Struggling with early waking - 5/5:30am starts!

[Freddie15VES]

My 10 month old son has always been a great sleeper. Rarely wakes in the night etc but he’s always liked to get up early, I say early I mean around 7am. Which was great, then he’d had bedtime about 6:30/7pm.

Currently he wakes up at around 5am every single morning. Like clockwork. It’s to the minute 5:30am at the moment, this morning it was 5:31am and the one before it was 5:30 bang on. Nothing is waking him as we live in a quiet area and he has white noise on. We live in a new build house so his room stays lovely and warm (20/21 degrees) hes dressed appropriately so I’ve made sure he isn’t too warm if anything. The heating doesn’t come on to wake him up, he has 3 meals in the day including 4 x 8oz bottles…so I’m sure it’s not hunger.

HELP these early mornings are just killing me. Is it a regression? Or just habit? Any tips would be really helpful!

I thought it was a regression but it’s been a lonnnng time now. But now we’re stuck in a routine of him getting up so so early that he ends up going to bed really early!

What’s your routine for the day? What times does he nap and is bedtime still 6:30/7?

I found early starts at the same age basically signalled the need to either start cutting down naps (the morning one) or push bedtime later. Eventually you will be at the promise land of being able to drop one big nap, which for us stopped the early starts in less than a week. 10 months is likely too early to cope with 1 nap though. I guessed your DC would be around the 10-12 month mark from the title - it’s a difficult time as 2 naps (especially if long) are almost too much but 1 is not enough.

So at the moment our ‘routine’ is this -

5/5:30am awake + bottle
An hour later we’ll have breakfast
8:30/9am nap which I wake him from after an hour
Then we’ll do play/lunch/whatever errands we have for the day
12/12:30pm nap 1.5 hours
Which results in his latest bedtime being around the 5:30/5:45pm mark

It’s the bedtime, he’s actually sleeping great - 12 hours!
Why do you wake him from first nap out of interest?
I’s let him sleep as long as he needs. Stretch out the time between the next nap.
My dd same age and naps around 2. If you can stretch out until 2, you’ve got a better chance of a a 7pm ish bedtime and a later wake up time but i think it starts with letting him sleep longer for that first nap

That's 12 hours so I don't think you're going to get any longer out of him if he's in bed so early. You might have to persevere with a few days of grumpiness to shift bedtime later again.

I know arghhhh I’m in a vicious circle!!

Someone told me that his morning nap was too long 🤯

Honestly he sleeps great. He’s absolutely flat out. And he probably cries in the morning because we’re trying to make him sleep more when he doesn’t need it!!

I will just let him sleep as long as he wants for his morning nap then keep him awake for longer until his next one

Any ideas what kind of wake windows etc? Do they look about right for 10 months? 3/3.5 hour?

Try and get your naps at 10 and 2 then you can have a more reasonable 7pm bed and 7am wake. To do that don't cut the morning nap then shift the afternoon nap and bedtime later so you end up with a later wakeup and later morning nap x

Bedtime far too early! You can’t expect him to sleep over 12 hours overnight. Let the morning nap go longer for a few days to push everything else back. Try moving everything backwards 15 min at a time and then do 6.30pm bedtime for a week and see what happens with the morning.

Oh my goodness yes most people in this situation have a 5am start despite a 7 or 7:30 bedtime because the morning nap is too early or too long! It’s way more simple for you - your bedtime is just far too early. Shift everything back by half an hour, remembering the morning wake will be the last to catch up…and keep pushing back until you get a more acceptable bedtime/wake up. When bedtime is more like 7pm or later, if you start getting early wakes again then shorten your morning nap until it’s eventually gone.

You just need to shift everything back 10/15mins a day until bedtime is 7 and wake up is 7.

You've actually got a good routine, you're just in the wrong time zone

At that age my DD was doing 2x 1.5 hour naps. I’d let him sleep longer for the first nap but push it back a bit to more like 9/9:15 then if he sleeps for 1.5 hours you can push his second nap back then a later bedtime. Eventually you wanna do:-

7: wake
9:30-11: nap 1
2-3:30: nap 2
7: bedtime

You have a great routine, everything just needs pushing back slightly.

As everyone else has said, can’t expect him to sleep longer than 12 hours! At that age my son had a long morning nap (2/2 and a half hours) then would have a short 30/45 minute nap late afternoon to take him through to a 7/7.30 bedtime xx

My DS is 10mo and he was waking at 0430-0530 despite a 7pm bedtime for MONTHS. We had to reduce no of naps. Like others have said 12 hours is great! We think we're winning because DS sleeps 7pm - 6am!!!

You might want to think about pushing back 1st bottle as well. At the moment it's possible you've trained his metabolism to want milk at 0530. We do 1st bottle at 7am no matter when DS wakes so we stay on roughly the right schedule. I DO limit the morning nap as well when needed (rare to be fair). That means we get a longer afternoon nap which then gets us through to bedtime better - and has set us up for when DS drops to one nap. But that's what works for us - might not be right for you. We're definitely into more day sleep = less night sleep these days.

I actually don't think it matters how you do the naps - other than nap 1 you just need to shift the whole routine back day by day until you get to about 7pm bedtime.

So - update for you all!

I just let him sleep as much as he wanted yesterday in the morning nap. He woke up at 5am (standard) I stretched first nap until 8:30am and he slept until just past 10am. So I made sure his 2nd nap was stretched out too, kept him awake for 3hr45mins….and he slept until 3:35! Which meant I could do a 7:30pm bedtime!!! His dad saw him after work, actually got to spend some time with him before he went to bed which was lovely. He still woke at 5:58am haha but I’ll take that as a good start to a new routine. I didn’t feed him his milk until 6:45am either. I think to be completely honest I had just way over googled everything haha, looking back now waking him up from his first nap, like why was I doing that haha he obviously needed the sleep!

Well done thats good! Apparently takes 3 weeks of being strict to set a sleep routine. Then you can flex it a bit- up late if family come around one day or early wake up for holiday etc.

Yes Ds was still waking at 5am with 9pm bedtime at that age! 5.30pm-5.30am is a huge sleep.

Now nearly 2 years he’s slowly shifted and we usually get 8.30pm-7am. That’s with 1 or no nap.