What are sleep training clocks?

Sleep training clocks are sleep aids that can help encourage your little one to stay in bed until a set time. The clock shows one face when it’s night time and then another when it’s day time.

You might want to introduce it if you’re seeing early starts, as part of the cot to bed transition or perhaps you want to use it from early on as many of them double up with white noise and night lights.

The most common sleep training clock is the Gro Clock. The only issue with this is it has a blue light at night and then a yellow night for the morning. Blue light can break down melatonin (the sleep hormone) which isn’t ideal. We did try it with Hallie for about a week and we did see a big change in how long it was taking her to fall asleep so we removed it. Ideally you want the overnight colour to be red or orange - think sunset colours..

There are plenty of options online. The one we went for is this one - it’s great, does the job and is reliable with it. There are other options available, some of them are linked by an app.

When setting up your clock you want the wake time to be achievable. If you have a baby that usually wakes at 6am that you want to encourage to stay in their room until 6:30am initially set the clock to change colour at 5:50am. That way they are winning from the start. Cue big celebration. Then after a couple of days you can shift the ‘wake time’ by 10 minutes and then continue to do this until it’s set at your desired wake time.

If they wake while it’s still ‘night’ keep them in their room until it changes colour to day.

It can be really useful to introduce a clock in the run up to the cot to bed transition, it will help alleviate your fears that given the opportunity your little one will be trying to escape their room at any given opportunity.