Daylight Saving Time and Toddler Sleep

Starting four to six days beforehand, move the whole day — wake-up, meals, naps, and bedtime — by ten to fifteen minutes in the direction the clocks are going. By the time the change lands, your child is most of the way there and Sunday is unremarkable.

This is the better option for children who are sensitive to schedule changes, which mostly means younger toddlers and anyone whose sleep is currently fragile.

Switch the clocks, run the normal routine at the new times, and let the body clock catch up over three to five days. For a lot of children, particularly over three, this is genuinely fine and saves a week of managing.

If you take this route, be strict about the wake-up time for those few days — that's the anchor the rest of the day hangs from.

• Clocks forward (losing an hour): bedtime feels early and mornings are dark. Get bright light in the morning, and expect a few nights of not being ready to sleep. Usually the easier one.
• Clocks back (gaining an hour): you get the 5am wake-up. Blackout curtains matter enormously here, and it's worth pushing bedtime later in small steps rather than accepting a permanent early start.

Light does more to move a body clock than schedule discipline does. Bright morning light — outside if possible, curtains wide open if not — pulls the clock earlier. A dim house in the last hour before bed pushes it later. Point both at whichever direction you're trying to go.

Whatever the clock says, the sequence shouldn't change. The order of the routine and the story at the end of it are the cues your child actually reads; keeping them identical during a week when the light is wrong is what stops the change turning into a month-long problem.