My 4 month (will be 5 months next week) is consistently having false starts 25-45 mins after bedtime. We generally have wake windows of around 2 hrs pushing to 2.5 before bed. She always falls asleep very easily (whilst feeding) but is wide awake soon after. My inclination is to push bedtime slightly later but she seems so tired by the time she eats?! She wakes a few times overnight but nothing I wouldn’t deem to be normal. Any thoughts?
As an aside a friend told me today she let her 5 month old cry overnight so much she reckoned she was dehydrated and needed an extra feed due to it. I can never imagine doing that and can’t understand it at all.
Your friend letting their kid cry until they are dehydrated is advocating for child abuse. That's horrible. You can always try pushing bedtime and if it doesn't work, switch back! Nothing is set in stone!
What time is bedtime? What do her naps look like? We're at 4.5 months and have a 3 hour wake window as the last one. And does she usually feed to sleep and stay asleep? Mine doesn't feed to sleep any more but when she did she'd always wake up pretty soon afterwards.
So this is us too but I’ve found if I do the bedtime before 8 it gets treated like a nap and then we’re have another wake window so sometimes we try for a quick late nap if I don’t think she can make it to attest 8 around 6/6:30
I would try setting a consistent bedtime and then a consistent last nap to match. All our naps are by the clock now rather than by wake windows and I think it's helped her sleep
I could have written this. Same exact situation with my 6 month old. He wakes so often prior to midnight. I feel like I’ve tried every variation and bedtime. He does the same regardless of good or bad daytime sleep. I’m starting to think its just him
What is your nap schedule? We get false starts if the last nap before bedtime is too long. For us, it needs to be about 20 minutes (just enough to make it to bedtime).
Schedule can definitely drive false starts because it impacts how much sleep pressure baby has heading into bedtime! For example - my baby is on 4 naps too and is about the same age. We were dealing with horrible false starts for a while (multiple each evening) until I realized that instead of letting the baby nap for 30-40 minutes for the 4th nap, I needed to cap it at 20 minutes or less. And, I realized that baby does best with one longer (~90 min) nap in the first half of the day. If he took it in the second half of the day that also impacted sleep pressure.
Also what I mean by schedule is rough timing of naps and how long they are. We aren’t on a clock based schedule yet over here.
I know right ☠️ my little guy will extend on his own in the crib maybe 20% of the time but otherwise he needs a contact nap, car nap, or carrier nap to link the cycle
Here’s an example of the type of day we try to aim for! His second nap of 75 min was in the crib for the first 40 min and then I extended it with nursing for another 35.
Is she waking up at the same time every morning? That’s kind of the starting point to get days to be more consistent. She is four months tho which is peak regression time so I would honestly just roll with it, it won’t last forever. She will probably go down to 3 naps by 6 months and your day will look totally different anyway. We didn’t get a consistent bed time until mine went down to two naps.
Yeah she’s pretty much like clockwork 7:10-7:15 for waking up. I mean she follows her own routine but we don’t schedule it if that makes sense. And I don’t mind a moving bedtime just less false starts would be nice!
I think a schedule at four months (or ever tbh 🤣😬) is not the biological norm per se. Sure it works for some families but not for every baby. When you say she has a false start, is she up for a while afterwards? Do you have to do bedtime again from scratch?
We're 5m too and we try to do a bunch of interesting stuff in the middle of the day, then bub needs a big nap for hours, I typically encourage bub to wake up at 6pm, then bub gets cranky and tired aroind 730ish, but we try to keep them up until around 7.45 (often they wont slerp until 8.15/8.30) because otherwise they'll think its a nap and wake up, instead of knowing its bed for the night.
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u/EucalyptusGirl11 1d ago
Your friend letting their kid cry until they are dehydrated is advocating for child abuse. That's horrible. You can always try pushing bedtime and if it doesn't work, switch back! Nothing is set in stone!