Help with 4 1/2 year olds early waking

[????]

Our little girl (4.5) has always been a pretty early riser but it's now averaging 5.30am, as it has been most of the dark winter mornings! 6am is a result! I'm especially noticing this as Mrs Quids is doing all our new ones feeding etc so I'm doing all the morning shift with our other 2 (our boy is 2 and would and sometimes does sleep far later). Any suggestions how we can try and push this back or is she just a lark (annoying for an owl like me)?

She's started school so energy should be burning away

She doesn't sleep in the day

She sleeps well... until she wakes in the morninfg, very little night waking

We've tried later nights (she currently goes to bed at 7pmish). They don't seem to alter this and obviously it's a struggle to keep her awake beyond 7pm with her early starts!

Any ideas?

[nunheadmum]

Could you try one of the Bunny alarm clocks to encourage her to stay in bed even if she does wake? My eldest (almost 4) has had one for a while now and it worked wonders for getting her over that early morning issue. If she wakes, she understands that she can't get up if Bunny is sleeping. She usually gets woken early these days as our 20mth old is waking around 6am. But as long as bunny is asleep, she lies there and usually drifts back off to sleep.

There are 2 main types:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sleep-Bunny-Alarm-Clock-Childrens/dp/B000EQGU9K

or

http://www.babysleepshop.com/acatalog/Sleepytime_Bunny_Clocks.html

If your little one really isn't going to go back to sleep, could she be encouraged to stay in bed with a toy or dolly (probably too dark for a book). My eldest does that at lunchtime for her rest and sometimes will end up drifting off to sleep if she needs it. Even if she isn't sleeping, she'll be resting a little more and (more importantly!) you can stay in bed longer!

I've tended to find that once they start to get more sleep, they start to want more. It's just finding a way to get them the extra sleep to start with.

[candj]

Our 5 year old went through this period after starting school last September. It was a nightmare because she would wake at 5am to go to the loo and then not be able to get herself back to sleep so would either be in our bed (and thus no sleep for us) or be sitting on our bedroom floor playing with my husband's iphone and watching mummy and daddy trying to sleep. I also had the fear that she would wake her two year old sister and that would be it for our sanity although this never happened.

We basically didn't allow her to have a huge amount of liquid (water) before bedtime. She has a little thermos of water next to her bed for when she's thirsty but usually drinks all of it before bedtime which would indicate to me that she didn't drink enough during the day at school or wherever. I just made sure she drank loads at breakfast and when she came home from school and with dinner, but no drinks after dinner from 5.45pm onwards (I still keep the thermos of water next to her bed). Also, made sure that she went to the loo before bedtime and on those occasions that she did drank a load of water before bedtime I would wake her up before we went to bed (10.30-11pm) to take her to the loo. This pretty much worked for us and was the culprit although we do have minor setbacks.

Moving back to London last summer, she wasn't used to the airplanes at that point and the sound of foxes this winter scared her, so I think it was also getting used to the noises around us - so perhaps for your household it's the new baby making noises/nightfeeds, etc that wake her or at least stir her out of a deep sleep.

We are fine now (sort of) with our daughter staying in her bed until 6ish, going to the loo and then getting back into bed and sometimes falling back asleep again. I agree with Nunheadmum that if you could get your little one to settle in her bed and play with some stuffed noiseless toys that it would be better and hopefully it's just a phase that she'll outgrow.

Good luck. Sorry for rambling post.

[largeginandtonic]

Hi there. I have a nearly 5 year old who has always been a bad sleeper and I know your pain! My feeling is that you somehow need to shift that 7pm bedtime back to something more like 7.30pm because otherwise you are effectively trapped into a cycle of early nights and early mornings.

Kids this age apparently need around 11 hours sleep a night (of course it varies and writing things like this often prompts a wave of posts from parents of perfect sleepers who protest that their child was still sleeping 12 hours straight from 7 till 7 until about age 8 or something!) and I also think that 5am and 5.30am are classic vulnerable points in the night-time, in that kids seem to go into a v light sleep at these points and are prone to wake up, especially if they are light/poor sleepers generally (or need the loo like candj's lo). I think it's possible that if your little one has nearly had her 11 hours by the time she hits the vulnerable spot of 5.30am then it's natural for her to wake rather than carry on sleeping.

I know you've said you tried a later bedtime, but did you give it a few weeks? I think that's how long it takes to notice the difference to be honest. Saying that, of course it's v hard to give it a few weeks during term time because of course she'll be pooped. So in your shoes I'd probably wait for the clocks to change in March and try to ensure that she doesn't adjust her body clock but sticks with a later bedtime. Or maybe wait for a Friday when she, for whatever reason, manages to sleep until 6am, seize that opportunity to shift bedtime forwards, stick with it over the weekend and hope that you can continue with it into the following week?

I know that some of my little girl's friends will play themselves on waking up but mine certainly wouldn't!

By the way there is an interesting thread running on mumsnet at the moment on why British kids are put to bed so 'early' compared to other countries with lots of differing and interesting viewpoints.

[redjam]

I'd second the bunny alarm clock, which we use in conjunction with reward charts when our oldest daughter goes through one of her early morning phases (normally in the summer for us). We also encourage her to play quietly on her own if she really can't go back to sleep - she looks at books on her own, puts the computer on and plays on CBeebies, or turns the telly on and curls up on the sofa with her blanket and teddy till it's time for us to get up. I realise this makes me sound like a terrible parent but my partner and I are also owls rather than larks and we just can't do early starts. But most of all I'd agree with the earlier posters that you need to get that bedtime later - my daughter normally goes to bed at 8pm and wakes at 7am, which seems to be fine for her (she's just turned five) - but anything before 7am is just not on in my book!