What time does your small child go to bed? (Not your point, really -- having lots to do, including lots of physical play, does a great job exhausting you... but I'm looking at many of the responses to your comment.)

I can't tell you how many parents I know that complain (sometimes bitterly) about how early their kids wake them up, and I find out they put the kid in bed at 7pm. Or 6pm, even.

My wife works best in the morning (and I work just fine whenever), so we play with our almost-2-year-old in the evenings and she generally goes to sleep at 11pm or sometimes later, then wakes up normally about 10am. She's never had a bedtime earlier than 10pm.

I don't know about every other parent (and how this would fit in with life) but this works great for us. We can go out to dinner and/or see friends in the evening when we want to (we take her along), we get lots done in the morning, and she gets her sleep.

Is there some other factor I'm missing? Why, when a child wakes up at 5:30am, is it not automatic for the parents to think "we're putting her to bed 2 hours too early"?

A possible enabler, now that I think about it -- we have great shutters on our windows, so it's dark until we open them.

Because not all kids work this way. If I put my daughter (17.5 months) to bed any later, not only would she wake earlier but she would wake up in the night more too.

I do know of another couple who have a similar system to you though; Dad works all day so they keep their boy up later and let him sleep in to get more family time.

This has always confused me. I have memories of some vague but very young age of me being put to bed when it was still light outside.

Agreed on having a small child. I now get up at 5:30 everyday, even if I don't want to.

Same here. I was a "top of noon" riser for years, then I got married and had a kid... Now my two boys are 5 and 7, they both wake up reliably between 5 and 6am everyday. Also, relatedly, though, they go to sleep at 7pm. To deal with such an early rise, I often fall asleep at 7pm, too. If you still want lots of sleep, go to sleep early. Simple advice like that is often hard to follow.

I have definitely become more of a morning person since becoming a dad, but not because the kid wakes me up. My wife handles the baby in the morning. I just find myself waking up early so I can spend some time with the baby before I have to work.

YES! Wearing yourself out does wonders for your sleep. I'd bet that 99% of people with sleeping problems have sitting jobs.

Only exhausting your brain without exhausting your body will just make you weary without making you feel sleepy. Your mind needs rest but your body is restless because it wants action :)

I remember when I had to do a mandatory 6-month army service period after college and during that time it took me about 2 minutes after lights-out to fall asleep. Actually, I was sooo sleepy all of the time that I learned how to take short naps whenever and whenever I could (especially after lunch).

The experience made me realize that, for most of the people who have it, insomnia was not a health problem that should be treated with drugs but just an imbalance between body and spirit, if I may say so :)

Just to add on, I would recommend getting that exercise in the morning or worst case, more than 4 hours before bedtime.

My boss has a couple of children, and he is very much a night person. He'll be working on stuff till 2, and then be up again at 7 because of the kids. I'm sure that isn't healthy either, but that is when he is most productive.

I myself have found myself to be more productive at night as well. For some reason I am just able to get more work done, faster, and more efficiently and best of all with less distractions from "the real world".

Let me just preface this by saying that I think kids are great (and this is not taking into consideration the other benefits of having kids, like happiness and sense of purpose and things like that), but if your goal is not just to get up early for the sake of getting up early but to get up early in order to get things done, it seems like having a kid would not necessarily be a net benefit time-wise as the reason you need to get up early with a kid is to spend time taking care of them. Of course, I don't think having kids ever stopped anyone from taking over the world, so this may be an invalid point.

I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but I believe the suggestion of having kids wasn't intended to be taken seriously.

Oh I got that impression too, I was just being literal for the sake of discussion :)

Exercise makes or breaks a good night's sleep for me. It's so necessary in fact that I'd equate my need for a good run to my coffee addiction.

Two staph infections this past year that have prohibited me from running, my preferred exercise, causing me to be completely unable to sleep without drugs. Fortunately, a symptom of a staph infection is a prescription for hydrocodone.

As Richard Branson declared, the secret weapon to productivity is exercise.

amen to that. the problem with the luxury of time is that you tend to piss it away on things you don't really need to do. having kids, or other time sensitive commitments really forces you to make the most out of the "spare" time you do have.

Try getting up early to cycle to work, which worked brilliantly for me when I was able to do it.