Skip to main content

Tips for keeping baby on a sleep schedule with the fall time change

All parents know that we don’t gain an hour of sleep like everyone else with the time change — our kids get us up no matter what. With the delicate balance of baby sleep schedules, the fall time change can be a nightmare for parents struggling to establish a routine, especially given how tough it is to get babies on a good sleep schedule in the first place. However, don’t worry about “fall back” too much. It may take a few days, but your baby will adjust to the change and everything will return to normal soon enough. These tips will help get you there with some extra confidence.

baby on back sleeping

Accept that adjustment will take time

Babies can take several days and sometimes more than a week to fully adjust, so go into the fall time change with realistic expectations. A gradual shift will be easiest on all of you to avoid freak-outs around changing a baby sleep schedule by a full hour, so this will take some time, but that’s OK. You’ll have the time change behind you before you know it.

Related Videos

Get blackout curtains

If you don’t already have a pitch-black room for sleep, consider getting blackout curtains now so that your baby is less able to tell that the sun has come up. This will help with their confusion about wake-ups and bedtimes looking different with more or less sunlight. Open the curtains when you wake them up to orient them to the time, but for going to sleep and staying asleep, eliminate the sunlight cues.

Start early

If you have a well-established sleep routine with an older baby, you don’t necessarily have to do anything to prepare for the shift. However, if your baby has a difficult relationship with sleep or is a young infant, prep ahead of time to make the transition smoother. Starting up about one week before the time change day, push bedtime later by 5-15 minutes every 1-3 days. If you can manage 5 minutes every day or one 15-minute change every three days, your baby will barely notice the smooth transition. Feel free to do this even with a champion sleeper if you’re feeling nervous about the time change.

Use incremental change

Whether you start the day after the change or days before, use incremental changes of 30 minutes or less to bedtimes and naptimes. Even though we are “falling back” an hour, that actually means you have to push bedtime and naptime forward an hour to make up for it. If you didn’t start incremental changes before the change day, the easiest way to do it is to move bedtime forward by half an hour on the change day and use that bedtime for 2-3 days before moving it forward the second half-hour to complete the adjustment. Moving bedtime a whole hour at once is less likely to be successful.

Baby girl sleeping in a bed

Adjust the whole daily schedule

Bedtime isn’t the only part of your daily schedule that needs to be moved–naptimes, mealtimes, and everything else need to shift as well. If your child wakes up an hour early (actually the same time but now an hour earlier on the clock), have them wait an extra 30 minutes before getting to their first naptime and keep pushing them longer on all parts of the day until they’ve adjusted. It’s best not to eliminate any naps, just move their timing. Keeping the routines the same but with the time change is best. Routines staying constant will help the return to stability.

Don’t make any other changes

Keep the whole bedtime routine the same throughout. This isn’t the time to move out of your room, change a bedtime routine element, wean from breastmilk, or graduate from a crib to a toddler bed. There’s enough change already happening without adding anything else.

Baby sleep with a fall time change can be stressful, but just remember to take it minute by minute and day by day to make a gradual shift. Anticipating it with apprehension doesn’t help anybody, so just remember these small adjustments will all even out sooner rather than later. Some babies even adjust absolutely fine without any incremental changes and only take a couple of days to completely adjust. Like with all things parenting, take a deep breath and do your best while trying not to worry too much.

Editors' Recommendations

Need advice on parenting teens? Get support from these Facebook groups just for you
The best Facebook groups for parenting teens advice
A parent and teen talking.

Parenting teens can be a challenge, but doing it with the support of other parents can make it easier. These Facebook groups are places to find advice and support from other parents of teens as sounding boards to help you figure out the dilemmas that come up, like discipline, body image issues, dating and sex, and building trust.

Moms of Teens Support Group
This group is exclusively for moms, while others are open to all parents, caregivers, educators, and others. Get support, trade advice, or just vent about how parenting a teenager is going.
Parenting in a Tech World
Teens finding information, strangers, bullies, or all manner of things online is a concern for any parent in the modern age. This group of over 288,000 parents discusses issues of social media, screen time, online safety, and more about parenting in a tech world.
Parents of Teens with Depression, Anxiety and OCD
From 2016 to 2019, 5.8 million teens had anxiety and 2.7 million had depression, and those numbers have been increasing since. Supporting your teen's mental health is a special skill that can take an emotional toll and takes work to find a delicate balance of how to approach. This group of over 25,000 parents can help you find support in a safe space.
Raising Teenage Boys Is HARD!!
No matter their gender, raising teenagers is hard, but there are special challenges that come along with raising teen boys. This group, run by Teen Thrive, is for those raising teenage boys and looking for advice about puberty, communication, substance use, dating, bullying, internet and gaming device use, and mental health.
Raising Teenage Girls Is HARD! Parenting Teens Support Group by Teen Thrive
The sister group to the one above and also run by Teen Thrive, this group is all about raising teen girls. Issues like menstruation, mental health, dating, academics, body image and self-confidence, and peer pressure can all be discussed with over 35,000 other parents here.
Teenager parenting (Raising teens)
With hundreds of new posts every month, this group is a teen parenting haven. You can read through what others ask to get ideas on how to handle what's to come, give advice to others if you've been in their shoes, and ask your own questions about how to handle your own struggles with your teenager.

Read more
What is normal teen sexual behavior? We’ve got answers to help you understand your teenager
Read this to find out if your teen's sexual behavior is "normal"
Two teenagers on a date outside

What can parents actually expect when their kids turn into teens and start exploring their sexuality? It can be an uncomfortable subject, but being educated about typical sexual development and what your teen may be hearing from their peers is important to make sure you can talk openly with your child about protection, consent, risk reduction, and other issues.
Teens will be talking about sex and exploring this new part of their lives eventually and it's perfectly natural. Having your head in the sand won't make it go away, so the information below will prepare you with information to tackle this new stage of parenting.

Puberty
The onset of puberty is what can start the beginning of this stage of life for teens, but it doesn't mean they're ready for sex; just that they may start experiencing sexual thoughts like crushes or urges like feeling aroused. On average, puberty begins between ages 8 and 14.

Read more
Going through the IVF process? Here’s what to expect
Ready for the IVF process? The steps and expectations from start to finish
A woman undergoing an ultrasound

Because of modern science, the birds and the bees aren’t precisely what they used to be. The rise of assisted reproductive technology (ART) has given parents ways of conceiving besides intercourse.

More than 8 million babies have been born via in vitro fertilization (IVF) since its inception in 1978 and 2018. In 2019, more than 83,000 babies were born via ART, according to CDC data. It’s unclear how many of those were from the IVF process, but the CDC notes it’s the most common form of ART.

Read more