A guide to handling early morning baby wakings. The speaker explains circadian rhythms and wake windows, then offers strategies to shift your baby's sleep schedule and a class for more detailed help.
So, yes, today we are talking about early morning wakings. Those wakings that occur prior to 6am did you see that? Real. If you consistently start your day prior to 6am this solidifies those early morning wakings, right? If your baby Wakes Prior to 6, you want to pretend it's midnight, right? They don't know the difference between 5am and midnight. Treat it just like it's midnight, okay? You're going to keep it dark. You're going to keep stimulation low. You're going to do exactly what you would do if it was midnight. Imagine this. Every morning you have to wake up at 5am to be at work, right? So every morning your alarm goes off at 5am Monday through Friday, but Saturday, you're like, I'm off. I'm gonna sleep in 5 00. The clock reads, boom. Your eyes open. Why does that happen? It's because our bodies are set in the circadian rhythm. Our bodies are used to waking up at that time. Now you and I shut our eyes and go, it's Saturday. I'm going back to sleep. But for our babies, the same thing happens if we start our day prior to 6am that's their little circadian rhythm gets used to that. They don't have a drive to go, hey, it's Saturday. I'm going to go back to sleep. They're up for the day. We want to start our first wake window of the day no earlier than 6am so let's say your little one wakes at 5:30. We don't want to start that wake window until 6am that's when we turn on the lights. We start our day, then we give a full wake window and then have the first nap. Otherwise, what we're doing is we're solidifying those early morning wakings. Our baby just treats it like an extension of night sleep when there isn't that full wake window. Sam, some little ones will sleep in until 7, 7:30. But I want you to understand that a biologically normal wake time for little ones is 6am and after. So we need to count that as a win. All right? You can do things like block out the light, have a sound machine to block out any extraneous noises like the neighbor's garage door or something like that, if that's waking them early. But truly, anytime after 6am That's a win. Keeping them up later rarely results in a little one sleeping later. And here's why. When we keep them up later, they're more likely to be overtired. And guess what happens when we're overtired. We have night wakings and we wake up earlier the next day. So for a baby who is struggling with being overtired, an earlier bedtime is actually the answer, because night sleep is restorative. And so if you have a little one who's been struggling with naps all day long, the best thing you can do is an earlier bedtime, because then you're less likely to have, you know, night wakings and those early morning wakings. If you're struggling, I want you to know I can help you. My class for 5 to 24 month olds, we dive in deep to those early morning wakings and you have a plan to resolve them. So I just want you to know it doesn't have to be a continuous struggle.
