What to know trick-or-treating on Saturday

It is 23 minutes after the hour. Doctors are advising parents to keep a very close watch on their children this weekend. Yeah, because it's Halloween tomorrow and then the end of daylight, saving time from Saturday into Sunday morning. Let's check in with Sal now, who's joined by a Stanford sleep specialist. Sal, take it away. I want to bring in Dr. Rafael Palayo, who is going to talk to us about, you know, the dangers of not getting enough sleep, especially around this time of year. Doctor, welcome to the program once again. Nice to see you. What kind of things are parents, should parents be watching out for, not only for their kids, but also, doctor, as you know, for me? Yeah. Nice to see you. Thank you for having me on. Go ahead, Ron. So daylight saving is an annual, a biannual, unforced error, and what we're doing is we're simply swapping morning light for afternoon light. What's going to happen is this Sunday is going to be darker in the evening than people are used to. So people have to be aware that their children are going to be in a darker environment than they're used to. At the same time, the kids will be more exposed to those dangers because the people driving the cars will not be used to this, especially on Monday also. Halloween is going to be fine because that's Saturday, but Sunday is when the change occurs. So we're going to get an extra hour of sleep. This weekend, which is the best part of this, we're paying back this time, but hopefully this will be the last time we ever change the clocks. We don't want to keep doing this. It's ridiculous to keep changing the clocks twice a year. Many countries have gotten rid of daylight savings, actually. Mexico doesn't do it. Brazil doesn't do it. Only about a third of the world actually does this, so hopefully we're going to stop doing it. But the main thing for parents to be aware of is one, especially if they have younger kids, people know the clock has changed. Little kids are not sleep deprived the way teenagers So little kids are going to wake up early, even though they have that extra hour, they're not going to necessarily need it, but they're going to be out of sync. Also, your pets are not going to know that there's been an hour shift in your clock. So even though you're thinking you're going to get an extra hour of sleep, that's not going to necessarily happen. Precisely because the brain is not expecting this to occur. Teenagers are different. The data with teenagers, when they lose that extra hour of sleep in the springtime, they lose about two and a half hours of sleep total, because it takes about a week to get used to that time change. But the little kids will adapt very easily, but the parents won't. So you're going to be out of sync with your kids. Also, your kids are going to be hungrier than usual, because they're usually eating at noon, but now it's going to be 11 o'clock. So they may be noticing that they want to eat some more. But the main thing to watch for is that in the evening, it's going to be darker than they expected. Yeah, doctor, you mentioned teenagers. I happen to have some. And I wanted to know if, you know, there's anything I can do for them to help them make it easier. You're right. The little kids, when my kids were little, they didn't care about any of this. But now, you know, an hour can mean a big difference. What can I do to help them? We want them to think about the importance of sleep. There's a lifestyle issue, so you really can't force them to do it. They've got to see what's in it for themselves. And they've got to appreciate the difference that they feel. We're a sleep-deprived nation in general. So that's why the spring is such a bad time to lose that hour of sleep because we're adding, on top of chronic sleep deprivation, we're adding acute sleep deprivation. And kids are going to be more irritable, inattentive, just more likely to get into car accidents if they're teenage drivers. Those are the things you're watching for. But just not prepared for things. They're going to be short-tempered and just making little mental errors. So you've just got to be careful because the entire family is going to be like that. The things to watch for. What they can do is make sleep a priority and start getting a little bit of extra sleep beforehand. The hard part is you cannot make the brain fall asleep an hour earlier. The brain doesn't allow us to do that. Our brains are set up to have peak alertness about two hours before we fall asleep. So it's easier to force somebody to wake up than to force somebody to fall asleep. So what you'll find is that people will go to sleep maybe later, but they still wake up around the same time because the biological clock is telling them to wake up. So it's really, really hard to just shift one hour all of a sudden abruptly. They can do it over the weekend if they want to, like maybe a 10- to 20-minute shift, but it's going to take three or four days for them to make up that one hour of lost sleep, no matter what we do. All right, Dr. Rafael Palau, we're going to have to leave it there. We're going to just make you the official Mornings on 2 doctor, sleep doctor. Yeah, we will be. All right, Dr. Rafael Palau from Stanford, thank you so much for joining us. Mornings on 2, we'll take a quick break. Hopefully, you'll be getting your sleep this weekend. We'll be right back.