Helping Children Adapt to the Time Change in Travel

Children, like adults, often have trouble adjusting to time changes and jet lag when they travel across time zones. You can help regulate your child's internal clock by maintaining predictable schedules. Continuing to enforce daylight hours as awake time and associating night time with sleep, you can help your children adapt to a new time zone. Children are resilient so they usually bounce back and can continue with normal routines after a day or two.

  1. Encourage Daytime Physical Activity

    • Children will sleep when they are tired, so encourage plenty of physical exercise during daylight hours to help them fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer at night. Getting your children out in the sun and fresh air during the day and making their bedrooms as dark as possible at night helps their internal rhythms adjust, according to the Sleep Tight Consultants website. As a result, they wake and sleep during appropriate hours in the new time zone.

    Meals and Drinks

    • Help your children adjust to a time change by eating meals at the appropriate time in your new time zone. For example, hold off on eating dinner until it's dinnertime at your new destination. You might need to give your kids a light snack to tide them over, but avoid eating your main meal too early or too late in the day. Eat light lunches and avoid sugary foods or drinks that could result in unwanted sleepiness.

    Naps

    • Your children might have trouble sleeping the first couple of nights and crave a big nap during the day. To help them adapt to a new time zone, don't let them sleep beyond their normal at-home nap time. This will help them feel sleepy when bedtime rolls around. If your children take a regularly scheduled nap, don't skip it while you are on vacation. Otherwise, they might feel overly tired and get grouchy. Maintaining normal napping schedules will likely make the time adjustment easier.

    Get on Local Time

    • Your children might be tired after a long day of travel and a short night of sleep, but you must wake them up at a normal waking hour the following morning. The goal is to get them on local time, says pediatrician Gwenn Schurgin O'Keeffe on her website PediatricsNow.com. Your children will adjust more quickly if they eat, sleep and play according to their new local schedule. Even if it takes a day or two, your children won't suffer as they adjust to a new time zone.

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