Wake window
Also called wake windows, awake time, WW
A wake window is the stretch a baby stays awake between two sleeps, from waking up to drifting off again. Parents and sleep consultants use it to guess when the next nap will come.
How it's said
At what age did you stop going by wake windows and have a consistent bedtime?
My girl's just turned 5 months and her wake windows are 1 hour 30 to 1 hour 45 max!
I had my kids in the noughties and even I have no idea what a wake window is, or why I'd need an app.
Nine babies is going to be busy, busy, busy. No one is going to be timing wake windows.
Who says it
Not to be confused with
- Awake time is the plain way to say how long a baby has been up. Wake window usually means a set length for the baby's age, used to time the next nap.
- A routine pins naps and bedtime to the clock. With wake windows the count starts when the baby wakes, so nap times move from day to day.
- SweetSpot is the Huckleberry app's name for its predicted best time to sleep, worked out from a baby's logged sleep and age. The wake window is the stretch awake; the SweetSpot is the app's guess at where it should end.
Where it came from
The idea grew out of private baby sleep consulting, which took off in the early 2000s. Consultants noticed that babies at each age settled best after a certain stretch awake, and they built nap schedules around those stretches.
The phrase reached most parents much later. Searches for "baby wake windows" started rising toward the end of 2020, and sleep consultants and parents soon filled Instagram and TikTok with age charts and sample days. Parents whose children were born in the 1990s and 2000s often say they never heard it.
It rests on a real idea, sleep drive: the longer a baby is awake, the stronger the pull toward sleep. Some people write it as awake window. Apps have their own versions too, and Huckleberry calls its predicted nap time the SweetSpot.
Cutiko's wake window calculator turns your baby's age into a sample day. Open the calculator