Advice for early wake ups

[Danwm]

First post here, looking for some advice.

After a bit of a sleep journey, we're in a position now where our 20 month old is settling himself to sleep quickly without fuss, and sleeping solidly through the night. It is rare that he wakes in the night and if he does the vast majority of the time he'll drop off to sleep again without us going in. From reading other posts I know that getting to this point is a fair achievement!

We are however finding that he is consistently waking up around 5:15am having gone to sleep routinely between 6:45 and 7pm. Whilst I know babies are notoriously early risers, this seems particularly early! Our toddler will sometimes sleep on one of us on a chair at that point for another 30-40 mins so is definitely still tired, but will not self settle or respond to our usual method of checking in, leaving the room, and returning every 5 mins as we would in the evening.

Our toddler sleeps either in the buggy or car for around 1.5 - 2 hours in the daytime usually between 12:30 - 2:30pm. He is super resistant to cop naps in the daytime, but is very happy going into his cot at bedtime!

Advice needed - are the 5:15 wake ups just to be expected, or from experience is there anything you would do or try differently with timings? Or anything else?

First time parents here so any advice warmly welcomed!

Thanks!

Have you tried a later bed time?

Try a later bedtime, 6:45 is really early and he's probably maxed out the amount of sleep he needs by 5:15am. There's only a certain amount they can sleep in 24 hours and he's currently doing 12.5 which is pretty average. Any change to bedtime can take up to two weeks to see effects in the morning so don't give up after a couple of days.

A 8pm bedtime may get you a 6:30 start which is much more reasonable 😊

Thank you both! Around 2-3 months ago we were going up to bed at 7, asleep by 7:30 but finding wake up times were the same and so he was super underslept! Will try a bit later again though and stick with it for a few weeks in that case! Thank you!

If he's anything like my DS which his schedule seems identical to them it won't matter how late you put him down, he'll still wake at that time and be grumpy that he hasn't had enough sleep because you put him down later😅 5-5:30 has been my wake up time since he was tiny, you get used to it eventually

Both my 2 sons were early risers, always awake by 6am, my first DC wasn’t a great sleeper and went to bed finally quite late, but did sleep through to 6. My second needed way more sleep and had to woken up in the afternoon after a couple of hours, but would be asleep 8pm but took a while to go through the night. Fortunately my DH was an early riser so he would take DC downstairs and make them breakfast and then I would get up at 7. In childhood they were always up early, which was good, we could take our time getting ready for school and weekend sports.