According to Tracy Hogg, children (and apparently adults too) have sleep cycles of more or less 45 minutes. After the first few days of being a sleepy blob, babies tend to wake up after these short naps. As a Mom, you can do one of two things – you can go to your baby and get him up OR you can teach him to drift back to sleep and start a new cycle.
I have no preference regarding what you choose. For me however, it was important to have some proper “me” time between feeds. And so I set out to teach my babies how to sleep.
Sometimes, it was as simple as giving her the dummy. If I got there quick enough that she has just woken up, that usually did the trick. Other times I had to stay longer and pat her on the bum.
Even when they were several months old (and it happened with all of them), they would all of a sudden wake up at a certain time on a specific nap or at night. Like a little alarm clock, they woke.
In comes Tracy with her magic with a technique called “Wake to sleep”. “Say what?” I thought. I need to wake her up to make her sleep again… that doesn’t sound right!
So I read further… According to Tracy, if you interrupt a baby’s deep sleep, you interrupt the whole cycle, so the baby will sleep longer and won’t wake up at the time his internal alarm would go off.
The important bit of this technique is to do it at the right time – when the baby is indeed in deep sleep. Because you see, you don’t really want to wake up your baby – you just give him a nudge, tickle his ear, give him the dummy or tuck him in. Just enough to hear him breathing again, you know – rather than that non-existent breathing that they do when they are in deep sleep that freaks out any first time parent.
With a nap (during the day) this time is normally 30 minutes before their habitual waking time. At night, it’s 1 hour before.
This is not an easy task at night. With all my kids I had to deal with this. At some point I had to put an alarm for 1am and for 3am – because she was waking at 2 and at 4. Sometimes I dealt with both in one go, sometimes I dealt with one at a time.
After a few days, the cycle was broken and I didn’t need to do it anymore. I figured it’s much better to make the sacrifice of a few nights as soon as I notice the pattern, than months of sleep deprivation if I didn’t do anything.
You can use this technique also to make them sleep longer stretches at night… so if your little one is waking up at 5 and you wish it was at 7, consider using this technique moving along 15 minutes every few days – as his sleep gets longer and longer.
Never ever ever did I consider giving my child a feed or a bottle or even water when this happened. That would just re-enforce the habit. My children were well fed. They were not hungry or thirsty. They simply had very stubborn little alarm clocks inside and my mission was to break them.