It’s Linda, owner of Sleep Tight Consultants. Today on the Sleepy Qs podcast, we’re going to talk about early rising. We’re going to start off today by going over a little bit about what early rising actually is and why it happens, particularly in the beginning when babies are newborns, we’re going to talk about why it happens when you’re sleep training. We’re going to go over the major causes of early rising, and then other things to watch out for that could be contributing to the early rising phenomenon with your child.
What is early rising?
So what is early rising exactly? In its technical sense, early rising is when your child wakes up between 4 and 6 in the morning and either doesn’t go back to sleep or has a really hard time going back to sleep. Early rising is very common with newborns in particular, and that’s because the early morning sleep is the most unconsolidated sleep for a newborn baby’s brain. What you will often find is that in the beginning of the night, they’ll start to do a long stretch up front. That means that you might get a nice, you know, two hours stretch of sleep three, four, six hour stretch of sleep, maybe even up to eight hours.
And then after that, they go back to their regular pattern of waking in the early morning that usually lines up with whatever their feeding schedule is throughout the day. Maybe that means they wake every two hours, every three hours after that. And as you move into the early morning hours, that sleep then starts to become very fragmented and it’s harder and harder for your baby to stay asleep at that time. What I most often see for newborns, in particular, is that once you get into the early morning, that’s where parents really start doing whatever they need to do in order to get their child back to sleep. Maybe that involves holding their child more in that early morning time. Maybe it means that that’s when some co-sleeping happens and really as long as that’s happening safely, that is definitely fine to do, especially for newborns when that sleep pattern is so unconsolidated at that age.
Often the last part of night sleep to improve
I also find that early rising tends to be the last piece of the puzzle to resolve it self when it comes to children learning sleep skills. So what that means is that if your child has been accustomed to going into their sleeping space asleep, so maybe you’ve held them, rock them, bounce them, fed them to sleep, and now you’re going to be changing that and you’re going to be helping your child learn how to fall asleep independently and how to get themselves back to sleep overnight. The way things typically look is that in the beginning bedtime is going to be hard. That is a new and different skill that you’re helping your child learn. And they have to figure out what that’s going to look like.
So that means that you may experience some challenges at bedtime, there are going to be night wakenings and then you may have some early rising. Then as things start to evolve, now bedtime becomes the easiest part of the day for your child to fall asleep. So they go in, they roll around, they spend up to 20 minutes working on putting themselves to sleep. That all goes very smoothly. Then the night wakening started to resolve. And then you might see that, you know, look at that your child fell asleep at 7 and you didn’t hear a peep from them until 5. And now 5 o’clock they’re awake. They’ve just had 10 hours of sleep. And it’s really, really hard for them to get themselves back to sleep in that early morning time. And that’s because that early rising is the last piece of the puzzle to resolve itself.
Causes of early rising
There are four causes of early rising in children. I’m going to go over each of those causes and explain a little bit more about why those things cause early rising. The first and major cause of early rising is when children go into their sleeping space already asleep at bedtime. That means that you’ve used some sort of a sleep crutch to help your child fall asleep at the onset of sleep. And as I’ve said many times before, and as we’ve probably discussed on another podcast, for babies in the early months, these are often things that we need to do as parents in order to help our children go to sleep when they’re very young, particularly for children under four months.
But as you move past four months, this is where children start to become capable of putting themselves to sleep. But when you continue to use a sleep crutch to get them to sleep at bedtime, now at the easiest time of the day, your child has had a lot of help falling asleep. And so as you move throughout the night, they need whatever that is that you’ve done and more in order to get themselves back to sleep.
And so if your child can’t put themselves to sleep at the easiest time of the night, when you get to the hardest time it’s going to be nearly impossible. So this is a major cause of early rising, and it’s something that I always work on with families first to make sure that the child has that skill so that when you get into the early morning, now your child has the capability of falling back to sleep independently.
Another cause of early rising is not getting enough sleep during the day and how much sleep your child needs during the day is largely based on their age. So, as an example, if your child is between 4 and 6 months old, then they probably need anywhere from 3 to 4 hours of sleep during the day. And that amount of sleep changes as they get older are usually becoming less and less. So if your child isn’t getting enough sleep during the day, that you’re not able to get them to nap when I start working with a family, I have parents do whatever they have to do in order to help their child nap in order to prevent early rising in particular.
So if your child isn’t getting enough sleep during the day now, when you get to bedtime, they’re going to be overtired. That over tiredness at bedtime causes their brain to start producing cortisol. Cortisol is that stress hormone that inhibits sleep and it makes it hard for your child to fall asleep and it also makes it hard for them to stay asleep. So you often get more night wakenings and now when you get to the early morning hours, now they get a spike in their cortisol level. And that means that cortisol resurges, and it makes your child wake up and look very alert at that time.
Another cause of early rising is being awake for too long between your child’s last nap and bedtime. Again, this awake window is largely based on your child’s age. So as an example, if your child’s between 4 and 6 months, that awake window is probably not much more than about two hours. That awake window starts to lengthen as your child gets older, and then they are capable of staying awake for longer periods of time before over tiredness kicks in. Again, this long stretch of awake time between waking up from a nap and being ready to go to sleep at bedtime causes that cortisol spike, which again, and resurges between 4 and 6 in the morning.
The last cause of early rising is going to bed too late. And for most children, especially pre toddlers, that is going to be somewhere around 9 or 10 o’clock at night or later, that’s too late for your child to go to sleep. Again, that causes a lot of over tiredness. So if you feel like, Oh, my child has a naturally late bedtime, or if I put them to bed later, they’re going to wake up later. This is actually not the case. Most children need an earlier bedtime in order to be able to get enough sleep overnight and in order to not be overtired and cause them to wake up in the early morning.
Early morning feedings
Other things that cause early rising to continue to happen are if you’re feeding your child very early in the morning. So in many instances, if I’m working with a younger child, I will encourage parents to just start to push that first feeding later. I don’t, generally speaking, call anything before 6:00 AM to be morning, but for some children, if they wake up before 6 and now they’re scooped up and fed immediately, right at 6:00 AM, it often causes their blood sugar to spike earlier. And it can cause that early rising to continue to happen. In many instances, I’ll have parents start pushing that feeding to 6:15, 6:30, eventually 6:45. And maybe even as far as 7, moving it very gradually so that your child’s body starts to adjust to not needing feeding that early and that can often start to shift that early rising.
Early morning screen time reinforcement
Another cause of early rising to persist is when children wake up early and now they immediately get to watch a screen early in the morning. And trust me, I understand when children wake up early, we are exhausted. And the easiest thing to do, the path of least resistance is to say, “Oh, here’s the iPad. Just watch whatever you want to watch.” Or here go the cartoons. And I’m going to snooze right next to you while you’re watching something. But the knowledge that you can watch a screen early in the morning is highly incentivizing for children and will cause them to wake up earlier in anticipation of being able to watch that screen.
A little funny story here that I’ll tell you. I was back home visiting my best friend from where I grew up and this was last summer or so, and her daughter was almost 2 at the time. And they were staying with her mom and her daughter was waking up early and sometimes children do wake up early when you’re traveling. They go through that early morning sleep cycle. They have a hard time falling back to sleep when they notice that everything around them is very new and different. And so her daughter was waking up early and her mom was scooping her up and taking her to watch doggy TV. And lo and behold what started happening? She started waking earlier and earlier and shouting from her crib, ” Hug doggies! Hug doggies!” and insisting that grandma come and take her out and let her watch doggie TV. Thankfully, when they got home and there was no grandma or doggy TV anymore, she went back to sleeping in again. But this is a lesson that children will often wake up early with the excitement and knowledge that they can watch some screen.
Early morning snuggles in the bed
Another thing that can cause this to continue to happen is if, as soon as your child wakes up in the morning, they get to come hang out on your bed. So certainly if your child is falling back to sleep in your bed, this is going to be problematic. It’s unpredictable when this might happen. And so your child will wake up early in anticipation of being able to come sleep in your bed. Or even if they just know that they can come and hang out in your bed and snuggle in the morning, which I know is so sweet, I really, really would advise against doing this because again, children will wake up, they don’t know when they get to do that. And so now they’re just are anticipating that it might happen at some arbitrary point in time and it can cause that early waking to continue to happen.
Early morning naps
Another cause of early rising is when your child wakes up very early and then goes down for a nap really early. This is particularly a problem for younger babies who just can’t say awake that long. So for instance, if your baby wakes up at 5 in the morning and you’ve held off on getting them until 6, but now, you know, 6:30, they’re exhausted and they go back to sleep and now they take a huge two hour nap.
As an aside, this is a phenomenon that happens most often when there’s only one child because what happens is that parents go back to sleep and they’re thrilled. They’re thinking, “Oh, I can get another couple hours of sleep.” If you have older children, usually you can’t do this. And so it doesn’t work out like that.
What happens when children take an early morning nap, one that starts before 8:00 AM is that that sleep is part of their REM sleep from the night before. It will cause them to continue to wake up early because their brain knows, “Oh, it’s okay. I can wake up early because I can go back to sleep really early.”
So most often I encourage parents to really try to hold off on that morning nap until at least 8:00 AM, especially for younger babies. But if your child can’t make it until 8:00 AM, which I understand if they’re very young and this is just not something they’re capable of doing yet, because they’ve been awake for too long, you can do a cat nap from about 7 to 7:30. So it’s a half an hour nap. You don’t want them going through too many sleep cycles. Cause again, that causes that early rising to become more ingrained. But you can do a cat nap, 7 to 7:30, get your child up. And then their first real nap is now going to be around 9 or 9:30, again, depending on their age and what their awake window is.
This cat nap is not something that you really can do longterm. You definitely want to phase it out by seven months or so usually by then children can make it from an early wake up to at least 8:00 AM. And so you’re really working towards that.
Whole schedule shifted too early
Another scenario that I’ve seen play out is when children have a schedule that’s just all shifted very early. So as I was just talking about that early morning nap happens and now the second nap happens. And if there’s a third nap that happens too early as well. And so now your child is going to bed for the night at say 5 o’clock. Now at this point, even if they sleep 11 to 12 hours, they’re still, I’m going to be up early again.
I worked with a family recently where the child was taking two naps and their whole schedule was shifted very early. So I think he was about 12 months old, just a little bit over one. The morning nap was early. It was starting as early as 8:00 AM. The second nap was starting at noon. He was awake by two o’clock and now bedtime I’m was even earlier than 6 o’clock. He could barely make it to even six. And so he was going to bed at 5 waking up the next day at sometimes 4, sometimes 5, very early. And so what we did in that instance is we started to shift all of his naps later, so that bedtime could be later. And lo and behold, once we got to a place where he could go to bed at 7, not over tired and sleep a good 11 to 12 hours, now the early rising resolved itself.
Snooze button feeding
The last scenario that I often see play out with early rising is when you’re doing, what’s referred to as snooze button feed. So when children wake up early, in many instances, we figure out that, “Oh, if I just feed you at that time, you’ll go back to sleep.” This could mean that you do a 5:00 AM nursing. It could mean that you give your child a bottle at that time, whatever it is that they go back to sleep and now they sleep another couple hours. And this can work for a long period of time. And if this works for your family, then far be it for me to say that this is a problem.
Where the challenge comes in is when you either decide to wean or you decide that your child no longer needs that bottle, or even if you’re doing that feeding and they’re not going back to sleep, then this is where it becomes more problematic. Now you have to help your child learn how to go back to sleep at that really hard time of the day without the feeding. And they’re going to have to develop that skill, which is something that is, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the last piece to resolve itself. So it’s going to take a lot of persistence. It’s going to take really having a plan for how to follow through at that time of the day. So you don’t get stuck with that early wake now with no feeding as that snooze button.
Resolving it!
So, what do you do to resolve early rising? I should mention that early rising is a very stubborn and very persistent problem to resolve. And it happens at the time of the day when as parents, we are least able to be consistent. In many instances, our resolve is low. We’re very tired. It’s that early morning and all we want to do is to go back to sleep. In order to resolve it. You really want to first make sure that you’re working through all of those four factors that I mentioned before. One, that your child is going into the crib fully awake or into their bed, fully awake at bedtime, not a little bit sleepy, kind of drowsy and then I help him the last step of the way. Fully 100% awake, meaning that it takes roughly 10 to 20 minutes for your child to fall asleep at bedtime. That’s how, you know, your child has done all of the work at the easiest time of the night to fall asleep so that when he or she gets to the hardest time they can do that again and again. You want to make sure that they are getting enough sleep during the day, that they’re not awake for too long between that last nap and bedtime, that that awake window is suitable for their age. And then, of course the bedtime is not too late. I would make sure that you’re pushing that first feeding of the day later, whether that’s nursing or a bottle or they’re drinking milk or having snacks in the morning. You’re pushing that first time that your child is eating later and later in the morning so that they can make it to that time and they’re not waking up hungry in anticipation of being able to eat early. That you’re pushing screen time later, that this doesn’t happen ideally until after breakfast. One of the reasons that this screen time is a big problem is because the screen actually puts your child’s brain into it asleep like state. So they wake up really early and now they’re zoning out, watching the screen and they’ve already kind of gone back to sleep during that time, while they’re watching the screen, rather than being able to go back to sleep when they’re in their bed.
Also, you want to make sure that you’re really not getting your child out of their bed and starting the day until at least 6:00 AM. When your child gets up early and their body’s exposed to light, it means that all of that melatonin production that happens overnight just essentially shuts off. And now their body knows, okay, this is daytime. I can start the day. So really encouraging children to continue to stay in their beds, to lay quietly in bed for older children. To go back to sleep, especially for younger children so that their body is adjusting to not waking up at that time and not again, being exposed to light.
Behavior modification lights
Lastly I should mentioned that for children over about 18 months and certainly by two years old, when children are having early rising, I often recommend using a behavioral modification light. This is a device that helps your child understand when it’s time for sleeping and when it’s time to wake up. The one that I most often recommend is called the Hatch Baby. And this is essentially a cone shape looking light that looks a certain way when it’s time to sleep and it changes. And it looks a certain way when it’s time to wake up. I most often recommend that parents make it red for sleeping because red is a good color for sleep. It doesn’t block melatonin production, and then have it changed to either green, which green means go, red means stop. So if your child understands the stoplight, this is something that they can understand as well. Or you can have it changed your child’s favorite color when it’s the wake up time in the morning. The best part about the Hatch is it is controlled by an app on your phone and so you can adjust it as you need to remotely. The most important thing about behavior modification lights is that if your child wakes up before the light changes, it’s a essential that you not allow the day to start, that you not get them up, that they don’t get up and start starting the day before the light changes to the wake up color. This makes the entire light concept meaningless. For younger children, really 18 months up through two years old or before they really solidly know their colors, I will often recommend using the Good Nite Lite. This is actually spelled G OOD N I T E L I T E. If you’re looking for, it’s not sold on Amazon, you have to go through their website. And this is a device that looks like a blue moon when it’s time to sleep. And it changes to a yellow sun when it’s time to wake up. The actual user friendliness of this, isn’t quite as nice as the, as something that has an app that works with it, but for a younger child, it helps them because they understand the symbol of the blue moon and the symbol of the yellow sun. So it helps with just the understanding of the concept in general.
The last thing that you could do also, if you’re looking for a less expensive option, I love smart light bulbs. Smart light bulbs are actually the technology that are used in the Hatch Baby light. So it’s the same concept. And if your child has a closet that you can put a different light bulb in, or sometimes parents use a lamp, as long as it’s not a really, you know, a big lamp that’s right next to their bed and that it might be too bright, but a smart light bulb is also attached to an app and you can control the light on it. So when I’ve had it, children who like to break all of the things in their room, toddlers in particular, or they like to mess with things and a parent just doesn’t feel comfortable having something like the Hatch in the room, then I’ve had them put a smart light bulb in a closet and either leave the door open a little bit, or they can, I can see the color of the light from under the door or through the crack in the door. This functions in the same way as the hatch, you have it a certain color when it’s time for sleeping, usually red. And then it changes to the wake up color in the morning. And no matter what, you’re always emphasizing the concept to your child: when it’s red, it’s time to sleep; when it changes, now it’s time to wake up.
So I hope that this conversation about early rising has been helpful for you. This is Linda Szmulewitz from the Sleepy Qs podcast. Thanks so much for listening in.
