aibu to ask..if your child was an early riser when did they grow put of it? because my son is driving me bloody mental!!!

[LalaLeona]

13 month old getting up at 4.20 every day..nothing but nothing gets him back to sleep! If your kid was like this..what age did they start sleeping longer?

Sorry LalaLeona, but you could potentially have another 3 years of this yet. Most people I know (including me) have children who didn't sleep in past 5.30am til about 5 y.o. Although sometimes - by the age of 3 and a half to 4 - they will get themselves downstairs and get some cereal and a drink of orange juice and put the tv on. But expect at LEAST another 2 years of being woken way before Dawn. Sorry.

One thing I did with both my early risers was buy a cheap wall clock and stick stars on it at the 7 and 12. They could disturb me then, but not before. I found it worked better than the groclock (which they worked out how to alter themselves)

You've still got a way to go though I'm afraid

DD is 8 and hasn't grown out of it yet, however by about 5 years old she did learn to make her own breakfast and play quietly

Mine used to get up around 6.30am when they were little.

Ds1 still gets up early - but that is because he has to commute from Tonbridge in Kent to his job in Dartford.

Ds2 gets up early when he has to, for university stuff or when he has hockey matches to umpire.

Ds3 can get up early if he must, but if he has nothing on that day, you won't see him out of his bed much before lunchtime!

We did find, as @ButtercupChain says, that they could be more independent in the morning, as time went on. We could leave them a drink and a biscuit, and they'd go downstairs and play or watch a video, whilst dh and I got an extra 30-60 minutes sleep!

I never understand why people don't just train them to amuse themselves. Stair gate on their bedroom doors until 2-3yrs and then amuse themselves from that point on. Read / play / telly. I would never get up on a weekend earlier than 8-9am. I find it bizarre that some parents get up at 4-5am with children and then complain about it. Either enjoy getting up that early or don't!

once they get to about3 maybe 3.5 you can teach them to go down and put on C Beebies or a video

If you think it's the dawn chorus try white noise all night. Put in on quite loud.

Never for one of them! I have a teenager who gets up at 5.30-6am at the weekend to have breakfast. all of my other kids are similarly early to bed and early risers but this one is the worst.

I wouldn't mind but I hate mornings. fortunately as they get older you can leave them to entertain and feed themselves.

11year old frequently awake and noisy from 3am (sn though).

Never!!! 16 now and still gets up at the crack of dawn. I too ended up accepting that it. They do eventually reach the age where they can get up and go down stairs on their own but by then I had also lost the ability to lie in!!!

Gro clock is the answer. We set it for acceptable time and DS (now 4) knows not to annoy us any earlier than the set time. He wakes any time between 5:30 and 7, irrespective of what time he went to bed, level of activity on the day before and what he had for tea.
My mother says it's karma. I never slept in until late late teen years.

At 3 a gro-clock would get my DD to stay in bed until 6.30

I think getting up with them at 4.30/5 and doing stuff: iPad, tv just reinforces the sleep patterns. I get that some children wake early naturally but holy moly 4.30am is not an acceptable time to start the day for anybody.
It does need to be treated like a night waking. I know you say you've tried that but then also say you're getting up. Keep treating it like a night waking until the body clock shifts. Make it boring, nobody gets up, no lights on..If they cry they cry.

Mine is 13 and still wakes up at 6- no matter what time he goes to bed! Fortunately, I don't have to get up with him anymore. That probably happens by about 6 or 7.

Misery!

At 13 months my ds was walking at 4.30 every day- it was hell as I'd just gone back to work! Dh and I took it in turns every day to get up early with him. But by 17 months he just started sleeping til 'late' (around half six) which was bliss! And 4 years later that's still the time he wakes up! We didn't do any sleep training, though when we dropped the day time nap at 2 he started going down earlier too and slept a full 11 hours!
Hope that gives you some hope!

Ds was up between 4.30-5 until he was 2 1/2. grow clock has seen it shifted to 6.30-7 at just turned 3.
Honestly it could be years or it could be next week!
We didn't have a choice but to get up with Ds really.
We're in a mid terrace with thin walls and I cant imagine the amount of abuse id get if i just left him screaming, playing, banging, running like a heard of tiny hippos like toddlers do, at that time of the morning.

Not too bad in this house, agree with teacher54321 - what is the deal with leaping out of bed on the weekend at the larks fart but having to be prised out of bed with a shovel for school

Gro Clock worked for my very logical eldest at around 18mo and he is now definitely a night owl rather than a lark - will read until 9.30 and wake up between 7.30 and 8 now that he's nearly 9.

Co-sleeping worked with the others because essentially they were lonely. We now only tend to get the nearly-6yo once a week and the 3yo maybe twice, at around 6, and they know it's eyes shut hugs and snoring until 7. We bought a massive bed especially which obviously isn't an option for everyone, and have no risk factors such as relevant medical conditions, medications, smoking, drink etc.

One of mine is 10 and wakes at 4.30am every morning. Was hellish until he could keep himself entertained.

If it doesn't change, and we tried all the suggestions on this thread, wake to sleep just woke him up even earlier, then think about moving to his time zone. That was the only thing that got us through.

On the plus side!!!!!! You can get a lot done in the mornings and we are never late to school. Plus he is alseep by 8pm so we still have our evenings.

Even on holiday when he goes to bed at 10/11pm he's still up at 6pm so later bedtim s were never worth it.

Good luck !

Dd got up at 5.30-6 till she was about 3 then she started sleeping till 6.30-7. Ds is 20 months and is less predictable - he will wake up Any time between 5.15 and 7 but he's not a chronic early riser

I haven't read full thread so sorry if someone has already said to push back their morning /only nap. My daughter woke at 4am at that age for a good six months and I eventually figured out I needed to stop her early napping. It really helped. Sympathies. It was the most difficult time of parenting so far - worse than newborn, worse than having two, worse even than DS waking literally every 40 minutes for a while.

Sorry if already tried that.

I blame my dh for ds being an early riser. I'm a night owl and I have the choice of going to bed early and not being able to sleep or stay up late knowing that ds will be up early. I content myself with the knowledge that he now sleeps from 8-4.30ish and sleeps through most nights. Until he was 18 months (and about once a week still) he woke up from 1-3ish. Not the end of the world when on mat leave, but going to work on 3hours of broken sleep isn't great.

My 18 year old gets up at 7:30 at the weekend. At least I think he does, I'm asleep, I've done my share of early mornings

Ds now sometimes lays in until 7:30! He's 11. He stopped getting up at 4am regularly around 9/10. If he wakes early now he puts his headphones in and watches a movie and every day I'm thankful for that . If we are on holiday and he's excited he will wake really early, before it gets light . He didn't sleep well from around a month old and I remember a particularly horrific stage where he woke at 2/3am often and just wouldn't sleep again.
I tried everything! I mean absolutely everything to get him to sleep, stay asleep, wake later and nothing worked! I felt like I was doing something wrong all the time and was a bad mother and felt even worse when going through controlled crying (4 weeks of that). Ds has been diagnosed with ASD, ADHD and SPD so it could well be to do with all that but I don't know that for sure I just know how very bleak it all felt at the time... it's one of the reasons I only had one child.

My DS went through a phase of it at about 18months old. Probably lasted a few months. He's now 3.5 and loves his sleep. He's been waking about 7 now it's getting lighter, but yesterday it was 7.40!

When his waking got really early (5.30) we got strict. Treated it like waking in the night. Kept lights off. Keeping as quiet and dark as possible. Would lie him back down without making a fuss/chatting. Just saying,' no its still sleeping time'. Then walking back out the room. Just keep telling him/ actually lying him down. Going back in lying him down, patting back if he really screamed, but just doing same thing and really resisting picking him up or talking to him etc. Kept doing that for about an hour each morning till he got the idea and settled back down. We didn't actually get any more sleep to start with, but it was worth persisting not getting him up for us!

He has black out blind and black out curtains, but also used a gro-blind stuck to the window for a while too!!! We also changed the time the heating came on as that would start squeaking too.

I tweaked his naps at the same time, shifting his nap a bit later in the day. Not sure if actually helped but it might have got him into the routine of having to wait a bit longer for nap so needing to sleep later in the morning. That was the idea anyway!