Jet Lag: Baby and Toddler Basics
I think I’ll just nap on this uncomfortable chair.
Here’s the short solution to dealing with baby and toddler jet lag:
- Plan for about an hour per day to adjust to the new time zone, especially if you’re traveling from west to east.
- Use the sleeplessness of international travel to your advantage, especially if you’re traveling from east to west.
- If your time difference is short (less than +/- 3 hours) and you’re only traveling for a few days, consider staying on your home time zone.
This is how you deal with it:
- Take in lots of sunshine and outdoor playtime when you want baby to be wake.
- Use blackout curtains or find a way to safely darken the room for night sleep.
- Keep your nap schedule at roughly the same intervals as at home based on baby’s wake-up time.
- For east to west, stretch awake intervals as long as you can without baby getting over tired.
- For west to east, shorten awake intervals as much as you can. You could eliminate your toddler’s daily nap to shorten the day (works best for west to east travel). Only do this if they sometimes go all day without a nap and sleep fine at night.
- Make sure everyone eats and drinks as much as they can.
- If you’re nursing, nurse as much and as often as your nursling wants.
Here’s the long story:
Jet lag + babies = baaaaaarf. Dealing with jet lag has not been my favorite part of international travel. However, east to west is much, much easier than west to east. Here are some examples of my successes and failures. Please let me be an example to you.
Toronto –> Los Angeles. Three hour time difference, east to west. 6 months old and 8 months old. Miles woke up at 3:30 a.m. the day after we arrived instead of 6:30 a.m. I made the intervals between his three naps as long as they could be to get to a normal 7:30 p.m. bedtime by the next day. Winner winner, chicken dinner.
Prague –> Denver. Eight hour time difference, east to west. 12 months old. We landed at 11:00 p.m. in Denver, and it took us a while to find our hotel. We had three flights that day and no parental sleep, so there was some tension/pea-brained-ness as we were driving around. We finally went to “sleep” at 2:00 a.m. I knew that Miles was really tired from the long day, that it was dark outside, and that the sun would rise in a few hours. So I decided that we would all just have a super duper short night and wake up for the day whenever Miles woke up from that sleep (which was really just a long nap). He woke up at 5:30 a.m., and we began our day. This worked great! He took two naps in the car that day, and then we put him to sleep for the night at around 6:00 p.m. It only took two days to get to the normal 7:30 p.m. bedtime. Mom wins again!
Los Angeles –> Edinburgh. Eight hour time difference, west to east. 13 months old. West to east is the worst. The day shrinks, and it’s really tough (impossible) to make a young child go to sleep earlier than when their bodies are not yet telling them that it’s time to sleep. There is a whole series of cascading functions in our bodies which say, “It’s nighttime. I should sleep,” as opposed to taking a very long nap.
Our plane landed in Edinburgh at about 10:00 a.m. local time, so 2:00 a.m. in our heads. The adult way of handling jet lag is to stay awake, drink coffee, not nap, and go to bed once the sun goes down (like 9:30 p.m.). The baby way of handling this is to conk out in the cab ride to the flat and wake up at about 12 noon (previous 4 a.m.). Fine. We all ate lunch at about 1:00 p.m. (5:00 a.m.). Miles took a short afternoon nap in the carrier at about 2:30 p.m. (morning nap, silly Mommy), and I thought that perhaps we were on track to just use the momentum of being super tired to take us to a new schedule right away. He was in the middle of transitioning to one nap in California. I thought we were in great shape. Ah ha ha ha ha. Ha. Ha ha ha. Aaah. Sigh. Anyway, Ian had a dinner planned with his students for 7:00 p.m. Miles was motoring around the restaurant, using his new walking legs and having a grand time. Until he MELTED THE EFF DOWN. Ian took him outside to try and calm him for a bit so that I could have a break, and Ian used every method to try and contact me until his phone died. People on the street were staring and eye-shaming. Miles was screeeeeeeeaming. Once Miles calmed a little bit, Ian gave me Miles, I nursed him for two seconds, and then he passed out on my lap in the middle of an Indian restaurant. I put him in the carrier, took him to our flat, and put him to bed. I got myself ready for bed, and snuggled in….
MOM FAIL.
Miles woke up five hours later, at midnight (4:00 p.m.), ready to play. And you can guess what happened next. I fed him dinner at 2:00 a.m. (6:00 p.m.) and put him to bed at 3:30 a.m. (7:30 p.m.) This whole middle-of-the-night dinner thing slowly shifted to a normal, actual 6:00 p.m. time over, bingo bango, eight days.
It did not work for us to skip over this adjustment and wake up Miles earlier in the morning. He just got overtired, took long naps, and wanted dinner in the middle of the night again.
Have questions about baby and toddler jet lag? Leave them in the comments!