How to keep your early-riser sleeping

If your child is waking up before the crack of dawn every day (i.e. before 6 a.m. after a 7:30 bedtime), this checklist is a good starting place for solving the issue: 

• Offer them more food before bedtime to fill their tank a little more.

• Use blackout blinds; make sure the room is dark enough and that street lights aren't seeping in around the sides.

• Avoid night lights or light-up toys in the room. The perfect amount of light for a child’s room is to have a night light on in the hallway with their door left open just a crack. And cover any LED lights from devices in the room (humidifiers, monitors) with electrical tape.

• Put an extra layer on your child, so that they don’t become a little chilly at 5 a.m. when body temperatures tend to drop. If your child doesn’t move around a whole lot while they sleep, you could also slip a extra light blanket on them when you’re heading to bed. But keep the room temperature between 18 and 21 degrees C.

• Use a little white noise (placed away from your child’s bed) to help drown out early-morning birds, garbage trucks or snowplows rolling by, a heater kicking in or a parent getting up early for work.

All of these tips assume that your child is falling asleep independently, without any sleep 'props' like Mom or Dad falling asleep beside them (and then going off to their own bed for the night), or for younger children, falling asleep feeding or with a pacifier. Since we have a lot of light-sleep phases in the early morning hours, your child will almost certainly wake up at 5 a.m. looking for their prop.

If you'd like more tips for helping your child sleep well, I have a free video series - one for every age group from infants to age 10.

How to keep your sleep with the time change

If this is your first fall-back time change with a baby, or you have parenting-induced amnesia about last year, here’s what’s going to happen:

This Saturday, the clocks turn back an hour, meaning your child’s perfectly great 7:30 bedtime is suddenly 6:30 p.m. the next day. After 1.5 seconds of celebrating that idea, your bubble bursts with the realization that they’ll also be waking up a whole hour earlier, which could be 6 a.m. Or maybe 5. Yuck.

But you can fight the time-change chaos! The key is to start early:

Starting the week ahead of time-change weekend, put your baby or young child to bed 10 or 15 minutes later than usual. Their bodies won’t usually notice a change that small. Then do the same thing two nights later, and two nights after that. If you do it gradually enough (and you’ve got solid blackout blinds in your child’s bedroom), their morning wakeup time should be moving a little later as well.

The idea is that by the time Sunday rolls around, your little one will already be on the new time (or only 15 minutes off) and not rearing to go when the clock shows 5:30 a.m.

If your child is already waking up too early in the morning, there are lots of things you can do to change that: you can book a free call with me any time to talk it through.

Why your baby will never sleep through the night

From about month 2 of a baby's life, most moms start wondering if their little one will ever sleep through the night.

By month 4 (when the vast majority of babies go through a sleep regression), sleeping through the night can become an obsession, or a seemingly impossible dream.

The truth is, technically, your baby will never sleep through the night.  That's right. Never!

That's because none of us ever does.

All human beings sleep in cycles. We start out in Phase 1 or light sleep - the kind when you're just nodding off and it's easy for someone to wake you. Then we move into Phases 2, 3 and 4, each becoming progressively deeper. (You know when your alarm clock wakes you and it takes a minute to figure out where you are and what's happening? That's because you were woken out of stage 4 or deep sleep.)

After that, we move into dream sleep, also called rapid-eye-movement or REM sleep because of the rolling eye movements that happen while we're dreaming. If we're woken during this phase, we often remember our dreams. 

For adults, each cycle lasts about an hour and a half. But the really important point for you and your baby is what happens after we've cycled through all of these phases?

We wake up. Every time.

Remember before you had kids, when you would blissfully sleep 8 or 9 hours straight and wake up feeling refreshed? You didn't know it, but you had actually woken up about 5 times during the night; maybe you rolled over, adjusted the covers, or nudged your snoring partner. So why don't we remember all these little wake ups?

The reason is simple: we learned at a very early age how to go from one complete sleep cycle to the next with barely a conscious moment. That is the key behind the commonly used term "self soothing." When it comes to your baby's sleep, self soothing is simply the ability to go from one sleep cycle to the next without waking up fully and crying out for help to get back to sleep.

So while it may seem like your baby really wants something else, once they reach a healthy 6 or 7 months and move past the age of actually needing calories to get through the night, what they're really crying out for is more sleep!

I know, I know - your baby drains two breasts or downs an 8-ounce bottle every waking, so they must be hungry, right?

Well, yes and no. If every time you had a little trouble falling back to sleep during the night, you got up and ate a peanut butter sandwich, pretty soon your body would start waking you up at those times, expecting calories, even though you didn't need them. You would probably even feel some pangs of hunger (and you wouldn't eat as much for breakfast because your belly was still full from your night-time picnics).

So if your baby is waking up every hour or two (and let's face it, a 6-pound newborn doesn't even need to feed that often), it's because they just haven't figured out that ever-important life skill for getting the sleep their brains and bodies need: how to go from one sleep cycle to the next without help from something or someone else.

That's where sleep "training" comes in. As circus-animal as the term can make our babies sound, sleeping is actually a skill they need to learn.

The good news is, you don't have to shut the door and let your baby cry-it-out until 7 a.m. (ugh). There is a supportive, gradual way that gives your baby the chance to learn with you right there beside them, while also shifting their metabolism toward getting all their calories during the day, rather than at the all-night snack bar. (It also works for babies who wake up after every sleep cycle looking for their pacifier or Dad's arms to be rocked in.)

In fact, most moms I've worked with tell me that daytime feeding becomes way better once their babies ditch the snack-and-snooze habit at night. (They also tell me that it's like "a miracle", "amazing" and "OMG I can't believe she slept through the night!" when their little one starts knocking off 11-12 hours without a peep.)

Once your baby learns the skill of moving from one sleep cycle to the next, they start to do it with just a quiet little moment of changing position, just like we do. They'll do that new trick 6 times a night until they're actually ready for food.

And the best part is, when morning comes, everyone wakes up happy.