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Toddler Early Birds
Tips to Get Toddlers to Sleep In
By Kelly Burgess
Still, if a child is going to bed at 5 or 6 p.m., expecting him to sleep past 6 a.m. is probably unrealistic. It's better to try adjusting nap(s) and bedtime to gradually ease him into a later wake time. With her boys, Barber even used five-minute intervals to ease them into later waking. However, she gave it up when she went past 7 p.m. The boys were still waking at 6 a.m. but were cranky in the evening.
Dr. Tobin looks at 6 a.m. as a kind of cut-off time for early waking. If they wake at 6 a.m., that's probably just where they are developmentally and it's not really a problem of early rising. If they wake prior to 6 a.m., it's probably a good idea to take some steps to teach them to fall back to sleep.
It's when teaching early risers how to get back to sleep on their own that looking at the child's general sleep patterns becomes an important issue, Dr. Tobin says.
"Just as we look at how we put babies to sleep we have to look at how we put toddlers to sleep," Dr. Tobin says. "If you help them by sitting at their bed, when they hit that shallow sleep they need you to be sitting on their bed. Whatever you do to assist them to get to sleep, they'll need that assistance to get them back to sleep. So the first thing is to make sure they go to sleep on their own."
