DD(10) just doesn’t wake up in the morning!! What can we do?!

[FusionChefGeoff]

She finds going to bed really hard and is often up and down until 9.30/10.00. She doesn’t use her iPad after dinner, TV off at 8ish and I read to her then she reads herself. Sometimes she has a melatonin tablet which helps hugely but not always as I’m hopeful she will eventually be able to sleep without them.

She has a LOUD Alexa alarm right next to her head and it’s been going off for 10 minutes and she’s still asleep. Her lights turn on with the alarm too but that makes no difference. We have to go in a physically wake her most mornings.

I’ve got one eye on secondary school next year and how she’s supposed to be getting more independent but this is going to be a major issue if she can’t even be left to get up on time!

Any ideas / reassurances / solidarity to help???

We woke dd1 at this age. She’s 15 now and I haven’t had to wake her up for school in over a year although we would usually check she’s up and about. I think it’s fine op as you are!

Most research says owls are more creative!

DD takes melatonin, it helps falling asleep, but you need to take it early enough to avoid being too asleep in the morning. DD is actually a lot more awake in the mornings when she takes them, she schedules it so that she has 7 hours between taking and the alarm going off.

But - I wouldn't worry too much. It could also that her body is preparing for puberty and needs to store energy.

Do you want her to wake up and be up immediately? DD and I need at least 15-30 minutes from waking up to be functioning.
A light alarm may also help, especially if her room is pitch black dark and the dark mornings are coming. I already find it more difficult to wake up at the moment.

I’ve got one of these too, always in bed for 9ish, often not asleep until 10pm. Also 10. Left to her own devices she would sleep 10pm - 8am which is what she defaults to on holiday. Unfortunately school starts at 8.30am and she often has sports training before that so we get her up every day and will probably have to for the foreseeable! I can’t see her being able to get the bus for secondary either, that leaves the end of the road at 7.30…

Oh dear! You’re messing with her body - no wonder she has sleep problems!!!

She isn’t, she’s using it illegally.

I would wake DD even in 6th form, and given her bedroom was right next to the kitchen I would bring her toast to her bedroom (maybe I over compensated for being a single mum working FT). She's 26 now, and has always made it to work on time, so it didnt do her any harm.

To be fair she would often half wake up when I started banging about in the kitchen so it seemed a bit pointless to have an alarm.

Well I'm still waking my 17 year old with ADHD. My 14 year old is much more independent.

If you leave atc7am now then presumably you are waking her before you leave or her father is waking her.

I still wake my 15 and 12 year olds in the morning. 15 yo has an alarm (as of recently) for the mornings she wants to wake up earlier. She usually switches it off and goes back to sleep! Youngest child needs a lot of encouragement in going to sleep and waking up. I usually go into his room half an hour before he needs to get up so he thinks he’s getting extra time in bed 🙈 I don’t think I’d introduce medication without explicit guidance from a GP.

My DD was like this and to be honest, still is to some extent as an adult. I worried when she went off to Uni that she'd never make morning lectures and whilst she did miss some, she wasn't as bad as I thought she's be. She's never missed work though (even with some vvv early starts) so I guess we got there in the end.

She has ADHD btw.

If it is really causing issues with the morning routine, you need to get her to bed earlier op. 10 is quite late for a ten year old.

If you haul her out early one morning to break the cycle, she will likely be more ready for bed earlier that evening and you can try to reset it all from there. People will wake once they have had enough sleep, and she is only ten so you need to be ensuring she gets it. Turning off tv earlier etc might cause upset, but if you need to, you need to.

Ha ha this is EXACTLY where my worries come from - other posters!!

Very reassuring knowing I can just keep waking her up (we love it really it’s usually a comedy race between me, DS and DH to go a get her up. And not worrying that she’s never going to be able to get to work on time!!

We’ve had a 2 year (?) process with trying to sort out the sleep thing with other threads from me where I got all the conflicting and contradictory advice (spend more time talking to her / don’t make such a thing about it / get her upstairs and in bed earlier / let her stay up and go to bed at her own time….) so I feel like we’ve done everything we can there.

Sounds like it’s all well within normal so I’ll stop worrying!

My dad used to bring in a cold wet sponge but I wouldn’t recommend it. It did work though.

I have to wake my 10yo DD at 7:20 every day. At the weekend she sleeps past 8. She goes to bed at 9 lights out just after but often stirs around 10 to use the loo. She did used to take melatonin too (lots of sleep issues when she was younger, it was prescribed to her) but it didn't change things much and she'd get distressed when she woke for a wee because she'd be in a depo slept and disoriented, so we stopped bothering. It's just her natural body clock I think. My youngest is up at 6:45 every day like a human alarm clock! I get the whole worrying about secondary school though, DD will have to catch a bus at 7:50!

Alarms never worked for my two as teens. Try a bugle. Or a frying pan and wooden spoon. Or a fully loaded nerf gun. Do you have a dog? If so, dispatch them into the bedroom at waking time.

They’re crap at getting themselves up past a certain age. Circadian rhythm is later than ours. IMO, school should start later to accommodate this, but that’s a whole other subject.

DD could never wake by herself, even as a toddler I'd be blaring rave music loudly in her room and she still wouldn't wake up, but around 11 years old it suddenly changed and she started waking up to her phone alarm.

Melatonin isn't even classed as a medicine in my country, its a supplement and sold alongside vitamins. And my country is very strict about medications, you can't even buy paracetamol outside of a pharmacy so I wouldn't worry about giving unprescribed Melatonin so long as its from a reputable source and you follow dosage guidelines (DD was on it for several years and 0.5mg was enough to work)

I don’t see that you still needing to wake her up matters in the slightest.

As we grow older and take on more responsibility for our own lives we tend to usually wake ourselves up when we need to, because we know we have to. You won’t still be waking her when she's 25.

My DS is 26. He came to stay for a night last week as he had a job to look at near where I live. Despite his alarms, I still had to wake him up the next day! He's always been the same and relies on his partner to make sure he's up each day.

I wish people on MN didn't assume the whole world was the same as the UK.
Melatonin is not under prescribed medications in France, where OP is. She is NOT using it illegally.

@FusionChefGeoff I still wake my teens for school and they're 16 & 17.

If we didn't have a dog, I don't know how we'd get the kids up!
It does sound like she needs a bit of help getting to sleep earlier though, is she doing plenty of exercise? Not the standing in line, taking a turn to hit a ball, type of class but the kind that properly tires her out? My DD is ASD but exercise has been the absolute key to sleep, it gets all the fidgets and worries out.

Sometimes I have to check that DD (24) has actually woken to her alarm.

My Mam was still waking me at 18/19 because I’d sleep through.

It's not illegal 😆

😂😂🙈

Same level of criminality as ‘fraud’ if you lie about your dc’s age to get into the zoo.

She's 10! It's still your job to get her up and make sure she's dressed and ready for school!!

What time is her alarm going off? When does she need to be up?

You say she's struggling to go to bed/get off to sleep - is she getting plenty of fresh air and exercise during the day?

Is she coming back downstairs because she's looking for stimulation (reverse bedtime procrastination?) Or closeness /connection with you?