11 month old 4am wake ups

[Leigh93]

Need some advice on my 11 month old sleep. He has always been an early riser he has never woken past 5am for a very very long time but recently it seems to be getting earlier and now we’re touching 4am with lots of upset night time wakings as well.

if I feed him a bottle when he wakes at 4am he will go back to sleep 70% of the time.

I’ve tried earlier bedtimes and later bedtimes neither makes a difference also tried dream feeding also makes
no difference.

a usually schedule for example if he wakes at 5am would be
nap 1 at 8am ish for usually 1.5 hours
nap 2 at around 2ish for anything between 1-1.5 hours
bedtime around 6.30ish

thanks

Aww bless you that's hard. The only thing that worked for me was putting baby to bed at the same time as I went to bed - 9pm. Any earlier than that and baby would be awake at 4 or 5am. I don't know if that's an option for you? If you can maybe change nap times somehow so baby goes to bed later?

Could you try capping both naps at 1 hour, or the first nap be 1.5 hours and the second one 30 minutes. Huckleberry give some good advice on this stuff.

You are aiming for far too much sleep. Average for this age is 10-14 hours in 24. Assume yours is in the middle at say 12.5 hours. With 2.5 hours of naps that leaves 10 hours of sleep at night. It’s completely unsurprising she is waking at 4am with a 6:30pm bedtime when you look at it like this. She’s just totally run out of sleep pressure. It’s often lots of naps or an early night, not both.

Id aim for a 30 minute nap in the morning and then 1.5 hours after lunch. Next time she wakes at a sensible hour I’d say do:

Wake 6am
Nap 9-9:30am
Nap 1-2:30pm
bedtime 7pm

Wake to sleep!

it’s a bit of a killer but it really does work.

if he is waking up at 4am regularly his sleep cycles are ending and physically waking him up. So set your alarm for about 3:40 and gently disturb him - not enough to wake him up. He will go back in to another sleep cycle.

This takes about 4 nights to reset his sleep pattern but it really does work.

Also is he eating enough real food during the day? My dd3 was a milk monster and would happily avoid food for a bottle of milk which couldn’t see her through the night

@VivaVivaa thanks it makes a lot of sense explained like that I think because he’s slept fine for such a long time with a 6.30 bedtime and two 1.5 hour naps I just didn’t consider that they need to now change as he’s getting older I also feel mean waking him up 😂 but will defo give this a try today thank you

@Hugosmaid I actually tried this last week but didn’t really go to plan as he didn’t wake up consistently at 4am and then also his night wake up were all over the place so he was already up at 3am himself put his dummy back in and wide awake at 4 so just gave up 🤦🏻‍♀️

We had this when my 3 year old was that age. Only thing that solved it.
1 hour morning.
2 lunch
8pm bed.

Or

30 mins morning
1.5 lunch.
7pm bed.

We found that even with cutting naps. 7pm is far too early and still is for my 3 year old. Still needs to be 745/ 8pm bed 💤 😴

It took a while to see any changed though. Doesn't happen immediately xx

Thanks for the advice everyone I tried the 30 min morning nap and 1.5 afternoon nap yesterday and he didn’t wake for the day until just before 6am which is a win for me compared to our 4-5 am wake ups but he still woke up three times throughout the night but went back off after a cuddle and his dummy. Would you say this is just a self settling issues rather than a daytime nap issue?

Personally I would say its because lo isn't used to so little sleep in day so may be a little overtired in night. Hence the wakeups. It will take time to change it, we found around 2 weeks to it all settling down when a change was made. But can be longer.

Personally I would say its because lo isn't used to so little sleep in day so may be a little overtired in night. Hence the wakeups. It will take time to change it, we found around 2 weeks to it all settling down when a change was made. But can be longer.