Shifting Your Baby's Bedtime for Daylight Savings: A Comprehensive Guide

It feels like every year I am caught unawares by Daylight Savings, despite it being one of my favourite times of year! It's the marker of long sunny evenings in the park and beautiful warm days. Who wouldn't be looking forward to that?

Well, it can also mean having to figure out how to transition your baby's sleep schedule to a whole new time zone. It may not seem like a big deal to others, but we know that an hour shift in baby sleep land is HUGE. Especially if you've done all hard work to stick to sleep schedules and keep your baby's sleep routine consistent—the thought of all that work unraveling at the hands of a clock change is a waking (pardon the pun) nightmare.

Luckily, I'm ahead of the curve this year, and I'm here to share my Daylight Savings sleep guide with you!

How to adjust your baby's sleep for the Daylight Savings time change

Here is a little cheat sheet if you want to wean into Daylight Savings with your little one’s sleep. This coming Sunday, our clocks will be moving forward an hour. Remember: Spring forward, Fall back.

From Wednesday night, start slowly shifting your baby’s schedule forward to help them gradually get used to the change. This means pushing bedtime, nap times and meal times forward by 15 minutes each day.

If you make this gradual incremental shift over the week, by the time the clock change happens Sunday night, your baby will have already adjusted to their daily routine happening (technically) an hour earlier—meaning that you can continue your usual routine as it always was.

Don't stress if you forget

I never stress too much about making the change. Ideally you would make the shift proactively, but if you're like me and forget until the night it's happening, you can always just do it retroactively in the days following by shifting their bedtime backwards by 15 minutes, instead of forwards.

Now bring on the sunshiney, warm evenings!