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

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

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

• 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 baby rejects, or takes but still doesn't settle back into sleep

• Makes noises (groans or grunts) and back arches and stretches, even though her eyes are closed, from well before dawn or much earlier than you would want. This makes it difficult for you to return to sleep. You try feeding her but she only settles for a short time, then resumes the grunting and stretching.

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 baby is not waking too early in the morning because of

• Gut pain, even if you hear your baby pass wind or swallow back reflux in this time

• Hunger (though offering frequent flexible feeds is an important way to get through this situation while you're sorting it out, because feeding keeps her reasonably dialled down). However, if your baby is still a newborn or very young, hunger sometimes can be the cause of excessive waking in the early morning. Please read more here

• Breastfeeding frequently and flexibly. Responding to your baby with a breastfeed is an important way of keeping your little one dialled down (and of protecting your own milk supply and baby's weight gain), but your responsive breastfeeding does not cause bad habits or make your baby wake excessively in the early hours of the morning, though you might have heard this!

How you can change early morning waking

Your baby's body clock needs a reset, to bring it better into sync with your own. This takes one or two weeks. You can find out about this here.

Most importantly, changing early morning waking will require working with your baby's bedtimes in the evening, so I suggest you start with the 'Evenings' section in The Possums Sleep Program. But you might need to consider making changes in the daytimes too, by reading through the 'Daytime' section and thinking about how best to meet your baby's sensory motor needs.

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 baby.