When your 3-5 year old wakes up too early, you may feel pressured to wake up with them to keep them out of trouble. This can become taxing if it encroaches on your own sleeping needs. This is Zenith’s advice for that situation:
First of all, this is totally normal.
Many children wake up early. Generally, they aren’t negatively affected by their wake-up time. Our personal advice would be to, not try to adjust your child’s wake-up time, but rather work on their discipline.
For discipline to work, children need to understand that you do not want them to be ‘up and about’ before YOU wake up. Therefore, they must have a sense of what time you would be waking up.
Now, not being ‘up and about’ doesn’t mean they can’t be awake. Be sure to explain this and suggest to them that they can stay in their room and play until it’s time to ‘wake up’.
As for knowing when it is time to wake up:
Get a digital clock and put it in their room.
Let’s say you pick 7 AM as wake-up time. Show them this on the clock.
Clocks can be hard to read when they have just started numeracy, so to help them, make a paper sign with a 7 on it, as shown below.
You could even let them colour it if you like. Now stick this ‘7’ over the ‘minute’ digits so that all the child should be able to see are the ‘hour’ digit(s).
For example: Above, you would block the ’59’ with your 7 cut-out. (The closer the cut-out 7 looks to the clock’s 7, the better)
Introduce the vocabulary, “7 o’clock” and then test their knowledge by telling them to give you a high five when it is 7 o’clock; when the red number matches the paper’s number.
Then you can establish that 7 o’clock is the designated time for them to be outside their room. Whenever they wake up before that, they now know that they are expected to stay in their room.
We advise leaving some toys or activities in the room for them to play with. Do not lock the door.
For the first few nights, wake up and wait quietly near the door in case they wake up. If they come out of their room, go to the clock and explain to them that it is not time to wake up yet and they have to stay in their room for now.
This should be done for at least a week. Do not allow them to negotiate to come outside. Crying is allowed. Consider redirecting them to something fun they can do in their room. Once you are firm and consistent, the child should soon learn that they have to stay in their room until ‘7 o’clock’.
Once they have gotten this skill and you’re ready to trust them to stay inside, mention to them that if there is a fire, or if they get hurt, they are allowed to come straight to your room and wake you up.
