#6 MONTH OLD WAKE UP TIME WINDOWS#

It’s common when we start working with people to drop one of the solid meals in the short-term, enabling us to increase their daytime milk feeds again while we decrease their overnight milk feeds. These parents go all in with the introduction of solids – sometimes too quickly – which can cause a milk/solids imbalance. So often we hear from parents who were holding firmly to the belief that once they start solids their child will sleep through the night. Overall, we know as adults that eating doesn’t encourage sleep, so forcing a feed into them here starts having the counter-effect to what you may be intending. As they are now going into a deeper sleep, the dream feed starts to disturb their consolidated stretches, which can contribute to more subsequent wake-ups overnight.įurther to that, feeding triggers both hormonal responses and the digestive process, which makes the baby wake up further. By six months, you (and your baby) are better served by feeding them when, or if, they wake up hungry. If you’ve been doing a ‘dream feed’ until this point, now is the time to drop it. Just because your child is biologically capable, doesn’t mean they will suddenly start sleeping all night. By this age, your child is biologically able to do anywhere between a four to eight hour stretch of sleep overnight. Similarly, helping them to consolidate their sleep overnight has a flow-on effect to longer, more consolidated naps too. Bedtime is a long way away for a child who sleeps just 45 minutes, as opposed to a couple of hours, at lunchtime. That’s why it’s so important to cure catnapping and help them to consolidate their sleep. I tend to find that children will refuse or drop their third nap when they are ready, whether they are doing a long lunchtime sleep or not. It’s a short (sometimes just 10-15 minute) power nap to help them make it until bedtime, because if they go to bed overtired, they’ll wake more overnight. At this age, this nap is often an assisted one – in the pram while you’re out for a walk, or in the car. However, by six months old, it’s likely that your littlie will be starting to fight their third day sleep. Speaking of day sleep, most six month olds are still having three naps a day (the majority are ready to drop to two around seven or eight months of age). Fighting the third nap and the need to consolidate If your child hasn’t progressed and lengthened their awake times along those lines, they might now not be having enough time awake in a stretch, which can mean they won’t sleep well during the day.

#6 MONTH OLD WAKE UP TIME WINDOWS#

Your child will have moved from 45 minute windows of time spent awake as a newborn, to 2.5 hours in a stretch by six months old, or at least nearing that sort of window. I’ve mentioned that six months is a time of vast changes – there’s been a lot of progression to get to this point. But it does tend to mean that you can start backing off a bit and supporting them to find sleep themselves, as opposed to relying on you getting them there.

By this I don’t mean just put them down and walk away that’s not necessarily going to work either. Often, this is their way of telling you that they’re ready to self-settle.

Put simply, children outgrow them, and they start fighting your efforts. One of the initial sources of frustration for parents as their children reach the six month mark is that the techniques that had worked to get your newborn to sleep – whether rocking, patting, swaddling, or similar – stop working. A different age calls for different techniques Unfortunately, this simply isn’t the case! Others may fall prey to one (or many) of the misconceptions about this age and stage… So, let’s take a look at the hurdles you might expect to encounter around the six month mark, and some advice to get you through them. Some mums and dads may have been holding onto the belief that six months is somehow a magical age when the challenging sleep deprivation of having a newborn in the house will resolve. You might be starting to introduce solids and move around their milk feeds, and there is (in some cases) the arrival of those first few teeth. There’s so much going on at six months old that can affect a little one’s sleep.Īs a baby’s sleep cycle matures, they’ve likely started catnapping. It’s no surprise to me that the most common age that we start working with babies is when they hit the six month mark.

6 month old wake up time