Episode 179: Why is My Baby Up for the Day at 5 am?

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

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Welcome to The Kids Sleep Show podcast, where we dive into the magical world of sleep and all things parenting. Join us as we embark on a journey filled with expert advice, practical tips, and heartwarming stories that will transform your little ones into sleep superheroes and empower you to navigate the beautiful chaos of parenting. I’m your host, Courtney Zents, and I’m on a mission to change how the world views sleep and provide accessible sleep coaching resources for all families to build healthy sleep habits in their home for children and adults of all ages. As an award winning speaker, author, and pediatric sleep expert, myself and my team of consultants work intimately with families around the world to teach healthy sleep habits to children and adults. I believe wholeheartedly that sleep is the foundation for which a happy home is built, so let’s sleep together.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode. Today, we are talking about why your baby is up at 5AM for the day, what you can do to fix it. And no, early morning wakings are not a thing. And no, they shouldn’t start their day at 04:17AM because they seem wide awake.

So first and foremost, I have been a baby sleep coach for a decade and have seen thousands of children in our tiny transitions practice here and have seen a lot of experience in how to manage early morning wakings. Now, I will tell you, there are things that can cause early morning wakings that are always the first line of defense that you have to look at. And then we start to look at, you know, kind of second level challenges that might be causing that early morning waking. So I want to first start with some Okay. Children’s sleep cycles, they will generally sleep somewhere between eleven to twelve hours overnight, presuming that their schedule is set up properly in the daytime.

So what I mean by that is the best bedtime for a baby that I have found in my practice is somewhere between seven and 08:00 at night. Okay. That is a general baseline that works with most families in our practice here, with the exception of different parts of the world where I know culturally they just don’t go to bed till later. And in those situations, we essentially add in an additional nap and bedtime happens later because the child will still wake up somewhere between generally six and eight in the morning because there’s an aspect of their biological clock that focuses on the sunlight. Okay.

That being said, for ninety five percent of our clients, a bedtime between seven and 08:00 for an infant is completely realistic, expected, and really what’s best for them from a circadian rhythm standpoint. Right? They have the ability to produce melatonin as they start growing and their body starts doing so. And melatonin is the hormone of darkness, meaning that when the sun goes down, ocularly, baby’s eyes are what kind of start to trigger the rise in melatonin, which is the sleep hormone, if you will. Right?

It’s the hormone of darkness. And so it is really preparing the body to sleep. I know there’s a lot of misconceptions about that. And then as the night goes on, the amount of melatonin in a baby’s body starts to dwindle. And then towards the morning hours between four and six in the morning, it’s the lightest stages of sleep.

It is the coldest body temperature and there is the highest levels of cortisol, which is that stimulant hormone that prepares a body to wake for the day. Okay. The first six hours of a child’s sleep is the deepest and most restorative. You might find with your infant, you could go in and run the vacuum at 10:00 at night and they’re not going to budge. But if you fart at 04:00 in the morning down the hall, they’re going to come and wake up and you’re going to hear him on the monitor.

Right. We used to have a client that her husband was a nurse and he would leave for the hospital really early in the morning. And whenever the garage door would open, it would wake him up because the garage door was below the baby’s nursery. And it took us like three weeks to figure out what was going on because I’m like, what is the variable here? And it wasn’t till he had off that day that the baby slept in and we were like, oh my gosh.

It’s the garage door. You know? And it’s something as stupid as that that you don’t even think of that, you know, can disturb sleep. My husband’s, you know, our garage is below our room and I’m up early. Sometimes I’m up there in in, you know, the morning, and I go out into the garage, and I open the garage door.

And it every time wakes him up, like, sorry. I forgot. You know? Because he can hear it up in our bedroom. So, you know, it’s just you’ve gotta kinda look at those variables, and that’s your first part to understand.

Like, you got to kind of set your kid up for success. I know a lot of times when we have kids, we’re like, they’re I’m not changing my schedule. They’re gonna do things on my schedule, and I’m not gonna do things on their schedule. And while that might work for you for a little bit, it’s not gonna work for a long time, and you are gonna need to get your child to bed a little earlier, especially as the naps start to consolidate because even that late bedtime becomes equally challenging after a child gets over the age of one. When you’re a baby, you can kinda mess with it a little bit because you have the ability to adjust naps to a certain degree.

But that brings me to the next point. Right? With early wakings, you’ve got to look at setting them up with the right structure in the day. So kind of a bedtime between seven and eight yields a waking somewhere between six and eight in the morning if they’re sleeping eleven to twelve hours overnight. Okay.

If your child is on a forty five to sixty minute sleep cycle, which most kids are. Right. And let’s assume their cycles fifty minutes. Okay. You can actually count through the night where they are going to wake up.

And that’s how parents can start to identify whether it’s a habit or not, when it comes to their child waking, right. So you’ve got whether it’s a habit, which would be, you know, every night at 2AM at nine months old, they’re waking up for milk. Okay. At nine months old, every night at 2AM, you’ve created a habit based waking. Because at nine months, they shouldn’t need to eat overnight anymore from a, you know, ability to manage milk intake.

They need 24 to 32 ounces of milk in the daytime hours to sleep through the night. And by nine months, their belly is certainly big enough to handle that milk in the day. It doesn’t mean they’re not hungry overnight because you’re at the Vegas buffet drinking, you know, a six ounce bottle at 2AM. What it means is that you have to move that milk if your nine month old is still waking overnight to eat and slowly decrease it to eight and a half ounces and pace feed them to eight ounces to seven and a half to seven ounces. And over the course of a week, you’re slowly kind of robbing from Peter to pay Paul to move that milk into the daytime.

And if it is not a habit, but hunger, they will naturally then sleep through the night. If it is hunger, they will continue to wake. And that’s how, you know, it’s a hunger based waking even after you move the milk. So learned a little something there. But the reason I wanted to explain that is because if you put your child down at seven every night, they’re going to pass through their first cycle 07:50, eight forty, nine thirty, ten twenty, eleven ten.

Right. And you go through the whole night. No. They shouldn’t start their day at 05:10. Right.

They should at least go to 06:00 or 06:50 or 07:40. So you see what I did there? There’s three extra cycles they were missing, especially if you wake your child up and they are immediately exhausted. If you get them out of the crib for the day, they shouldn’t be ready to go to nap right away unless they’re a newborn. Right.

They only can stay awake about forty five to sixty minutes. But, you know, your six month old shouldn’t be rubbing their eyes. If they start their day at five a. M, they’re not ready to get up for the day. Okay.

Now, how you fix it is, again, you’ve got to kind of align what’s happening And are they hungry? And is it scheduled? Right? So there’s all these things. And I’m gonna talk through each one now because I want you to understand this.

You have to look at an early morning waking with a baby and go, is this a want or is this a need? Right? If your baby wakes at 5AM and has a poopy diaper, soiled diaper, right, they might need to be changed. Well, the problem with that is going in at five, picking them up, changing them, which we absolutely have to do, can cause excess stimulation. And they’ve slept enough that they’re kind of excited and then they don’t want to go back down.

Right. So you have to kind of be careful if there’s like a poop happening at five a. M. I actually encourage clients and like throw them an ounce of prune juice, like in the morning hours. You got to get that poop to happen earlier.

So you try to kind of flush the poop out and change their poop schedule so that a five a. M. Poop isn’t waking them up where they do struggle to go back down. Okay. Now if you go in at 5AM and they are hungry and they are over six months of age as a baseline, I would say also you’re gonna run into the same challenge.

You pick them up, you feed them, and now they’re ready to start the day. Right? Or you pick them up, feed them, put them back down. But then when you wake at seven, they’re not hungry. Well, they’re at the Vegas buffet again, my friend.

So you’ve gotta kinda understand how do we get out of this, you know, sort of situation and make sure that, you know, a child understands it’s not quite time to get up yet and you’re managing milk. Okay. Milk itself is always such a tough one. I think that’s the number one challenge new parents face is how do I know if baby’s hungry or why won’t this baby sleep through the night or when will this baby sleep through the night, right, without eating? And milk is milk.

Okay. They need 24 to 32 ounces in a twenty four hour period. So when parents ask me when will my baby sleep through the night, I tell them when they have the independent ability to settle themselves to sleep and when they get 24 to 32 ounces of milk in the day. That is the highest level answer I can give. Right?

Because they have to have the right schedule and stuff too. You know, they can’t be super overtired because that causes multiple overnight wakings and early morning wakings, but we’ll get to that next. But that’s a general baseline. Right? Like, kids shouldn’t need to eat.

Now, again, when you’re nursing, it’s always a challenge. And as a certified lactation counselor, I can tell you, I encourage parents to get a weighted scale. To have a baby scale, you can get one on Amazon that’s super sensitive for, like, $60, especially the whole first year of life because sleep is something that is really I, you know, I almost kinda say, like, you can understand, is this a want versus a need or how much milk are they getting? There are certain things that are just not variables. Right?

They need 24 to 32 ounces. You might think you’re Betsy the cow, but at your 10AM feeding, they’re only getting an ounce of milk, but they’re taking seven ounces at 2AM. Like, you gotta understand where the milk is coming out, how much they’re putting in because that’s gonna be your first variable and isolating. It’s absolutely appropriate that kids eat overnight. As a sleep consultant, I will keep feedings when I’m working privately with a sleep coaching client.

Right? There are a lot of ill experienced sleep consultants that will frankly pull all the night feedings when a baby is actually still hungry. And I do not, I do not agree with that. And it’s just really their lack of experience, honestly, that they don’t know what else to do. And they think I’m just gonna pull the feeding and let the baby cry all night, and they’ll eventually move their milk.

And that’s true, but it’s not necessary, and and it’s not always appropriate, you know, depending on their age and and certainly their unique situation. So what I always advise to clients when especially I’m working with clients over six months that are still feeding, is that we look at, can the baby eat burp and then go back down to sleep independently? Great. Then you’re feeding for nutrition, not for habit. But if your baby at any age is using the breast or bottle as a mechanism to fall back to sleep, that’s a sleep association.

They’re never gonna naturally drop the feed until they understand how to go to bed without it. Right? That’s a sleep association, not feeding for nutrition. So it’s a really fine line that you have to manage in making sure that your child’s getting the right amount of sleep overnight so that they’re not waking hungry at 5AM because then they’re not gonna eat again at seven. Sometimes it’s developmentally appropriate to feed a child, like, especially, you know, a a new baby that is an infant that’s hungry.

Yeah. Absolutely. You always feed them. Right? I’m not saying that.

I’m saying, you know, if you’re feeding, though, seven ounces at 5AM, they’re not gonna take anything at seven. So if you got like a five month old that’s slamming seven ounces at 5AM, try to dial it back a bit. You gotta get that milk into the daytime for that early morning waking to go away when it’s like a food slash habit based waking because they get too stimulated. So focusing on intake in the day, I really recommend full feedings every three hours. Usually I try to keep a baseline of seven, ten, one, four and seven that maximizes five full feedings in the day.

I do find in my experience as both a lactation counselor and a baby sleep coach that feeding on demand causes colic, feeding on demand causes a lot of exertion and extra energy from a baby, but it’s also sometimes necessary. Okay. So I don’t need a bunch of people sending me hate mail that says, I can’t believe you said don’t feed on demand. All I’m saying is that in my experience of ten years as a coach, when parents come to me and say my baby has colic, the first question I ask is, are you feeding on demand? The answer is 99.9 of the time, yes.

When a child has the ability to take full feedings and allow their body the opportunity to digest food, they are often demeanor wise a bit more balanced. Okay. That is my experience as a professional sleep coach and a lactation counselor. Does it mean you don’t feed a hungry baby? Absolutely not.

It means that you don’t always go right to food as the reason a baby is crying. A lot of times it’s actually overtired. Parents misunderstand wake windows and they misunderstand the importance of a schedule. And yes, your baby can be on a schedule. And I use that term loosely, but I will explain, because overtired causes early morning wakings.

I’ll say that again. Overtired causes early morning wakings. Right? My grandma always used to be like, oh, just keep them up late. They’ll sleep in.

Like, they don’t. They’ll actually be up, if not the same time earlier. Overtired triggers your brain to have too much of a neurotransmitter called adenosine. Okay. When they get too much of that, their brain goes, oh, you’re trying to stay awake.

Here’s some stimulant hormones. And then it floods their body with stimulant hormones. Right? It causes broken sleep, trouble settling. Usually, a child will crash real hard, you know, when they’re just so strung out and overtired.

They just pass out, which is not normal. They, you know, kind of fall asleep gradually independently. And they will also wake early in the morning. So then you start this day where you get in this dumpster fire of an overtired kid because if your kid gets up at five, you can’t get them back down. Now their first nap’s at seven.

Now your food’s all messed up. Now they’re trying to you know what I mean? And like you just get in this hamster wheel where it’s like because you’re kind of supporting the early morning waking out of necessity, it ends up creating a lot of other habits and challenges that, you know, you gotta kinda break. So it’s just a balance. Right?

It’s a balance of managing to both things. And, you know, that right schedule is super important. Out on our website at tinytransitions.com, we have a schedule generator, and it is a really great way for you to, kinda see what your kids should be on loosely. I generally don’t see set schedules until somewhere between five and six months when they’re on three naps a day. You’re generally looking at a schedule somewhere around 09:30, a bit of a longer nap around lunchtime, and then a 03:30 to kind of 04:30 ish type nap.

So, like, 09:30, twelve thirty, three thirty is a general baseline. With four naps a day, I generally see that around four months. You are typically doing two naps where you’re supporting it in some capacity and two naps that are independent. So you’re building the skill of independent sleep, but the ability to consolidate for naps is a biological development that app actually doesn’t happen till between four and five months. So getting that predictable schedule is tough, and you need to have them consolidate.

But sometimes they need to be supported to consolidate. So take your baby for a walk at, you know, a certain nap of the day. I recommend the first nap and third nap be the ones that are independent, and the second nap and fourth nap be the ones that are supported, for a variety of reasons to protect a child from getting overtired is probably the most important. Right? Because you need to balance that schedule to set them up for the bedtime success of around 07:00 and make sure they’re ready to rest.

You know? So those are kind of the things that I would recommend from a balance standpoint that you are doing, you know, just in general when it comes to the overnight sleep and managing and structuring the day with those naps. The nap schedule for baby is super important. And, again, people are like, my baby doesn’t wanna sleep. They’re not tired.

You can’t put a baby on a schedule. I mean, I hear all kinds of hate hateful things when I do these episodes, which is really great. I can tell you that professionally, I’ve done this for over ten years, and I know what I’m doing. So, it does work. You just have, certain variables you’re missing.

You know? And that’s what we work through, frankly. So, you know, every kid is different. There are different personalities. There are different wake windows.

But by the general rule of thumb, the American Academy of Pediatrics is not wrong, my friends. They have recommended wake windows for a reason, and it’s developmental and biological, not, because Courtney Zann said tiny transition says so. So, everything we do here is evidence based. It is science backed, and, you know, we’ve got a lot of research out there. That is not something you just Googled and found on some rogue website cause you can pretty much find anything for any perspective that you want out there.

And we’ve done this pretty successfully for a long time. So, with early morning wakings, you have intake. So we’ve covered that. We’ve now looked at schedules. You have to be on the right one.

You’ve got to make sure they’re not overtired going to bed. I will every single day take an overtired kid for a nap versus overtired at bedtime protected at all costs. I actually disagree with something that taking care of baby says, and she’s lovely. But I disagree with the longer wake window at bedtime because I think that there is so much going on in the day. The longer bedtime wake window, that I know some parents, you know, kind of ask about is actually not something I would recommend because, I think it causes overtired, which triggers trouble settling multiple night wakings and early morning wakings in my experience.

So I think as kids get closer to one, they can start to manage that, but it is not something before that that I recommend. I’m very strict on, you know, consistent wake windows throughout the day, and it has served our clients very well. Now, you start to then look at, like, okay. Well, what do I do, Courtney? Like, I I’ve identified that we’ve got a kid who’s waking at 5AM.

This sucks, and I don’t wanna start my day at five. How do we fix it? Okay. When you assess environment and you make sure the temperature is good between sixty eight and seventy, when you look at intake, and that’s good, when you look at diapers, and they’re good, and you look at schedules, and they’re good. Right?

And your child has the ability to independently settle to sleep. They just seem to be waking early. Sometimes it is a habit, my friends. They have gotten used to you coming in and picking them up and rocking them for two hours to hold them. You gotta break the habit.

How do I break the habit? Breaking the habit sucks. You have to sleep train them a little bit for that early morning waking. Sometimes your experience maybe sleep training was that you were in the room with them. And that worked at bedtime, maybe that worked overnight.

I’ll tell you it often does not work early in the morning because, they get stimulated. They see you, then they wanna get up, then they’re overstimulated because you’re there. It generally only takes one to two days to train out of an early morning waking situation, and it is generally watching on the monitor and staying out of there. And I know that’s hard for parents, but you going in isn’t gonna make it any easier, and you’ve probably already tried that. They get overstimulated, then they cry harder because you just went in, and now they’re pissed off because they know that you acknowledge them.

Now you do always have to kind of understand what’s going on. You gotta make sure there’s not a poopy diaper, that their arm, you know, might not be in a weird position in the crib or you know what I mean? Like, we’re always accessible as parents. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that if you’ve exhausted all options and they’re still waking, you likely have a habit and you have to sleep train them out of it.

They have to understand that it is not yet time to wake up and that they need to go back to bed. And sometimes a day or two of you staying out of there and giving them a few minutes is all you need to do. And you can watch them on the monitor, and they will cry for a few minutes, and then they will settle themselves back to sleep. In general, I see it’s anywhere between ten to twelve minutes. And I know that number sounds really long to parents.

You can go in, but I can tell you they’re gonna cry harder. And what people misunderstand about sleep training when there is a deficiency in the skill for babies to settle independently to sleep is that there has to be an aspect of practice. Okay? I have parents come to me and say, you know, I’ve tried interval based check ins. I’ve tried staying in the room.

I’ve tried the sleep lady shuffle. I’ve tried, you know, the chair method. You know, whatever it is, they’re all the same kind of methodologies. Right? Everybody just decides to put a fancy spin on it.

It is really about consistency in what you’re doing. I have found ten to twelve minutes to be the sweet spot where your child peaks in protest. They’re pissed off. They want you to pick them up. Then they come down and they go, that is actually them practicing.

Let them do that. That is wonderful. That’s self soothing. Right? And then they’re gonna spike again and go, hey.

Are you sure you’re not gonna get me? And that gets longer, and then they fall asleep. Sleep training a baby should take forty minutes the first night. I’ve done this for ten years. I can put a time on it.

Most sleep consultants can’t. If it is taking longer than forty minutes, you’re doing it wrong. And it shouldn’t be forty minutes of stage five clinging, crying. It is forty minutes of intervals up and down as your child learns the skill of independent sleep. Okay?

So if your child is waking early in the morning, you’ve gotta go through all these different things in the checklist, then you’ve got to look at it and go, okay. It is a habit, and they just want me, and I gotta give them some time. And I will tell you in about two days, just, you know, keep a peek on them on the monitor, and they’ve got a spike in protest, which is expected. They’re trying to tell you to come. And then the second you come and open the door, they go, hi.

Hi. You can’t do that because they like, you can, but you’re gonna have to leave again and start that timer over. You gotta give them a chance to spike and come back down and get into that listening of the rhythmic sound of the because that’s them practicing the self soothing. And then with it being pitch dark in there, it is helpful so that they then go back to bed. That’s why I’m not really a fan of night lights for children who are babies because I think pitch black is best for them.

And, you know, very much so to the point where, like, even with my kids, like, I put a snake, one of those, like, sock snake things outside the door in the hallway because I just didn’t want any light waking them up. I had blackout blinds. We love OtterSpace blackout blinds. We have, you know, our blackout curtains. We have blackout blinds.

You know? Like, we love these products that are intended to keep it pitch dark for a reason. You know? You don’t go to Vegas and sleep with the windows open and the blinds open. Right?

Because the lights are too bright. My daughter, we were at Hershey Park A Couple Weeks ago for an Irish Dance Fish, and she’s like, mommy, can you put a towel by the door? It’s really bright in here from the hallway. And I’m like, oh my gosh. I’ve created a monster.

But you know what? She’s right. Like, you could see the whole room clearly at three in the morning. So she, like, goes as far as now puts electrical tape on the lights at the hotel, which I have to laugh at because I do the same thing, which I guess that’s why she gets it from me. But, you know, it’s just consistency in what you’re doing, understanding what the variables are that cause early morning wakings, and then putting a plan together to work through them.

We do offer thirty minute ask me anything calls. We have sixty minute calls. We do mini sessions. We do full sleep coaching. You don’t always need full sleep coaching.

We have a variety of things. So if you kinda wanna chat through your challenge, schedule a discovery call with us. They’re free. They’re out on tinytransitions.com forward slash contact. Me or any member of my slumber squad here, we will talk to you.

And we will say, hey. This is the best plan for you right now, or this is the best type of package for your need based on, you know, what you’re going through. And, you know, for a hundred bucks, you can jump on the phone with us and fix your issue. Right? So, lots of good offerings, lots of ways to help.

Don’t be shy in asking what you need because we’re here to support you on your quest for rest. I will tell you the gift of sleep is an amazing one. And and my job here is to give you confidence in parenting. And I want you to be confident in parenting and understand what you’re doing because I didn’t, and that sucks. And so we’re here.

We’re happy to help. Thanks so much for tuning in. Be sure to click subscribe and share a review out on your favorite podcast streaming service. We always appreciate that. We never really ask for them because I’m not good at that.

But, you know, we’re all getting better at things. So if you would be so kind as to leave a review, if you find these helpful and drop me an email, Courtney@tinytransitions.com, if you want me to talk about something on the podcast because I love doing it and I’m happy to help. All right. Till next time. Bye for now.

One more thing before you go. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with someone you know who could use a little more sleep in their life. For tips and resources, be sure to visit us at tinytransitions.com or follow us across social media. Here’s to better sleep, brighter days, and healthier, happier families.