Adjusting to the end of daylight saving

There is nothing more frustrating as a parent than when you finally manage to get your child into a great sleeping routine, they're waking at a respectable 7am, and then suddenly find that due to daylight savings your child's wake time suddenly becomes 6am! Naturopath Natasha Berman offers advice for getting kids used to the new routine.

A couple of years ago I received some great advice from a collegue of mine Katie Kilgore who runs Lil' Angels Consultancy Services (Practical parenting advice for babies and children 0-5).
When we used this technique on our son Eli our transition into daylight savings was a breeze.

• When daylight savings finishes, it pays to gradually get your baby accustomed to the new times over the few days before the change.
• As with anything, babies respond best to gradual changes, and you may find it takes up to a week before they settle right into the new times for feeding and sleeping.
• Begin on the Thursday before daylight savings finishes, so that you can gradually move their feeds and sleeps by 15 minutes a day rather than the whole hour at once.
• On the Thursday morning try to delay the first morning milk by 15 mins from when they would usually have it, and carry on with leaving everything 15 mins later (feeds and sleeps) for the whole day (Thursday).
• On Friday you would move everything by half an hour so the morning milk feed would be 7.30am .
• Saturday you would try to move everything by 45 mins, so if your baby usually has his milk at 7am, you would try and give it as close to 7.45am as possible. This way by Sunday morning, your baby will already be almost at the new times, and they only have another 15 mins to adjust by, instead of a whole hour.
• For some babies, even the 15 minutes extra stretch can prove difficult, for these babies, the whole process may just take a few days longer and you could adjust their routine by 10 mins a day instead.

Natasha Berman is a naturopath and mum to two sons. She is the managing director of qbaby. Read more at qbaby.co.nz and allergenicstesting.com.