Every autumn, the UK puts its clocks back an hour. For most famililies, it means a slightly groggy Monday and a few days of confusion before things settle. For us, it means something quite different.
One Hour Can Upend Everything
You might think that one hour wouldn't matter much. But when you're parenting a child whose sense of safety is deeply anchored in rhythm and predictability, even a small shift in the light—in when morning feels like morning—can be destabilising in ways that are hard to explain to people who haven't lived it.
Our son doesn't just notice the change. He feels it in his body. The darkness that arrives at teatime instead of bedtime. The morning light that no longer lines up with when he needs to wake. The way the whole world seems slightly out of sync with his internal clock.
The Anxiety Before the Anxiety
One thing we've learned over the years is that the anticipation of change is often harder than the change itself. So now, in the week before the clocks go back, we start talking about it gently. Not as a warning, not as a list of rules—just as something we notice together.
"The evenings are getting darker, aren't they?" is less demanding than "Remember, the clocks change on Sunday and bedtime will feel different."
Framing it as something we observe together, rather than something that's about to happen to him, takes a little of the edge off.
What Actually Helps Us
Over time we've found a few things that genuinely ease the transition. We shift mealtimes and wind-down routines by fifteen minutes every two or three days in the run-up, so the actual clock change lands in the middle of a gradual drift rather than as a sudden jump. We also lean into cosy: warm lighting in the early evenings, familiar films, his favourite sensory toys. The articulated animals from our shop have become a real comfort object—something to hold and flex while the world feels a little wobbly.
We don't demand productivity in that first week. If he needs to decompress more than usual, we let him.
A Note to You, If This Resonates
If you're reading this as the nights draw in and feeling a little dread about what the clock change might bring—you're not being dramatic. Seasonal transitions are genuinely hard for many neurodivergent children, and by extension, for the people who love and care for them.
Be gentle with yourself this week. The clocks are the clocks. You're doing something much harder than adjusting them.