How to move wake-up time forward?
It has been a month since the switch to daylight savings, and we have not been able to get our 10 month old to move her wake-up time forward. If anything, she is likely to wake up earlier. So, what used to be waking up a six, is now waking up at five, or quarter or twenty to five. Sometimes four.
She gets about 9-10 hours of night sleep, and 1.5-2.5 hours of naps. We have shifted her going to bed time to being closer to 8, but she is firmly anchored in her wake up time. We have tried the "put her to bed earlier" and that helps when she has had a bad night or bad naps, and she may sleep in once a week, but then immediately returns to 5 am or earlier. As a consequence, she often falls asleep on the way to day care at about 8 am.
Suggestions?
She comes from a maternal line of strong internal bio-clocks, so it could be that, too.
UPDATE. We have switched to no more night time feeding at all (for the second or third time!) and this time it is no problem. Her bedtime is around 7:30. She alternates between sleeping through the night (to 5 or possibly 6) and waking up once or twice to have a bit of a cry. Biggest adjustment has been for parents to go to bed earlier. :)
4 Answers
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This is tough! One thing we always did for our son is to keep his room very dark with thick curtains. We picked a time that we consider would count as morning (eg 7am) Whenever he woke up earlier than that, we would go to his room and pretend like it was the middle of the night. In other words, what would you do if she woke up at 2am? We would go to his room, comfort him with a few words, keep the visit short and left again. This signaled to him that he should try and go back to sleep. This didn't always work but worked a good deal of the time.
Another thing to consider is that maybe it's not just her sleeping rhythm. Maybe she can hear something (a neighbor going to work?) that is waking her up. If this is the case, and there isn't anything you can do to eliminate that noise, then you might just be out of luck. If this is the case, you can try to adjust her going to bed time so that the source of the noise happens during a period when she's in deep sleep but it sounds like you've already tried that. But maybe it's something you can control, like your heater coming on in the morning.
Great suggestions, especially with respect to the thick heavy curtains. When our son was younger, he would wake up very early during this time of year as well -- something like 1 hour before sunrise, very consistently. You could also try keeping her up later for a few days in a row -- don't give in to fussiness and do your best to keep her up to say, 9pm for a week and see if that changes things.
- Steve Lacy, Nov 26, 2009
Good point about the neighbor possibility. For awhile our son was being woken up by a back porch light turning on when care workers took out the trash or changed shifts (or something) at the house next door.
- andrea, Nov 26, 2009
It's possible it is the heater. It's not light - these wakeups happen in complete pitch darkness. Now we are having all sorts of other disturbances. I decided to drop night snacks apart from the 11 pm one, and last night she was up at 2:30 wailing and complaining and muttering to herself. This time we did nothing as it was not pain or panic, and let her fall back asleep on her own. That took... maybe an hour? This morning she then slept in until 7. :) So whatever may have woken her up previously at 5, did not bother her today.
- katja, Nov 27, 2009
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I agree totally with sweetthi, black-out curtains are a must, but I want to mention a couple more things:
- What do you do when she wakes up? Does she get a "morning snack"? Maybe she's awaking more because of the expectation of the snack and less because she's actually done sleeping.
- Don't turn on the lights after you get up so early. Try to maintain/reinforce the circadian rhythm, and keep things dark, even if you're both awake.
- Try to postpone the "morning snack" to a time you think is reasonable (say, 6am). Use the time after waking for some quiet play (nothing too stimulating) and you may see some change over time.
- If she's consistent and crying when she wakes up, you can try being a bit more strict with immediately going to her. This is not in expectation of her going back to sleep, it's to let her know that you're not going to immediately come to her. We did something like this with our first as well, with a rule like "If we hear him after 5:30, we'll go immediately, otherwise we'll let him cry for 5 minutes". You can play with both variables and try to move both of them up in 5 minute increments.
- Have you thought in detail what the differences are between the "extra early" days and the "sleeps a little more days?" Really think hard -- write down nap times and durations, and even meal times and sizes, and see if those have any effect on the wake-up time the next morning. Keeping a sleep+eat log can be very enlightening.
Good luck!
We are now reducing our interventions at night (both going in to see her and offering milk) and hoping she will learn to put herself to sleep at night better. She is almost done with pacifiers, which is good, because all she does with them is toss them out of her crib.
- katja, Nov 27, 2009
- What do you do when she wakes up? Does she get a "morning snack"? Maybe she's awaking more because of the expectation of the snack and less because she's actually done sleeping.
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That's hard! And we can relate!
Another option - if you haven't already tried/considered this - might be to put things in the crib that she can play with on her own, like a board book or two, stuffed animals, quiet toys, complicated ones with buttons & dials, a special toy each night that's a surprise... I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point our son figured out that he could have a good time in the early morning on his own, without crying or waking us for at least another 20-40 min...
When it is time to wake up, she usually warbles to herself in the dark for a good 20 min. Then she begins to protest. At this point we can go in, put a little light on and give her a couple of board books in the crib. This usually buys us an extra 30-40 min of happy sleep in time. So between all these, we can drag our own get up time later by about an hour. But if she is noisy, we can't sleep much. Our cats prevent us from closing doors to keep the noise away, as she is in the next room.
- katja, Nov 27, 2009
An update. She has two main patterns. Sleep through the night and wake up for the day after 9 or 10 hours until 4 or 5 am. OR: Sleep till 2 or 3, wail and scream for a while, then sleep till about 6 am. It's getting better. We are seriously trying to influence falling asleep time, although now we just put her to bed when she is tired - she had a virus and needed more sleep than usual - and deal with wake up times whenver they come. Still baffled with the moving forward, though. It is ever elusive.
- katja, Dec 23, 2009