early wake ups

Is your day starting at 4.30am?! Your little one thinks this is the time to party and then remains grumpy the rest of the day!

The Baby Guru has some top tips to help combat early waking along with explaining the reasons why this can happen and when in your little ones development stages it is likely to occur.

When are you likely to experience early waking?

Early wake ups are often linked to big development leaps such as…

– The classic 4 month sleep leap , when their sleep cycles are changing and maturing with increased amounts of light sleep and awareness of where and how they go to sleep.

– Learning to stand – their bodies want to practice this new skill and when’s a good time to do it, when you’ve had a good chunk of sleep.

– Language development can play havoc with their sleep, they have such busy minds processing all this information, storing it for future use.

– Staring nursery, they often drop a nap when starting nursery and it takes time to adjust so can be overtired , which can cause early wake ups

Why are they waking early and how can you help your little one sleep later?

– Environmental reasons for early wake ups could include the early morning light, so blackout blinds are a must. Noise from within or outside the house, white noise is a must for helping with this.

– Look at their naps and how much sleep their getting.

– Are they hungry? Would they have a small feed and back down.

– Early bedtime doesn’t mean necessarily an early wake up, quiet the opposite sometimes.

– That they are able to self settle at the start of any sleep, so when they wake they can go back to sleep without sleep cues from you.

-Are they clearly still tired? If so then try settling them back to sleep, even if it means staying with them, with some constant shush and pat or a cuddle.

I hope you have found these tips and suggestions on early waking helpful. If you would like more bespoke 1-2-1 help with your little one’s sleep please email me sam@thebabyguru.co.uk

Sam aka The Baby Guru