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Home › Articles › Sleep Issues › The Early Bird: Waking up Too Early

The Early Bird: Waking up Too Early

An Excerpt From The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers & Preschoolers (McGraw-Hill, 2005)

By Elizabeth Pantley

Pages:  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  

More Tips for Encouraging Longer Sleep
Very often an early waking child is doing so out of habit, and it may take a few weeks of consistent changes before you see a new wake-up time emerge.
  • Apply the concepts covered previously and re-set your child's biological clock. Do this by keeping the hour before bedtime dimly lit, sleeping time dark and breakfast time brightly lit.
  • Keep your child's room dark during all the hours you want her to sleep. Use blinds, curtains or even a blanket or big pieces of cardboard to keep out unwanted light. Do your pre-bedtime reading by the dimmest light possible and finish it up with story-telling in the dark.
  • Schedule playtime in the afternoon or early evening outside when you can. When you can't get outside keep the play area brightly lit. You may even want to invest in a natural sunlight lamp which emits a yellow sun-like glow.
  • Try treating the early morning awakening as if it's 2 a.m. and respond to your child as you do with a night waking. If the windows are covered and the room is dark your child may accept that it's the middle of the night and not the morning.
  • Children who wake early often nap early, too, going for a nap within an hour or two of waking up. This is actually the end of their nighttime sleep! Try holding off the morning nap by 15 to 30 minutes every day until it falls an hour or two hours later in the day than it is now. After a week or two you should see a new pattern emerge.
  • old off breakfast for 30 minutes to an hour after your child wakes up. She may have set her "hunger alert" to go off at 6 a.m. By holding off breakfast in the morning you may be able to re-set the time she gets hungry. If she can't wait that long, try a small snack, like a few crackers and delay a full breakfast for a bit.

    • Pages:  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  


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