When Will My Baby Sleep Through the Night?

This is one of the most common questions parents and carers ask me during a consultation.  Their voices are often eager with hope, with good reason.  If you have a child who wakes through the night, every night, you’ll understand that feeling.  After a long day and what can feel like a marathon of getting your baby to sleep at bedtime, you want to eat a hot meal, read a good book, tick a few things off your to do list, watch some mindless television, or just crawl into bed yourself.  But you can’t truly relax and enjoy any of these things because you’re on edge waiting for the first wake up…and the second wake up…and the third wake up….

If this is you, I know you’re waiting for me to give you a clear cut answer, like “Your baby will sleep through the night at 6 months old.”  Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy.  There are a number of factors that affect your child’s sleep, and there isn’t a particular age or weight when babies automatically start sleeping longer stretches.

I can tell you that we all wake naturally multiple times during the night.  This includes babies, toddlers, teenagers, and adults.  Our sleep occurs in cycles, starting with a light stage of sleep, moving to a deeper stage of sleep, and then back to light sleep again.  During the light stage of sleep, it’s easy for us to be woken by small disturbances like the furnace kicking in, a dog barking outside, or just turning over in bed.  Adults have had plenty of experience and practice dealing with this, so we often just go back to sleep.  The majority of the time, the wake up is so brief that we don’t even remember it the next day. 

The challenge faced by many babies is their dependence on a sleep prop.  A sleep prop is something (or someone) babies depend upon to get themselves to sleep at naptime, bedtime, and when they wake during the night.  Common sleep props include breastfeeding, bottles, rocking, bouncing, swinging, and soothers.  We’ve all been that exhausted parent who will do just about anything to get their baby to sleep so we can do the same.  The problem with a sleep prop is that when your baby wakes naturally during the night, and you’re not ready and waiting with their prop, they have no other way to get back to sleep. 

So, what you really want to know is “When will my baby be able to get back to sleep on their own?”

This is a much easier question to answer.  Quite simply, this will happen when they learn how.

When you teach your child how to get to sleep independently, they will use that skill multiple times a night, every night, for the rest of their lives.

Now, there’s more to it than just leaving your baby alone in their crib and letting them figure it out for themselves. Although that approach has worked for a lot of families, it’s not one that everyone is comfortable using, and it’s not the most gentle or effective way of teaching your baby excellent sleep skills.  Independent sleep is a skill that takes time and practice to learn, just like driving a car, playing the piano, or learning to walk. 

The traditional Cry-It-Out approach is a lot like sitting your child at a piano bench with some sheet music and saying “Figure it out.” Eventually, they just might, and you could have a child prodigy on your hands.  Many children are not naturally gifted in the sleep department, and they need some teaching to be successful. 

As with any skill that a child needs to learn, practice is essential.  Your baby won’t master this new skill on the first day or the first night.  There will most likely be a bit of crying and frustration along the way as they develop their own strategies for success, but this doesn’t mean you can’t be there to encourage, comfort, and reassure them.  What you don’t want to do is do the hard work for them by resorting to a sleep prop.  Props don’t allow children the opportunity to figure out their own strategies for getting to sleep.

So even though I can’t give you an exact date or age when your baby will go through the night without crying and demanding help to get back to sleep, I can tell you without hesitation that it will be much, much sooner if you stop doing it for them.