Getting your toddler up at the same time each day helps when you have night-time sleep problems

Getting up at a different time from morning to morning might disrupt the settings on your toddler's body clock

Getting up at different times can disrupt the settings of your little one's body clock. This is particularly true if there is a big difference between get up times from day to day. A disrupted body clock means

• Your toddler wakes excessively at night, or doesn't settle back to sleep for long periods in the night, or keeps you awake with lots of restlessness and wanting to feed. He might be getting the same amount of sleep overall, but it's very broken up and spread out

• You experience the same physiological effects as jet lag, which might be worsening your feelings of sleep deprivation.

However, if you and your small child don't have night-time sleep problems, then variable get up times in the morning might be working just fine for your family. ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it"!)

The one thing that helps before all else when your toddler has disrupted body clock settings is to choose a regular get up time for your little one, and to stay with it. I know this doesn't sound very attractive, but it is very effective. The sleep science tells us that it's not regular bedtimes which are the key to healthy sleep throughout babyhood and childhood, but regular get up times. You can find out about protecting sleep throughout childhood here.

Choose the earliest possible time that works for your family, and then make sure your toddler always gets up at that time

It’s very hard to get out of bed and start the day when you're exhausted and sleep deprived. It’s quite normal to want to try to keep your little person asleep for as long as you can in the morning if the night has been broken. If things are really bad, you probably feel as though you started the day somewhere way back in the middle of the night, anyway. So, given how difficult it can be, getting your toddler up at the same time each day requires planning.

A very precise get up time works best, at least until the problems have resolved. By that I mean a difference of no more than ten minutes or so between mornings. I know it's tough. This is the closest The Possums Sleep Program gets to a rule, because a regular get up time is vitally important if you want to turn things around and enjoy more manageable days and nights with your little one.

What would be the earliest possible get up time that you and your partner can manage? Choosing the earliest possible get up time your family can do works best because the earlier a toddler gets up, regardless of his unique sleep needs, the earlier he is likely to go down for his Big Sleep at night. You can see that a little one who starts the day at five o'clock in the morning is likely to go to bed a lot earlier in the evening than a child who starts the day at eight o'clock in the morning.

Early morning sunlight helps keep the settings of the body clock healthy. Light, noise, activity – whether it’s opening the blinds, switching on the light (if you live in a country or a season where the sun isn’t up yet), making coffee, listening to the news – these are the circadian cues which set the body clock. I quite commonly see fathers where I live, in the inner city in a temperate climate, walking towards the local coffee shop or park as the sun rises with their toddler eagerly watching the world from a stroller or carrier.

Is it possible for your little person to start the day (often with a little wake up breastfeed) at the appointed get up time, then head off for an adventure with her other parent, while you (or the one doing the heavy night-time work) catch up on sleep?

You can set your child's body clock and get-up time to fit in with your family's lifestyle and needs

Earliest possible get up times vary from family to family. You can set your child's body clock to be in sync with your own preferences.

Some parents are night owls, and don’t mind their child going down to sleep very late as long as they don’t have to get up too early the next morning! When a parent comes in from paid work very late or is a shift worker, the family might be quite happy for their little one to go down for the Big Sleep very late in the evening, even eleven o'clock, in order to see a parent who comes in late! But this family might not want to get up before perhaps seven or eight o'clock in the morning. Yet another family, maybe with older children in school, or because of their own lifestyle preferences or because they've always been early birds, are happy for their toddler to start the day at (let's say) quarter to five.

A parent alone in the evenings without support might prefer to begin her days at the crack of dawn, because this helps her little one go down earlier in the evenings. It may be that in the early morning she is able to get out of the house and down to the park or a local cafe where she feels more connected to community life. She'd rather this, than face long evenings alone in the house with a child who needs high levels of sensory motor nourishment.

Also, some families like to change get up times depending on the season. That's fine too, as long as you remember to make the change gradually, over a week or two.

Ideas to help you get your toddler up at the same time each morning during a reset

It’s so hard getting up at the same time each day when you are already beyond exhausted! This can be one of the hardest aspects of The Possums Sleep Program to put in place. I hope that you have another loving adult who can take your child at get up time (often after a breastfeed), and let you catch up on some sleep! Here are other ideas, for when you don't have help.

• If you've had a big variation in get up times, of thirty minutes or an hour or more from morning to morning, bring your get up time earlier only gradually, by ten or fifteen minutes a day, otherwise everything can start to seem too difficult

• Ask others who care about you to support you. If you don't have a partner who can help out in the early morning, it might even be that a loving relative or friend is willing to come to your home at that time of day, to help while you're doing the reset, which typically takes one or two weeks

• Put the alarm clock near the bedroom door, so you have to get up to turn it off, and make sure the alarm is loud. Hitting snooze definitely doesn't help!

• Pull the curtains open to let the daylight in, or switch on the house lights if it's still dark outside

• Jump straight into the shower, if you possibly can, even just for a minute if your toddler doesn't like this. But toddlers usually love being in a warm shower on your hip - a sensory adventure to start the day.

• Turn on the radio or your favourite daily podcast

• Make up your bed (however poorly) so that it's less likely you'll climb back in with your child out of desperation

• Practice self-compassion, and remember it only feels this bad for the one or two weeks it takes to reset your own and your little one's body clock, after which getting up at the same time may still not feel great, to be honest, but won't feel this bad again.