Why is my toddler waking so early? Three adjustments for a Dubai flat

At 5:12 one morning in June our three-year-old stood by the bed holding her blanket and announced that it was day. By the window, it was. The curtain edges had gone grey, the air conditioner had clicked off at four on its timer, and the room was warm. Why is my toddler waking so early is the question I typed that week, and the answer in our flat turned out to be three ordinary things: light reaching the room before the sun was up, an afternoon nap that had grown too long, and a bedroom that warmed up in the last hours of the night. None of them needed a new routine. Each needed one adjustment.

This is not medical advice. A child who snores, seems unwell or is exhausted all day is a conversation for a doctor, not a blog.

Why is my toddler waking so early when the sun is not even up?

Because in Dubai the light arrives well before sunrise, and it moves a long way across the year. These are the Dubai times from sunrise-sunset.org:

Between mid-January and late June, first light moves more than an hour and a half earlier. Our daughter's wake-up time moved with it almost week for week. In winter she slept to 6:45 and nobody noticed that the room was still dark at that hour. By June the same curtains let a grey line in at five, and she read it as morning.

Our curtains were dark in the middle and useless at the edges and the top, where the rail sits a hand's width from the wall. The fix was a strip of blackout fabric folded over the rail and tape down both sides, which took ten minutes. The test that worked was standing in the room at first light, not at bedtime. At seven in the evening every curtain looks dark enough.

Will a later bedtime make my toddler sleep in?

It was the first thing we tried. We kept her up until 8:30, and she woke at 5:15 anyway, then spent the day tearful.

The Sleep Foundation's page When Should Kids Stop Taking Regular Naps? is direct about this: "Avoid pushing your child's bedtime later. Instead, monitor when the child is sleepy and put them down for bed at that time. In general, it is more advisable to shorten naps than push bedtimes later." And on early waking specifically: "If your child still needs to nap but is waking early, try shortening their naps rather than eliminating the nap entirely."

The NHS page Sleep and young children says it in six words: "Avoid long naps in the afternoon."

That pointed at the nursery sheet. Her afternoon nap had crept from about an hour to nearly two over the spring, and it was ending close to four. A child who has slept two hours in the afternoon has already banked part of the night. Start the night at 7:30 and the bank runs out around five. I have written separately about counting a toddler's sleep back from one wake-up time. The short version here is that the nap is the number that moves the morning, and bedtime is the one that tempts.

A later bedtime feels like borrowing sleep from the evening to spend in the morning. A toddler rarely honours the loan.

Does a cooler room help a toddler sleep past five?

In our flat it did, and this is the part that is particular to the Gulf. The bedroom list on the Sleep Foundation's Children and Sleep page includes "Setting the thermostat to a slightly cooler temperature". It gives no number, and it says nothing about off-timers.

Plenty of households here set the bedroom AC to switch off in the small hours to keep the bill down. Through a Dubai summer, an off-timer at three or four means the room warms up at exactly the hour the light starts and the night is nearly over. We changed two things: the timer went, and the thermostat held a little cooler than the living room through to seven. Both changes went in the same week, so I cannot say which did more.

That Children and Sleep list also suggests "Keeping the bedroom quiet, or using a white noise machine to mask outside sounds". Between the dawn call to prayer from the mosque across the road, an early bin lorry and a crane that starts with the light, a Dubai morning is not quiet. A fan-sound machine on low covered most of it.

And when she did still wake early, we borrowed the NHS line for night waking: "be as boring as possible to avoid exciting them and leave lights off." A five o'clock wake that earns a cartoon on the sofa is a five o'clock wake that comes back.

What did two weeks of wake-up times show?

I kept a log on the fridge: wake time, nap length from the nursery sheet, and whether the AC had run all night. Here is the shape of it.

The curtains and the AC bought about forty minutes. Shortening the nap bought the rest. Bedtime stayed at 7:30 through the fortnight, and the nursery agreed to wake her at an hour and ten once they saw the log.

The log taught me two things. The first is that early waking had more than one cause, and fixing one gave a partial result that looked like failure. If I had judged the curtains after three days and given up, I would never have reached the nap. The second is that the evening routine mattered less to the morning than I expected. It stayed the same throughout: bath, one book, lights out. For a while the book was Lantern by the Lake, and its lights going out one at a time along the shore became her way of saying goodnight to the window.

The early wake was never really about the morning. It was set the afternoon before by the nap, and the night before by a timer and a gap at the top of a curtain. The sun over Dubai moves its first light by an hour and a half across the year, and a small child will follow it unless the room says otherwise.

Sources

• When Should Kids Stop Taking Regular Naps? · Sleep Foundation (Jay Vera Summer, medically reviewed by Nilong Vyas, MD, MPH)
• Children and Sleep: Healthy Sleep Habits for Kids · Sleep Foundation
• Sleep and young children · NHS
• Dubai Sunrise and Sunset Times · sunrise-sunset.org