Transitioning Out of Daylight Savings Time In A New Way (This Sunday!)

The end of daylight savings time in the United States happens this coming Sunday at 2 am.

I’ve always recommended that parents start, ideally, transitioning their kids four days ahead of the end of daylight savings time. The challenge is that it’s complicated to remember to transition all naps, meals and bedtime every day for 4 days in a row.

So here’s a different approach, presented to me by fellow sleep consultant, Nichole Levy. She says that day-by-day approaches rarely work because children simply don’t notice and accommodate gradual changes. She prefers to either a) do nothing and just go by the new times when Sunday rolls around, b) split the transition over 2 days (half an hour per day), or c) put your child to bed at the regular time on Saturday but then wait until the new, correct time the following day to get them up. So most likely, your child will wait an hour for you to show up.

This was an interesting perspective for me. I have always recommended the 4-day approach to families: move bedtime, morning wake time, and nap times later by 15 minutes per day. If you start on Monday, you have 6 days to make the change so you have a couple days of padding, just in case.

But in practice, I rarely remembered to actually make the change gradually with my own children. Best case scenario, I remembered one day in advance and was able to spread it out over a day, and then I treated Sunday as a transition day so really, Monday was the first day the time change was imposed.

And everyone knows how good the Monday after the time change feels.

Now we live in Mexico and as of a year ago, Mexico abolished daylight savings time. This is definitely the ideal way to handle daylight savings – just don’t do it.

If you have to change time zones, let me know what strategy you choose and how it goes!

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