I have a good friend who has a son as old as my first son which is 16 years old and all through our babyhood together, we both had babies at the exact same time, her little guy woke up from his naps, woke up every morning just angry, just crying and every nap and every morning week after week and month after month and even year after year, this little person woke up angry.

Now, it can be a little alarming to a parent when this happens because the first thing we all think is that he must still be tired and in some cases that’s the truth and we’ll talk about sort of how to navigate the differences but I just wanna highlight the fact that sometimes a baby will wake up crying or seemingly angry and that’s just their temperament, right?

My middle son, he was a bit like that especially from his afternoon nap. Didn’t matter if he’d nap for three solid hours. He would still wake up grouchy and he’d be grouchy for a good 20 minutes or so. After I got him up, he liked to cuddle but he would be kind of grouchy and whiny for those first 20 minutes and that was just him. You know what, he’s 14 now and he still wakes up grouchy. So that’s just the temperament of the child and nothing to worry about, right? Doesn’t mean anything. It just means that’s the way that they are.

For myself, I’m not a morning person. I usually wake up feeling a little grumpy myself. So it’s just, that’s okay, right? We’re gonna let that one go but in the other case, it can mean that your child has not had enough sleep yet. So what would that look like? Well, if we’re talking about nap time, if nap is anything less than an hour and sometimes 45 minutes is okay if it’s that last nap of the day but if you’re finding that sort of chronically all throughout the day your child’s only napping for 30, maybe 35 minutes at a time, chances are high they’re gonna wake up crying and what that means is that they haven’t had enough sleep yet.

Most common reason for not having had enough sleep is that they are sleep prop dependent in the first place. So if you’re finding that you need to rock her to sleep, feed her to sleep, give her a pacifier every time she falls asleep then that is most likely why she’s not sleeping long enough. So the first step to fixing that would be to pick up a copy of the Sleep Sense program and start learning a method that feels good for you to teach your child how to fall asleep independently and in most cases, that solves the problem that they just start sleeping a longer stretch of time and will wake up feeling refreshed.

Nothing is more music to my ears than to hear a little person waking up and having a little chat to themselves in their crib before you come in and get ’em. That is I’m sure everyone’s dream come true and that is possible for the majority of babies but for those of you with a grouchy baby, just means they’re gonna need a little bit of time to shake off that sleepiness and get ready for their day.

Thanks so much for watching. Sleep well.