4 am wake up

[Banksy86]

My 9 months old baby is waking up every day at 4am, I feel like we have tried everything to put him back to sleep, feeding, cuddling, leave him to cry for a bit but nothing seem to help :(
He also won't nap in the morning without being fed to sleep (we try and give him at least 30 min nap). Lunch time we try to put him to sleep at 12:30 for two hours but he just won't go to sleep unless he is been stroked to sleep and sometimes even that doesn't work and he only sleeps 30 min instead his full 2 hours. He does goes to bed at about 18:15 on days that he didn't nap well in the afternoon and 18:45 on days that he did managed to get more than 30 min. He is good at going to sleep by himself after only 10 min of rolling about in the cot in the evening...but he wakes up every morning at 4am and his naps are just awful sometimes. Me and my husband going to bed every day at 8 pm which is the only way we can deal with the early wake up.
Please help! I don't know what to do any more :(

Infants are never easy. They don't mean to be difficult, they are still learning how it is to be alive.
The situation will pass. In the meantime, just give calm love and affection. Maybe take shifts in going to bed so early so other stuff (cleaning, etc) can be done?
Well done to both of you for staying together in this.

Ok, I'm not sure if any of this will help but I have an 8 month old and have done a fair bit of reading on this. The first nap of the day should be the longest as when the child gets older and they start staying awake longer in the morning, this becomes the lunchtime nap. Therefore this nap should only be capped if it goes past 3 hours. Naps generally get a bit shorter as you go through the day. I follow 'awake times' as opposed to naps at specific times. So at 9 months, I think awake times are roughly 3 hours so if waking at 4am, I would put him back in his cot just before 7am. Once woken from that nap, I would put him down again 3 hours later. If waking at 4am, he will need 3 naps in the day. He should have at least 3 hours of naps per day at this age. I would also bring bedtime forward to 17:45 on days with poor naps. This can cause them to sleep longer, not wake earlier as you would think.

A lot of babies still need help getting to sleep at this age, mine certainly won't go to sleep without being rocked and shushed! Its great that your little one can self settle in the evenings. To break the cycle of being fed to sleep, I would feed at least 20 minutes before you are going to put him down and not in the room he is going to sleep in. This way he has a full tummy and the need to feed decreases a bit. Does he have a dummy? Apologies if none of this is useful, feel free to ignore!

Definitely agree, they are learning how to be alive and we how to be thier parents :) he is such a happy little boy during the day and I just hate to seeing him struggle with sleep so much.

It could be he just doesn’t need that much sleep. I think 12-14 hours is normal at that age, but it can still vary. 18:15-18:45 seems early to me, but my youngest has always gone to sleep more like 20:00-21:00 and sleeps til 6:00-7:00, though for a while it was more like 5. They do go through phases like this and 8 to 12 months is particularly tough.

Better daytime naps and a later bedtime may help, but you may just need to wait til it passes. Have you tried co sleeping? Also make sure you take it in turns who gets up so one of you isn’t always exhausted.

Unfortunately he gave up his dummy when he was 6 months, he just didn't want it anymore and kept spiting it out every time we gave it to him.
I would give it a try and put him down for longer in the morning, I hope it would help. Thank you so much for the advise