What to do when your toddler wakes too early in the morning?

What's happening with your child's sleep from the early hours of the morning?

Each of the following early morning situations is a problem with the settings on your toddler's body clock. You might find this hard to believe at first, given how incredibly disrupted your sleep is!

Are you in one of these situations? Your little one

• Wakes well before dawn or much earlier than you would want, and is alert and wanting to interact

• Wants to breastfeed from before dawn or even from the small hours of the morning, and doesn't settle back into a block of sleep. He may dose for a time then wakes soon after, wanting yet another feed

• Isn't breastfeeding, and wakes for a bottle feed, but then doesn't settle back into deep sleep. You might even try another bottle, which your child rejects, or takes but still doesn't settle back into sleep

As a result, you're likely to feel exhausted and frustrated, or severely sleep deprived, before the day has even started!

The things that don't explain what's going on

Here's what's not happening. Your little child is not waking too early in the morning because of

• Gut pain or the need to poo, even if you hear your toddler pass wind in this time. You can find out more here.

• Hunger (as long as your toddler is more or less following his percentile line of growth on the WHO charts). You can find out more here.

• Breastfeeding frequently and flexibly (if you are breastfeeding). Responding to your breastfed toddler with an offer of the breast is an important way of keeping your little one dialled down. Your breastfeeding does not cause bad habits or make your toddler wake excessively in the early hours of the morning, though you might have heard this! You can find out more here.

How you can change early morning waking

Your toddlers's body clock needs a reset, to bring it better into sync with your own. This takes one or two weeks.

Most importantly, changing early morning waking will require working with your toddler's bed-times in the evening. You can find out more here. You might need to consider making changes in the daytimes too. You can find out more here.

If you've got the time, you could just start at the beginning and read or watch or listen all the way through The Possums Sleep Program. That way, it will all make sense as you take steps to change what's going on in the early hours of the morning with your little one.