How to fix your early rising for good:
Why people struggle to resolve early rising
Introduction
Early rising is when a little one wakes up before 6am on a regular basis. Normally these early risers are up somewhere between 4.30-5.30am every day.
Early rising can be one of the most counter-intuitive areas of child sleep and really tricky to fix. Understanding why it happens will allow you to put in place a plan to resolve the issue and push out your little ones wake up time. The same approach will work whatever your child’s age.
How to end early rising is one of the most frequently asked questions that I receive and there are many families struggling with this issue. I know it can feel like you have tried everything to fix it and nothing works but working through this blog is going to help you to understand why your little one is up so early and help you to stop it from happening in the future.
Understanding why your little one is early rising will make it easier to resolve
Why Does Early Rising Happen
In most cases that I see early rising is actually happening because a little one is not getting enough sleep and they have become overtired. Bolstering their sleep and adding sleep in wherever possible is the key. Understanding how much sleep they should be getting is also important. You can find this out by downloading my free guide ‘five gentle ways to end sleep deprivation for your family’ at the top of my homepage or my sleep needs chart which is further down the homepage. Once we know how much sleep they should be getting we can work out how close we are to achieving that.
There are other reasons why a little one may be waking early and these will mostly be environmental reasons such a noise or light and I am sure you will have already checked these off and looked into these. If not it is worth checking whether something is actually disturbing your little one in the early hours. White noise is good for a little one who is disturbed by noise and there are several good options on the market like this portable white noise machine. If light is an issue look at getting some black out blinds or curtains. I actually have both up in my children’s bedrooms and the combination works well to block out most of the light. Light can have a huge impact on how early a little one gets up so the darker the room the better.
How to solve early rising is one of my most frequently asked questions.
Why People struggle to resolve early rising
The main reason people struggle with pushing out the early rising is that they take the wrong approach to fix it. Remember that overtiredness is the leading cause of the early wake up time. Your little one is not getting enough sleep yet when people are trying to fix early rising they often restrict sleep. Have you ever tried the following hoping it will help you:
1. Put your little one to bed later hoping they will wake up later. By putting them to bed later you have taken more sleep away and will acutally be contributing to the problem.
2. Cut a nap short or not let them sleep at all during the day or drop to less naps. Again this restricts how much sleep they are getting and only compounds the problem.
It is time for a new approach, one that works and will fix your early rising.
Early rising takes time and pateince to resolve
My top tips for resolving early rising
Your first job is to understand how much sleep your little one needs. Download my sleep needs chart on the homepage to find out your sleep goal.
Next I want you to keep a sleep diary for a few days so you can understand how much sleep your little one is actually getting.
Your sleep diary needs to look like this:
- Into bed at 7pm
- Asleep by 7.40pm
- Wake 1: 11.30pm asleep again at midnight
- Wake 2: 2am asleep again at 2.30am
- Awake for the day at 5am
- Total sleep: 8hrs 20 minutes
Be completely realistic about how long they are taking to settle at bedtime, nap-time and any resettles in the night as this is NOT part of their sleep total!
When you get to the end of the day, sit down and add up their total sleep. This will give you a really good idea of how close you are to their sleep quota. If they are short of sleep by an hour every day, over a week that is 7 hours of missed sleep and suddenly you can see why they are overtired!
Then we need to find a way to get them more sleep to hit their sleep quota and begin to push out the early rising. One way is to work on their skills, if they are struggling to self-settle they may be up multiple times in the night taking a while to resettle and then missing crucial sleep. A lack of skill may also mean their naps are far too short (maybe only 30 minutes) and that will also be having an impact. Helping a little one to learn how to self-settle will mean that their sleep total massively improves and you will see the benefits of this straight away. Why not book a discovery call with me to discuss how I can help you.
If skill isn’t the problem maybe you have recently dropped a nap or your little one has been unwell. Maybe you just need to focus on sleep and think of ways in which you can add more sleep. If they recently dropped a nap and you are struggling maybe it was too early to drop the nap and you need to add it back in again. Maybe their bedtime is too late, could you bring that forward to help get them some more sleep. Early to bed is a fantastic way to add more sleep and you can put your little one to bed up to an hour early if the naps have been particularly bad in the day.
This comes with a warning though. Consistently putting your little one to bed early may cause you to pull their whole schedule forward so bedtime becomes earlier and the wake up time remains early. Doing this a couple of times a week is ok.
I love helping families to understand why they are dealing with early rising
Conclusion
Early rising is not easy to fix even when you understand why it is happening and that is because it takes time for the changes you are making to have an impact.
Once you start to hit the correct number of hours of sleep needed every 24 hours, you will begin to undo the over-tiredness. However, this may not happen overnight! It can take a week to ten days of achieving the right amount of sleep before you start to see an improvement.
Trust the process and keep bolstering your little ones sleep. It will be worth it and you will start to see them getting up later with your commitment.
Thanks for reading.
Naomi. X
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