I Don't Want to Wake My Child up in the Morning, Especially with an Alarm Clock

Oh, come on! Really?!
My kids went to bed at 7 until 2nd grade when I let them stay up until 7:30. They never saw 8 until 3rd grade!
Set a schedule.
Get the child an alarm clock.
This is the real world. Stop living in la la land.

Updated

Oh, come on! Really?!
My kids went to bed at 7 until 2nd grade when I let them stay up until 7:30. They never saw 8 until 3rd grade!
Set a schedule.
Get the child an alarm clock.
This is the real world. Stop living in la la land.

I don't understand the dilemma, I guess. My 6 year old goes to bed at 7:30 every week night and I wake her up every week day at 6:30. It's been that way since she was 12 weeks old. (Well, not the bed time, but the wake up time) In fact, this morning I was one minute late going in to wake her up and she came out and told me that she thought I forgot her.

My son goes to bed at 7:30 promptly and wakes no later than 6:45 each morning. I know he is not feeling well if he sleeps beyond that.

Stick to a bed time and you will find a wake time that works.

All I can say is, you may not WANT to wake your son up in the morning, but you have to. It's your job.

There are two ways to make this happen. Either you move his bedtime to earlier, or you wake him up after not-quite-enough sleep. If you do the latter, his bedtime will naturally adjust, but he'll be starting school with a sleep deficit.

But, getting to school on time is mandatory and required. No way around it. And it's your job to make that happen.

You have to be kidding, who is the parent? If you don't wake him up why would he be tired to go to bed at a decent hour?

Looking at your other questions it seems you let your son decide everything. Stop doing that it will only get worse.

Children do not lose sleep, if you get them up at a time they are tired at a corresponding time. You letting him sleep in is the direct cause for him staying up late.

I hate to be mean, but get over it. Waking your son up will get him ready for the future.

Give your son a bed time and wake up time and stick to it! Not only will you make your mornings easier, but your son will actually enjoy the structure.

As for the hubby, he needs to be on board with this also. Compromise. Start getting ready for bed at 8pm. Hugs/book/kisses whatever and lights out at 8:30.

Being required to get up at a certain time every day is an unpleasant but very real part of life.

Really??

There are certain things that I tell my husband "this is important to me and you need to respect it, I will NOT budge". And getting my kids to bed at 7:00 is one of those things I will not budge on.

So why don't you take over the bed time routine?

Get your son an alarm clock and he will probably be excited. Otherwise you're setting your son up for failure, be the mom!

i don't get it.
it's very nice to let your son sleep as long as he wants when there's nothing going on that requires him to wake up. but if you've got somewhere to be, he has to get up in time to eat breakfast and do necessary grooming.
just figure out how to do it gently. my older son just needed a gentle 'time to get up, sweetheart.' my younger loved it if i gave him a long backscratch to bring him out of sleep.
khairete
S.

It needs to be worked on the going to bed side.

By observation, and I mean years of it, I out grew the notion of them getting 15-30 mins more of sleep in the mornings was a big deal. It's not. They wake up with the same attitude according to their personality, no matter what.

What REALLY counts is the attitude they go out the door with. If they have enough time in the morning to leave with a full tummy, homework found, hair combed and teath brushed, then they can leave with a smile and a "I love you" as they climb out of the car, then that is the time you want to get them up. Work for the end product of the morning.

If it takes him an hour to get to bed, start an hour earlier. No nonsense.
Set clear boundaries and don't back down. Most likely he will start getting to bed when told, in order to have more time before the bedtime routine.

Who dawdles? Your husband, you or your son? When bedtime comes around, we say, "Time for bed." And wow, our kids go to bed! We might sing a song, but they're all old enough to manage their own bedtime routines.

When you see your son up at 8:30, why aren't you saying, "Why aren't you in bed? Go to bed."

If my kids aren't up on their own (6:15am), I stick my head in their door and say, "Time to get up!" They get up!

We all do things we don't want to do. Wake your kid at 7am and if he has trouble waking up, push back his bedtime. Easy peasy.

Why are you afraid of waking your son up?
You and he have to get to school, you having to take him there ON time so he is not tardy.

Just wake him up.
That is life.
And, common sense is, per your Husband, to put the kid to bed ON time... BECAUSE he is only 6 years and and goes to school. And school, is a responsibility, of the parent too. For their child.

A tired and overtired and lack-of-sleep child... will NOT do well in school. Tell your Husband this.
Does he not care about his son's well being and school performance and behavior?

I work at my kids' school.
Everyday, I CAN tell, which kids sleep appropriately and which don't.
It shows, in their behavior and attention spans and moods.

Not picking on you, but -- what on earth do you think is going to happen in 20 years when your son has to get up for work every morning? Most of us would love to shut off the alarm and spend a couple more hours in bed, but if we did, we'd be out of a job. Getting up when you don't want to is part of life.

Take over the bedtime routine or work it out with your husband, set a firm bedtime and wakeup time and stick to it, and rouse that boy out of bed! If he's tired from the early wake-ups, move his bedtime a little earlier.

Not waking him up is causing him more harm than good. Why would you want all his mornings to be stressful and rushed? What is that teaching him for the future? Schedules are a part of life.

Even if he goes to sleep at 9 if he wakes up at 7 that's 10 hours of sleep, he will be fine. I prefer 12 hours or so and ds goes to be at 830. If we had a busy day I may put him to bed earlier.

Discuss your concerns with your husband, but you need to put him on a schedule. Wake him up. Sleeping until he feels like waking up is an unrealistic habit.

Getting him up at a set time may in fact help him to go to bed earlier b/c at the end of his day he will be ready to go to sleep.

Good luck

In my opinion, he needs to learn responsibility and that would be setting a clock and having it in his room - get him involved in picking one out and setting it, etc. Then decide on a time in the morning for him to get up and stick to it EVERY morning.

As for the night time snafu - I feel your pain!! My husband would never help and if he got involved at all it would be to wind the kids up and then it would be even harder to get them to bed. So, my solution - do it myself!! I finally just told my husband to stay in the living room, turn the tv off at 7:00 and then I would take the kids up and get them ready for bed. It just made it a whole lot easier. He would go up and kiss them good-night AFTER they were all tucked in.

Good luck!!

7 or 7:30 in bed, yes. Give him time to fall asleep, too. So 8pm could be too late.
I never wake my little ones up. They just get up for school.

You have to get him to bed at a reasonable hour, and wake him up. That's the ONLY way his circadian rhythm will adjust to school hours and start waking him up on his own. He needs a set schedule.

When my boys were 6, bedtime was 7:30. That's IN BED with the lights off. I woke them up in the morning.

Now my boys are 10 and 12 years old. 10 yo's bedtime is 8:30, 12 yo's is 9pm. They go get ready for bed and go read 30 minutes prior. And they wake up at 6:30am on their own. The first few weeks of school, I usually go up and make sure they get up, just to get them back into the swing of things. But after that, they do just fine.

My point is that your child is too young to be getting up on his own. You need to wake him and get him into the habit. And you need to enforce that he is consistently going to bed and getting up at the same time if it's ever going to become an automatic thing for him.

He's 6 not a baby and if he goes to school, he should wake up at a time to get ready without rushing every day. I'm not really sure what your problem is: Do you want your son to not take responsibility for getting up on time with an alarm? Or are you angry with your husband for not getting him to bed on time?

Your setting yourself up for stress by doing this. You need to get your son his own alarm clock and let him get used to it. If you do this now your going to have a teenager who misses the bus every morning. why would you start the day feeling rushed and behind If 7 gets him moving and ready on time then do 7. the leaving him sleep to get that precious time is wasted because he will be off the rest of the day. Get him up and moving and into bed at the designated time. He will get used to the schedule and be happier with a mom who is not stressed and rushing in the morning.

if you are there then bedtime has to start at lot sooner maybe even before daddy comes home, so they can get to bed earlier, it had nothing to do with waking up and everything to do with going to bed on time.

My 6 yr old is going on a strict schedule of 8 pm bed, 6 am rise. His school starts at 7:40 am, and it takes nearly 30 minutes for me to drive him there. i'm not letting my husband interfere with the bedtimes this year because when it isn't adhered to, we are late the next day. Not happening this year!

I bought an alarm clock this weekend and set it for 6 am. Tonight he was in bed at 8. His clock will go off at 6 am. I will give him his ADHD medication, which takes 2 hours to kick in, so he'll be in good shape when class starts.

I don't understand. You want him to sleep until he wakes up? What if he's tired and wants to sleep until noon? He is 6 not an adult. He gets woke up when it's time to get up just like the rest of the world...

9pm to 7am is more than enough sleep for a 6 year old normally. I have a 9 year old that would sleep a full 13 hours per day if I'd let her. I have a 6 year old that is an 8-9 hour sleeper total. He's up and awake within a few moments of hearing his name called. The girl is one I drag out of bed and tell her the truck is running to get her hiney in it then she can go back to sleep.

Sounds to me like the issue is on the other end when he goes to bed. If your DH doesn't work well on getting him to bed, what about your DH waking him up?

I would set a time, like 7AM. I wake my DD by opening her window and singing her a song. She wakes up to my voice and likes the song.

I would rather wake her in the AM and not be running around like a crazy person in the morning than let her stay up at night.

If your DH is not on the ball with putting your son to bed, then say, "DH, we need to figure out something that works for everybody. Our son being tired in the morning makes for a really bad morning for both he and I. I don't like starting our day that way. How about you read him his story early and I take care of bath and bed so everyone is happier?" Etc.

Have you not noticed in the past 6 years that your son works better on a schedule?

School years are the time to get it together.
You need to set your husband down and explain that bedtime *needs* to be happening by 8 at the latest. Your son is six and if he's dragging in the morning, it's not fair to your son to allow him to stay up late.

He is the child. Your husband is the adult. If you do a Google search on student's sleep, you can see that every 15 minutes more of sleep a child has actually increases how well he learns at school and how he performs at school. Here's a New York Magazine article based on Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's research for the book "Nurtureshock". I observed this with the preschoolers I worked with- the ones who were regularly well-rested tended to do better than the kids who went to bed 'whenever'.

http://nymag.com/news/features/38951/

Tell your husband that this is how we start helping our kids-- it's by helping them to meet the expectations of school. Allowing them to stay up late may be 'fun dad', but it's so unfair to your son to send him to school tired. For your son's sake, figure out how long it *really* takes for your son to be up, having a good breakfast, getting dressed and functioning for school. He should be making it to school on time every day. Develop these good habits now so that your son is in the habit of meeting those expectations.

(My son is six;we do bedtime stories at 7, at 7:30 he has a half-hour of quiet playtime and then can look quietly at books in bed from 8 to 8:30. If he seems tired/cranky, we shorten those two times, so he might have 20minutes quiet play and 15 minutes to look at books. We discovered that he naturally woke on his own at 6:30 during the school year with plenty of time to get ready for school and to be on time for class.)

My older son is going into first grade next week. He goes to bed at 7:30 or 7:45 on school nights. His alarm goes off and he gets up at 7:00am, gets dressed and comes down for breakfast.

He has to go to school. That is not negotiable. He needs to learn to be on time for school, so that means having a schedule in the morning. If he is missing sleep it has to be made up by adjusting bedtime, not by sleeping in.
Yes, you should set a time and stick to it. You take over the bedtime routine and make sure your son gets to bed at a reasonable time. But you are going to have to get over not wanting to get him up in the morning and do it anyway.

If he gets to bed early enough on a consistent basis, he'll get enough sleep and still be able to wake up at 7am.
If you aim for an 8pm bedtime and it slips by an hour a lot then you need to move up the bedtime routine start time.
In general kids need 10-11 hrs of sleep.
It varies a bit with growth spurts and if they are coming down with something.
Sleep is important, but you can still manage it, put it on a schedule and get to school on time.

Kids are resilient. They can go with less sleep sometimes and be just fine. Sometimes the benefits of staying up a little later in the evening are worth having to be woken up in the morning. Seriously, if he stays up too late one night, then has to get up at the usual time despite still being tired he will likely just make up for it by going to bed early then next night. If he goes to bed at 9:00pm and gets up at 7:00am he is getting 10 hours of sleep a night, which is more than enough for a 6 year old.

I'm not sure why people are acting like this is a teen setting his own bedtime and you don't want to wake him. It's not your son's fault your husband keeps him up. At this age I agree them waking up naturally is the best. Then you know they are getting enough sleep. Works well for us except I have the same issue with my husband so I have to be a friggin tyrant telling him over and over to get say good night and be done. But I do get him out of there and we have periodic discussions about it and he's better for a while so at least talk to your husband. And then every night insist he let your son get to sleep.

Wake the poor kid at the same time every day. If you need 30 minutes to get him ready for school, wake him up 30 min before its time to go. If you need 45 minutes, wake him up 45 minutes. What is worse for your son is not getting a chance to prepare for the day by rushing sometimes, sometimes not, whatever. Let him have a routine, let him have time in the morning to mentally prepare for school. Do this by getting him up the same time every morning.

9:00 pm is on the late side for a kid, but not terrible. I say as long as your husband gets him to bed by 9, you're fine (are you getting him up any earlier than 7 am? That's a solid 10 hours). My 3 y/o and 6y/o are usually going to bed between 9:00 and 9:15.

Lastly, "you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" which means you might need to be the one who puts him to bed if you want it done by 8:00...

Your post sounds more like a vent than anything else.

If your husband doesn't help with bedtime (mine didn't, either, when my children were young!), get your boy to bed yourself.

I tend to wake up in the morning on my own, without an alarm, when I've had a good night's rest. For me, that's eight hours. Many adults can do well with less than that. Most children require more.

You want to adjust the going-to-bed end of things so that the getting-out-of-bed end can go more easily. That front end may be where you set the alarm clock right now: "Mikey, when the alarm goes off, it's 7:00 and time to start getting ready for sleep."

Then, when the bell goes off, *you* get up from your chair or get out of the kitchen, turn OFF the television/computer/both, and give Mikey your attention. I don't know if you have other children, but make this a special time of day for Mikey. A six-year-old can do many things for himself, but since it's really the non-dawdling you're working on, be involved as well.

When he's cleaned up and in pajamas, talk and read with him until the clock says 8 p.m. If Mikey still insists on playing the dawdling game, then get-ready-for-bed time will be moved up from 7:00 to 6:30. He'll understand after a while that bedtime can't be maneuvered.

When it's 7 a.m., wake Mikey up. Don't set a clock for him yet. That will come. Do it yourself, and do it cheerfully. Take a few minutes waking him up, talking to him, and hugging him. Let him know that the day is worth getting up for. That may mean that you will need to get up earlier than you usually do for a while, but that's just part of the job.

When Mikey wants to wake himself up - and he'll want to because that's a big-kid thing - introduce the bedroom alarm clock.

If Mikey has younger brothers and sisters, you'll want to make some adjustments, but you get the idea.

It sounds dorky, not to mention more work for you, but when a kid knows that going to bed and getting up is a GOOD thing and not just another command, it turns into a better habit. You need to set that up for him. It won't take forever, and you might even miss it when he decides he'd rather take on his own responsibility.

Can't you put him to bed rather than your husband...do you work at night? There is some clear research that not getting enough sleep can affect brain development in kids...so yes, sleep is number one.

We quit riding the bus so my dd can sleep later. Even when I put her to bed early, she's wired and doesn't fall asleep - so she does need more time in the morning. We lay all clothes out, have everything packed up so all she has to do is get up, dressed, teeth brushed, etc. I pack a protein snack she eats at school during snack time...even if we had time for breakfast, she's not hungry that early in the morning.

Sleep experts say that the way to know if they're getting enough sleep is if they wake up on their own.

Our daughter all through elementary school had to be in her seat at school by 7:40 am.

I set her alarm for 6:15 so she could sleep for 15 more minutes. If she did not get up in those 15 minutes, I then woke her up.. Some times she would ask for 5 more minutes.. And that was fine..

Your son may need to go to bed earlier to get his precious sleep...and then have 2 alarm clocks in his room. That way, he can either get up and turn one off, or get up and turn both of then off at the same time.

Sorry but I have never in my life, awoken before 7:00 am on my own. I have always needed a alarm. My husband has 3 alarms, a clock alarm, his cell phone alarm and his watch alarm..

I too don't get home until 7:30-9:00p. If my kids bedtime was 8p, which it should be, I would never see them. My middle schooler sometimes had homework until 10:00p....

Some things that have worked for us.
- Doing showers/bath time right after dinner.
- 30 mins of quiet time before bed. So if you want bed time to be 8:00pm, no tv after 7:30p.
- My kids wear their clothes for the next day to bed. Then it is just get up, brush the hair, put on the shoes and go.
- Instead of using an alarm clock, use your voice. We stand in the hall and say 'Rise and SHINE!!'..

Even going to bed as late as 9:00pm, waking up at 7:00am is fine.

Kids need a routine and they need consistency especially with bedtime and sleep habits. our nation has an overwhelming epidemic of sleepless children and even more adults that suffer from insomnia and other sleep disorders. There is nothing more detrimental to our health than lack of quality sleep. That being said, the bedtime routine and time that our son needs to be settled in for the night is critical. Keeping him on track and consistent each night will help him get the rest he needs and will also set the body's internal clock to fall into a natural sleep-wake pattern on its own.

As for getting your son up in the morning, that too should be a consistent event as well. Whether you wake him up or he uses an alarm clock, getting him up at the same time each day helps the body regulate itself and will also establish a nice sleep-wake cycle to the point where some people can wake ip at the same time each day no matter what because they have trained their bodies to do so. I agree with all the moms here who mentioned that the bedtime is more critical than when he wakes up in the morning. Get your husband onboard and in support of a static bedtime for your son and stick to it. A united front has to be in full effect....no cop outs from hubby and no wish-washy rules. Your son at this age needs about 9-10 hours of sleep at night so try to stick with that as a guide. Good sleep habits when he's young are totally worth their weight in gold when he is older!

I hate that, too. I think that alarm clocks are so rude and jarring. With mine, I make sure that he is gone to bed (asleep?) by a certain time and have a designated latest time to wake him up. Hopefully, he will have rested fully.

To wake him, I give him kisses and rub his back. I speak to him softly, telling him that it's time to wake up. I let him stir for a bit (couple of minutes) and then get progressively more aggressive. I do this with my husband, too, and anybody else I need to wake up. I've always done this. I HATED for my parents to yell in to me or to open the door and turn on lights or open curtains or pull down the covers. I think that it is rude, rude, rude to jar someone from a sound sleep.

Does your husband not wind down until a certain time, or does it just take him that long after you've started the process? If it's the former, encourage your husband to do his bonding at a different time. For example, if he comes home and reads the paper and has dinner before bonding with his son, encourage him to change up that routine, maybe have dinner first and then bond. While he's reading the paperm you can be getting son off to sleep. If it's the latter, then just start earlier the process of winding down. If he is not willing to budge on this, then you two really need to figure that part out. Will your husband let you take the reins?

First, you and hubbie need to be in agreement on bedtime. Maybe start the routine at 8, then tucked in by 8:30? My kids are in bed by 7:30 on school nights and are waking themselves up for school, no help needed from me.

You can wake your son up in a nicer way too. Maybe start with opening the blinds/curtains. If that doesn't rouse him, then some of his favorite music on low.

Your son needs about 10 hrs of sleep per night. If he is going to bed at 9, then 7 am is a reasonable wake up time.

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/sleep-children

I have the same problem with my daughter. If she sleeps until she wakes up, it is so much easier to get her ready and out the door than if I have to wake her up myself (she tends to sleep through her alarm anyway). My hubby dawdles at night too so when I am handling other things, she gets in bed late. If I deal with her bath and bedtime, nothing else gets done. Drives me crazy.

Best thin will be to get your son on a bedtime schedule and stick to it except in rare cases. Then, wake your son up at a reasonable time so you can get him ready and out the door without rushing on time.