baby or toddler, leave them until 7.15/20am. If they wake earlier (which would be more common!), see if you can delay getting them up if content or delay first morning light exposure a little longer, and then begin your day aiming for all timings to shift by 15 mins. Otherwise, stretch them a little between naps to help make up the difference.
4. If you don’t have one already and your child is 2 or older, you could introduce something like a Gro Clock or timed lamp earlier in the October month, so that they know when it’s time to get up, and then you can adjust the time it comes on in the morning by 15 mins to encourage them to stay in bed. N.B. Turn the display setting to ‘0’ to remove the blue glow across the night as this inhibits melatonin.
5. Feeds and mealtimes help to set our body clocks too, so if you normally do breakfast at 8am, do it at 8.15am instead. Again, if your child naps, try to adjust these timings so that bedtime can shift by another 15 mins to 7.30pm. If your child is in full time day care with fixed timings, start this process on Friday evening instead, and then it will just take a bit longer to adjust after the clocks go back.
6. On Friday, use the same approach so that bedtime is around 7.45pm.
7. On Saturday, use the same approach so that bedtime is around 8pm.
8. When the clocks go back at 2am on Sunday, you should find that your child wakes closer to their normal time. Then continue the day in the new time zone. It might then take a few days after this for your child’s body clock to fully settle into the change.
Troubleshooting:
- Do make sure the room where your child sleeps is fully blacked out so that early light doesn’t affect their wake-up time
- Give your child lots of active play each day, as well as time outside in the late afternoon – this will help to regulate their body clock and promote good night time sleep.
- Once the clocks have changed, if your child is still waking earlier than normal, aim to keep night conditions until it’s a more reasonable time, and avoid shifting their morning milk/drink and breakfast forwards, as this is likely to create an early-morning learned hunger issue.
- With younger babies, you may find it more manageable to shift their timings more gradually over a longer period before the clocks change, shifting bedtime by 15 mins every 2 or 3 days, or doing 10 min increments across the week from Monday instead.
