Why does your baby wake up at 5 am every morning?

Five o'clock. Wide awake, you're not. And unlike at one in the morning, nothing seems to help: no rocking, no feeding, no shushing.

That's because at this hour you're fighting something different from the rest of the night.

Sleep pressure is nearly gone

Sleep works on pressure. The longer your baby is awake, the more sleep pressure builds, and that pressure pushes toward sleep by itself.

At 5 am, most of the night's sleep has already happened. The pressure that pushed your baby into sleep effortlessly at 8 pm is hardly there anymore.

That's the annoying combination: not fully rested yet, and still barely any sleep pressure to fall back on.

Why Kyra calls this the hardest part

Falling asleep independently at the start of the evening is one thing. Getting back to sleep in the middle of the night is a different skill, and a harder one.

And the last part of the night is the hardest of all, precisely because of that low sleep pressure. If your baby looks for your help anywhere, it's here.

What to do at 5 am

Treat 5 am as night, not morning. Keep it dark, keep it quiet, no light and no interaction. As soon as light and attention come in, the night is over and the body clock shifts along, and then tomorrow it's 5 am again.

Don't expect your first success here. If you're working on falling asleep independently, start at bedtime, where sleep pressure is highest. This hour comes last. See when a baby is ready for sleep coaching.

Look at the rest of the 24 hours too

Early waking is often not a night problem but a day problem.

• Too little daytime sleep makes your baby overtired, and an overtired baby wakes earlier, not later. Check the wake windows.
• Too little feeding during the day gets caught up at night, and then hunger is the alarm clock.
• Light in the room counts heavily at this hour. See how dark the room should be.
• If a leap or the regression is going on, this is temporary.

With a toddler or preschooler

The causes are the same four, and Kyra names them that way in her toddler lesson too: bedtime too late, too little sleep, too few naps, and a daily schedule that no longer fits.

What's different is the solution. With an older child you can agree on what happens in the morning, and an okay-to-wake clock that shows with a color whether it's time to get up helps. That gives your child something to hold on to instead of a ban.

And if there's a nap that gets too late or too long, that's often the real cause: see when the afternoon nap ends.