Do Kids Just *Know* When We’re Trying To Wake Up Before Them?

Do you need slippers, or do you and your child need to hold a seancé together? It’s a question that seems to pop into every mom’s head when she’s going to sneak downstairs early and have a cup of coffee before her children’s extremely routine and normal wake-up time. Suddenly, before you can even pour the creamer, there they are, waiting for you on the stairs or already unplugging their tablet from its charger in the living room. “Hi, Mama. I wake up,” they say, like it’s totally normal for them to be up an hour earlier than usual when you’ve spent the last six months making waffles at exactly 7:48 a.m. each day.

Again: Do you need slippers because your loud ass feet are waking up your kids, or should the two of you take this weird energy/in-sync vibe on the road as a supernatural show?

Well, I’m sorry, but this “same brainwave” thing with your own baby can be highly annoying when you just want to get some work done without them jumping off of your shoulders like they’re auditioning for American Ninja Warrior, but it also could be legit. A 2023 research study actually found that a mother and child do develop “synchronized brain activity in neural regions implicated” in both emotion expression and emotion regulation.

This shows up when mom engages in a lot of interactive play with baby, and the findings also discovered that “this neural synchronization seems to be largely specific to when mothers and their very young children are matching each other’s high-intensity positive emotional states (relative to matching of neutral or low states).” And I’m sorry, but is there any other high-intensity positive emotional state like thinking you’re going to get a hot cup of coffee by yourself?

Or maybe you really do need to just float down to your Keurig on a cloud so nobody hears you.

Look, while there is some truth to being in sync with your kids on a brain-wave level, this phenomenon of having them wake up when you do or stand outside the bathroom three seconds after you’ve disappeared or start crying the minute you sit down may be just because your kids love you. And when they’re tiny babies incapable of doing a single thing for themselves, they develop that all-consuming bond with you — and of course it could mean that they just ~sense~ when you’re awake for the day.

“I’ve tried everything from vibrating alarms to putting my alarm clock in our master bathroom so that my toddler doesn’t have any indication that I’m trying to wake up before her, but nothing ever works. The minute my feet hit the kitchen, I hear her door open. I’ve long wondered if she’s actually been awake for a while, but she just hears me get up and decides she can, too. But short of putting her baby monitor back up, I just have to go with it,” Sarah T., a mom of one in Florida, tells me. “The bonus is she usually goes down for an earlier nap, and then I finally get my alone time.”

I asked my own pediatrician about this once, and she smiled and said that babies and kids absolutely do have a connection with their moms that goes beyond normal bonding — there’s a reason we have our mother’s intuition, after all. But she also thinks a mom trying to wake up earlier than her kid and being thwarted is probably romanticizing the connection a little bit. “We all can feel when things change in our house. Everyone has their own little spidey sense, and if it goes off, they act on it. So even if they’re sound asleep and you sneak past their bedroom, there is an evolutionary concept there that could make them aware of the change in the routine.”

When I asked her why they don’t seem to do this when a dad leaves for work, she smirks. “Because dad’s not sitting downstairs watching a grown-up show on Netflix.”

So go ahead, Mom. See if maybe you can prep the coffee beforehand. Maybe you can hold your breath as you slide down your stairs like a melted puddle of goo. Maybe don’t turn on the TV and read a book, or slip onto your front porch for some quiet restoration. For god’s sake, don’t let the dog notice, and fill up the cat’s bowl so they aren’t meowing incessantly at you for the first 30 seconds.

Then go ahead and make room on the couch for your little one. You know they’ve been waiting.