If you’d rather read than watch, here’s a transcription of the video…
This week’s question comes from Gina. She writes:
“Our 15 month old has been sleeping through the night for the past six months and been waking between 7:00 and 8:00 in the morning. In the past few weeks he’s begun to wake between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. and is ready to start his day. He is down to one nap a day for two hours. Is there any way to get him back to sleeping longer in the morning?”
And I would say Gina that this is just about one of the most popular questions I get: “How do you prevent those early morning wakeups?” And they can be tricky, and they do linger and so I’m going to give you my best suggestions, but I don’t think you should expect anything to change too quickly. It does take time for the body clock to adjust.
So the very first thing I always say to parents is “Are you sure that the room is dark enough?” And by that I mean dark, as dark as it is in the night. Even the slightest change of morning sunlight creeping into a room affects all of us and we start to kick out some cortisol and we start to wakeup earlier. And summer months are really tricky for adults and babies, but the good news is we can look at the clock and see that it’s only 5:00 and go back to sleep… whereas your baby can’t! So that’s the first step; make sure that room is nice and dark.
And then what I want you to do is when you hear him at 5:00, and this is only for early morning wakeups not for night wakeups something completely different, but for early morning wakeups if a parent goes in very quickly as soon as you first hear him start to stir, one of you go in there and if he’s standing lay him back down, cover him back up, give him back his lovie, tell him it’s still sleepy time, give him a few pats or a few strokes on the forehead, stay for a couple of minutes and then leave. Sometimes if you catch the child before he fully wakes up you can convince him to go back to sleep for another hour or two. It’s just tricky when it’s 5:00 and he’s had the majority of his nighttime sleep; once he really wakes himself up, now he might be too alert to actually even think about going back to sleep at that point.
So give that a try, but then you really need to stick to your minimum. You know my minimum is 7:00. I won’t let my children get up before 7:00. Now, they’re old enough now where that they can see the clock and they know when it’s 7:00 and when they can get up. But even when they were babies I would stick very closely to my minimum. Meaning if they woke up at 6:30 I would go in, I would tell them it’s still sleepy time, tuck them back in, and then I would not get them up until 7:00. And so I think you need to pick your minimum and if he was sleeping until 7:00 or 8:00 I would pick 7:00 as your minimum.
And give all that a solid try for at least two, maybe even three weeks, and see how things are coming along. If you’ve really tried and you’ve given it a month and you’re seeing no results, then it’s worth considering making some adjustments on the bedtime side of things. If he’s waking up in the morning at 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., I’m guessing he goes to bed somewhere between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. And you might need to adjust that just slightly and go very cautiously and carefully when you adjust the bedtime. Maybe by 10 or 15 minutes every three or four nights and only by about a half an hour and you might find that that helps you get a little deeper into the morning. Maybe he just doesn’t need quite as much nighttime sleep as before.
So that’s my best advice to all of you out there struggling with the early morning wakeup. If you’re just starting the Sleep Sense Program, please be patient. Early morning wakeups usually phase out on their own once you’ve worked a couple of weeks into the process. So don’t panic if you have a 5:00 a.m. waker at the moment, it’ll fade and it’ll get better and eventually they’ll start sleeping until a more decent time.
So thanks a lot for your question Gina. Sleep well.
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