Clocks Go Back. Lunch Stays.

When the clocks go back in autumn, we are supposed to get an extra hour as a gift. For me, that just means a bedtime story that runs an hour longer, but my son will most likely ask for lunch at exactly the same time as always. It is just that the clock will still say eleven.

The quiet of dawn

I am often awake hours before my son.

I sleep badly. It is still dark, he is asleep next to me in the room, and I try to stay quiet. We do not have a separate room I could slip away to. Whatever I do has to be quiet and doable in the dark.

So I put the day ahead together in my head. What I want to do, what is worth spending time on.

With ADHD, focusing is not easy for me even in this calm, low-stimulus setting. Everything around me being quiet does not mean my head is in order. By the time the day starts, I have already planned several versions of it, and forgotten a few of them.

For me, the gift hour will mostly mean being awake at four instead of five.

Lunch at twelve

My son’s schedule is a lot more precise:

• Lunch: at noon
• Dinner: at six
• Bedtime: nine on weekdays, ten at weekends

What I see is that he is at his most settled when everything happens at its usual time. If bedtime slips, he is noticeably crankier the next day.

And when it comes to lunchtime, he does not even need a clock.

“Dad, when is lunch?”

“But you just ate.”

I mean this as an answer, but about a minute later it turns out the question is still open.

“Dad, when is lunch?”

And so on, until food arrives. Sometimes he eats only a few bites. Which leaves me standing there with my grown-up logic, according to which the food he ate not long ago should still be keeping him going. (I wrote about what might lie behind questions like this in an earlier piece.)

But lunchtime has come: he is the one who signals it, and I learn again and again how much it matters to him.

From the outside, this may look like impatience, but I see it differently:

Many autistic children feel this way, and for many of them sleep is more fragile to begin with than for most children. That is why it is never “just an hour”.

An extra hour of stories

This is the strict timetable the clock change is about to land in.

Here in Hungary, the clocks go back this Sunday. We change ours the evening before and try to settle into the new time straight away. Changing the clocks takes only a few taps; bedtime takes rather more negotiation.

I read him a children’s book every night. For this weekend, I am already mentally preparing for a reading session an hour longer than usual, because by his body clock he has to hold out an extra hour until the new bedtime. I may be overplanning, but that is an occupational hazard: as a DevOps engineer, I know capacity planning always needs a buffer.

The next day at lunch, I expect the familiar question to arrive at eleven by the new clock. What we usually do is push mealtimes later bit by bit, until lunch lands at noon on the new clock as well. This is our way of doing it, shaped around our own days.

Meanwhile, I keep thinking about families for whom a change like this brings much harder evenings and mornings. My own story cannot tell me what would work for them. But I do not want to brush it off with a wave of the hand: “oh, it’s only an hour”.

Two ideas that might help

I gathered these from professional guidance. They are options worth trying, not tried-and-tested recipes of our own.

1. Shift times in smaller steps. Guidance on the clock change from Norfolk and Suffolk NHS suggests moving bedtime later by about 15 minutes a day in the few days before the clocks go back. It matters that wake-up time can follow, so the time set aside for sleep stays the same. A later bedtime on its own does not mean a longer lie-in. Source: Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust

2. Keep the familiar order of the bedtime routine. A routine made of familiar, calm activities can help a child wind down towards sleep. The time may change, while the steps the child knows, such as brushing teeth, a story and saying goodnight, still follow one another in the same order.

These, too, need adjusting to your own child and to what your family can manage. In a shared bedroom, for instance, even arranging a “quiet early-morning activity” is a project in itself. That one, at least, I know well.

What doesn’t get reset

For now, I am getting the storybooks ready. And when the lunch question comes, I will try to answer it remembering this: just because it is not noon yet on our clock does not mean his usual lunchtime has not arrived.

There will probably be a few days when we talk about this more than once.

“Dad, when is lunch?”

After the clocks go back, I am still the one who has to answer that.