Sleeping FAQ: 6-9 Months – Early Morning Waking
Baby, age 7 months – Early morning waking |
My daughter, age seven and half months, has begun to wake up earlier and earlier. This last week it has been around 5.30am every morning. I have tried leaving her to cry, but she works herself up into such a state that it wakes my toddler up. She eats really well and sleeps well for an hour between 9am and 10am and two hours from 12 noon. She used to go to bed at 7pm but since the early-morning waking I am having to put her down around 6.30pm as she is so tired. With a toddler of eighteen months I am struggling to cope with such an early start. |
| All babies are different in the amount of sleep that they need and I think that your daughter is just one of those babies that probably needs slightly less sleep. Leaving a baby to cry at this time in the morning rarely works, in my opinion, and usually just enforces the early-morning waking even more. It is better to get to the cause of the early-morning waking and, in your daughter’s case, I think that the early-morning waking is being caused by too long a morning nap. I would advise that this nap needs to be cut back to around 20/30 minutes and that both the morning nap and the lunchtime naps must be moved on. The morning nap should be moved on to 9.30am and the lunchtime nap moved on to 12.30pm.
In order to shift the morning nap on and reduce it to 20/30 minutes your daughter needs to sleep to nearer 7am. Therefore, it is important that for a few days you feed her immediately when she wakes at 5.30am to help settle her back to sleep. Once she is settling back to sleep, you can move the morning nap on by five or ten minutes every couple of days until she is going down to sleep at 9.30am for 20/30 minutes. At this stage you should also push the lunchtime nap to 12.30pm and allow no more than two hours, making a total daytime sleep of no more than 2 and a half hours. If, for some reason, your baby sleeps less than two hours at lunchtime, you may need to give her a short nap between 4pm and 5pm, to avoid overtiredness. It is also important that you count any sleep after 7am as part of her daytime sleep allowance. If she sleeps even 10 or 15 minutes past 7am reduce the morning nap to 15 minutes. Once you have moved on your daytime naps, your daughter should manage to get to nearer a 7pm bedtime. By reducing the morning nap and shifting the naps on your baby should start to sleep later in the morning and the 5.30am waking should naturally disappear but until this happens I would continue to quickly settle her back to sleep with a feed. This solution is preferable to her getting into the habit of being awake from 5.30am every morning. If your baby does not start to sleep later in the morning I would advise that you continue to feed her back to sleep but gradually diluting the feeds following the advice in this case study. |
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