Awake windows are probably one of the
most important elements in your baby sleeping
or not sleeping well.
So if a baby's awake windows are too short,
also then have short naps
because they weren't tired enough to nap for longer.
Short awake windows can also lead to
increased night waking,
the witching hour in the evening,
early morning waking and that kind of thing.
On the opposite end of the scale,
awake windows that are too long,
so your baby being awake for longer than they can handle,
can also lead to short naps due to overtiredness.
It can lead to night waking
and it can lead to early morning waking, as well.
So it is super important to get the awake windows right
because your child's sleep really, really depends on it.
Today's question that I'm going to be answering
is what is the awake window for a four or five month old?
So I'm also gonna say one more thing about that,
and that is that the thing you need to remember
with awake windows is that as your baby grows and develops,
which they do at a really rapid rate
in that first 12 months especially,
their awake windows also have to be constantly changing,
and that's something that a lot of people
don't quite realize how important that is.
So as your baby stops being a newborn baby,
you need to be constantly stretching out
their awake windows.
And I think a lot of the time we just forget to do that
or we don't realize quite how important it is
or we're really conscious of not being overtired,
so we actually end up putting them to bed too soon.
So what you're really doing by four or five months old
is you really should have moved completely away
from newborn sleep habits.
And by that I mean the sort of cliche,
one hour awake time between naps,
and you're looking at at least a two hour
awake window by that age.
So that means your baby wakes up in the morning,
and then two hours from there is their first nap.
They wake up from their nap.
Two hours from there is their next nap,
and so on throughout the day.
Closer to five and heading towards six months,
you'd want to be slowly stretching out
those awake times again
because, like I said, they're always changing and expanding.
By six months you're starting to look at
dropping that very late afternoon, the third nap of the day,
so then they're going to have a longer awake time
in the afternoon and evening
at that time of the day,
after their last nap and before bedtime,
than they will have in the morning.
Once you get towards six months,
it's not quite as simple as it's consistently
a two hour awake time.
It starts needing to be a little bit more structured
so that they're having an awake time in the morning
and then slightly more before their next nap
and then slightly more before bedtime in the evening.
And that is so that they have had enough sleep,
that they're rested.
They've had enough awake time, though,
that they are tired enough
to go to bed easily and then to sleep well overnight.
So yeah, two hours, certainly, at four months,
and looking to slowly stretch that out bit-by-bit
across the next couple months.
And easily you can do that by just tagging on
an extra five minutes every week or so
and stretching your baby's awake time out that way.
So I hope that's helps those of you
who have babies in that age range.
If you're sitting there going,
I've got a four month old baby
who is definitely not staying awake for two hours,
then I would suggest, first of all, I'm going to say,
your baby will surprise you.
So let them surprise you by how well
they actually can stay awake.
And my advice would be to start with what you're doing.
Maybe you're doing an hour 15, maybe an hour and a half,
and every couple days just stretch them by five minutes
every few days,
and then quite quickly you'll find they adapt
to having a longer awake time
and I think you might be pleasantly surprised
that they're also napping better as a result.
You can also just change their activity
or take them outside to get some fresh air
or put some music on or do something different
to kind of get them through that lull in their energy
to keep them going for a little bit longer.
I hope that's been really helpful in terms of awake times.
We have a lot more information about awake times
and the ideal nap lengths and things on our website,
and also a lot more videos about it on our YouTube channel.
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like this one.
See ya.