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“Relapsing” can’t be a bad thing, right? However, for someone with children, the time change can be an unwanted challenge.

While some people are looking forward to an extra hour of sleep this weekend, many new parents are concerned about how this change will affect their baby’s sleep schedule.

The clocks will “fall back” to standard time by one hour at 2 a.m. on November 3. On March 9, 2025, most clocks in the United States and many other parts of the world will move forward one hour and stay that way for eight months. enter a different period of daylight saving time.

The current system we follow, of “jumping forward” in March and “falling back” in November, was officially implemented in the US in 2007, but we have been “saving daylight” since World War I.

The legal introduction of daylight saving time was largely due to the reliance on trains for transportation and development. It was adopted in Europe and the U.S. after the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first U.S. regulatory agency, raised coordination issues regarding the amount of power and fuel trains used during certain parts of the year, according to the Bureau of Transportation . Statistics.

At the time, it was believed that daylight saving time would help save fuel, but today many believe the shift is necessary to save energy.

There are at least two important components that determine sleep: a stable sleep rhythm and the production of melatonin.

The homeostatic process is a self-regulating mechanism that our body uses to maintain stability, such as building sleep pressure. It can take a whole day for adults to build up enough sleep, but babies may only need to be awake for an hour or two before falling asleep.

The circadian rhythm is our body’s internal clock that maintains behavior and physiology in accordance with our environment. This invisible clock explains why we feel more energetic during the day and tired at night.

“During the day when we wake up, there will be a lot of sunlight, which suppresses the release of melatonin,” says Dr. Raj Dasgupta, Associate Program Director of Internal Medicine Residency at Huntington Memorial Hospital.. “It gets dark earlier at night, so it would give us a chance to release that melatonin and really get our 24-hour solar day more in line with our circadian rhythm.”

This process can begin to manifest in babies around 2 to 3 months old, but it can take more than a year for them to fully develop their circadian rhythm, according to the BC Children’s Hospital in Canada.

Because their circadian rhythm is still developing, babies and young children wake up earlier in the first few days after the time change in November.

You may be worried about how to transition your baby or child to the time change in one day, but don’t worry. It’s never too late to start.

One method parents can follow in helping their child adjust to the time change is to gradually push back the family schedule by fifteen to twenty minutes each evening leading up to the time change. You can also use this method in the days after the time change if you haven’t gotten around to it beforehand.

Additionally, you can take advantage of the circadian rhythm by leaving the lights on longer in the evening and waiting for them to come on in the morning.

If these hacks don’t work, don’t worry. Even if you don’t follow a transition process, children should obviously adapt to the change within one to two weeks.

Sleep is individual to the person, Dasgupta said, and every child will respond differently to the change, so it’s important to keep your schedules flexible and give your kids options during this time.

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