How To Combat Early Morning Waking

Sometimes, babies who have being sleeping through the night quite happily can suddenly begin to wake earlier and earlier in the mornings. They will wake and cry for attention or food – or both! For parents who feel they have only just got a handle on the whole ‘sleeping through’ thing, this can feel like a distressingly backward step.

There are a number of reasons for early morning waking in babies, and we will look at each in turn, as well as the ways to combat any problems.

Hunger

The most common reason for early morning waking, hunger is also the easiest problem to combat. It does, however, depend on the feeding routine you already have in place with your baby. Depending on his feeds throughout the day, it should be relatively straight forward to adjust the times and amounts of milk to help your baby go all the way through until morning – especially if he has previously slept through the night.

If you have been following a routine that required you to give a feed to your baby around 10.00pm to 11.00pm, you may find that if you drop this feed too soon it causes your baby problems sleeping through. Many parents drop this feed as soon as they begin weaning, or start to bring it forward too quickly – before the baby is ready. If this is the case, try re-introducing this feed until your baby is once again sleeping through until between 6.00am and 7.00am.

Once you have re-established a comfortable pattern, wait until your baby refuses this feed for three nights in a row, and becomes almost impossible to wake, before dropping it again. Now you should be on safe ground, and your baby ready to sleep all the way through from his last feed, at around 7.00pm, until morning.

Daylight

Something many parents forget about, daylight is a natural cue for our bodies to wake, and babies are even more susceptible to these rhythms than we are. Particularly in the summer months, your baby’s room can start to get light as early as 5.00am. If his waking seems to coincide with dawn, consider this as a possible reason for the early morning waking.

The remedy is quite simple – blackout blinds and curtains. These must be fitted completely flush with the window – any chinks of daylight will wake your baby. Your baby’s nursery should be pitch black in the daytime, so much so that you can barely see your hand in front of your face. If you get your baby used to sleeping in the dark as early on as possible, you won’t have to worry about night-lights later.

Habit

The last reason we will look at for early morning waking is habit. If your baby has been waking regularly for a feed between 4 and 6 in the morning, he may continue to do this even when hunger is no longer the reason. If this is the case, your baby needs to learn how to send himself off to sleep again – without being fed back to sleep. First, eliminate any wrong sleep associations, such as feeding or rocking to sleep. Next, allow your baby the chance to go off to sleep alone for as many of his naps as you can. Lastly, when he wakes in the early hours, offer him a drink of cooled-boiled water in his room with the lights down low. If habit is the cause of his waking, this will soothe him back to sleep, and you can eliminate hunger as the cause.

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