Sleep MYTH: ‘Never wake a sleeping baby’ - when you want to wake your child instead of letting them sleep
I’m sure we’ve all heard this saying before. And I know, I get it - why would you want to wake that peacefully sleeping baby? Sleep is so important for your little one and often a parents' only chance at some downtime occurs when their baby is sleeping. However, there are times when it benefits the bigger sleep picture to wake your baby.
How do you know when to wake your sleeping babe? Here are some times it can be helpful to wake your sleeping child:
Wake your baby to help sort out day/night confusion with a newborn
We want to encourage those longer stretches of sleep at night. If your newborn is taking long stretches of sleep during the day, it's unlikely you'll get those stretches at night. A good rule of thumb is to wake your newborn if it's been 3 hours since the last feed or if they have been napping for 2 hours.
Wake your newborn to encourage daytime calories
Just like we want to encourage those longer stretches of sleep at night, we want to encourage calorie intake during the day. It can be helpful to make sure your newborn is awake for a feed every 2-3 hours during the day to encourage feeds and calories during the daytime instead of at night. Again, a good rule of thumb is to wake your newborn if it’s been 3 hours since their last feed.
Wake your baby in the a.m. to maintain their daily routine
We all benefit from waking up around the same time each day. Our children do too, especially if they are still taking multiple naps! I encourage most families I work with to wake their baby by 7 a.m. in order to maintain an age-appropriate schedule throughout the day. If your child is only taking one nap or no longer napping, we are usually able to stretch this a bit to 7:15/7:30 a.m. without throwing off their day or their single nap later on. Let’s be real though, most of us are just wishing our kids would sleep until 7 a.m. in the first place!
Wake your baby to avoid the last nap interfering with bedtime
It’s also good to keep an eye on the last nap of the day as there are times it helps to wake a child from their final nap in order to get them to bed on time. The ideal bedtime for our kiddos should fall somewhere between 6-8:00 p.m. Putting them to bed later than this often leads to over tiredness, which can show itself in 3 ways:
as a second wind and a child having a harder time settling to sleep,
with more frequent wakes overnight, or
with early morning risings (anything before 6:00 a.m.).
A key to avoiding over tiredness is to get our children to bed nice and early. So, we may have to wake our kiddos from the last nap of the day in order to preserve this early bedtime. When on a 3-nap schedule, it’s best to wake baby by 5:00 p.m.; on a 2-nap schedule, it’s usually best to wake baby by about 4:00 p.m. and even on a 1-nap schedule, it can benefit to wake a child if they are still sleeping by 4:00 p.m. or even by 3:00 p.m. for the older toddlers/preschoolers.
Wake your baby to avoid a nap transition before they are ready
Nap transitions: Oh man, nap transitions can be such. a. pain. But they are also a wonderful sign that our baby/toddler is growing and developing. There are times when your child is starting to show signs of being ready to drop a nap, but they aren’t quite ready to lose a sleep period completely. During these transitions, it can help to shorten a nap earlier in the day in order to hold onto the current schedule longer instead of dropping the nap completely.
Wake your baby to sort out a poor night sleep cycle
If your child is having many nights of broken sleep, they may try to make up for it with a late sleep in or long naps during the day. In order to encourage this sleep to occur at night, it can help not to let them sleep in too late or nap for too long during the daytime. Otherwise we can wind up in a nasty cycle of night wakings -> late sleep in/long nap -> night wakings -> late sleep in/long nap -> and on and on!
Are you looking for some 1:1 help to improve your child’s sleep? See here how I can be of service to you!
