10 Tips to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night
There is a level of exhaustion known only by parents. It’s the result of the uncanny ability of a baby to know the precise moment you’re finally climbing into bed. With night after night of interrupted sleep and earlier than hoped for mornings, burnout should be inevitable. However, parents learn how to dig deep and find an other-worldly ability to function on little sleep. They wonder, “When will my baby sleep through the night?” And through the fog, they hope this isn’t their new norm, that tonight is the night that little one will sleep soundly.
Here are ten tips to help that restful night arrive as soon as possible.
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The Best Parenting Advice
When I was pregnant with my first baby, my sister-in-law and mother of five handed me a book. “Read this,” she said. “It’s a life saver.” Five children of our own later, and that is still some of the best parenting advice I’ve ever received because the book convinced me that sleeping is a skill and taught us principles for how to raise good sleepers.
It’s now been over a decade since I read that book
The most important concept to remember is that sleeping is a skill. That is a hopeful idea because it means that like other life skills, we can progress and change. We can help our children learn to be good sleepers.
Sleeping Goals
Whether you’re looking forward to your baby’s birth, in the throws of newborn exhaustion, or suddenly have a child waking in the night, sleep is a big deal. While parents do exhibit an uncanny ability to live on little to no sleep, that’s not the preferred lifestyle for most. Sleep helps everyone function at their highest level, remain happy, develop, and be healthy. Getting too little sleep is detrimental to the whole family.
So teaching our kids to be good sleepers is a priority for both their health and well-being and ours.
While it isn’t realistic to say every child will reach the milestones by a certain age, the goal is that our children will be able to fall asleep on their own, go back to sleep when they wake in the night, and eventually appreciate the opportunity to be well rested.
These tips can help us reach that goal.
10 Tips to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night
1. Create Consistent Daytime Sleep
It may seem like you want to tire a baby out during the day in order to help them sleep more at night. However, the better a baby sleeps during the day, the better the night will go too.
This is the first thing I focus on if my child is waking in the night.
It’s hard for a child to get too much sleep. The American Academy of Pediatrics as well as the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommend how much sleep children should get. So while your six-year-old might need twelve hours of sleep, your four-month-old might still need sixteen. Children need a lot of sleep because they are developing so rapidly.
One of the major causes of extreme fussiness and interrupted sleep is overtiredness. On the other hand, it is easier for a well-rested baby to be soothed and fall asleep. Daytime naps are essential for a baby to be well-rested.
The daytime is also an easier time for many babies to practice other sleep tips such as falling asleep on their own.
For this reason, this is the first thing I turn to when a baby starts waking in the night. I’ll shoot for a consistent morning wake-up time and set naps. This alone often resolves sleep issues.
2. Organize your Time into Sleep, Eat, then Wake
Set a routine for the day that is sleep, eat, awake time, repeat. As a newborn, those awake times will be short. You often have to tickle and cajole to get in a full feeding and a minute of awake time. As your baby grows, that awake time will lengthen.
This isn’t true in the night, when you won’t have awake time. Instead, you can feed, burp, and put baby back in bed. This is an early way to help babies begin to organize their sleep with uninterrupted stretches in the pm hours.
If your baby is older, she may be having fewer naps and might not need to sleep before every meal. However, the pattern holds for the naps that she does take. Nap, then eat, then playtime or go for a walk or whatever you are doing for awake time. Even the final nursing before bed will be followed by a little awake time to read a story or snuggle.
The real genius here is that your baby usually won’t be hungry and tired at the same time. When a tired baby needs to eat, he often falls asleep doing so. This can lead to a half-feeding (and thus needing to be fed sooner than usual), bubbles that need to be burped out while sleeping, or the baby learning he needs the breast to fall asleep.
After five kids and seeing the experience of countless other mothers, I can attest that every child is different. A set number of hours between feedings or certain nap schedule may not work for every child. However, I have seen this pattern of sleep, eat, wake be helpful over and over.
3. Choose Sleep Aides Purposefully
Many children appreciate sleep aides, even big children. A sleep aide helps bring sleep. It could be anything from a stuffed animal or pacifier to white noise or a certain song. Recognize that if you offer the same thing night after night, your child will likely come to count on it.
For example, if you want to use a pacifier, know you might be up in the night helping your baby find that pacifier to go back to sleep. If there’s one stuffed animal, be ready to take that stuffed animal when you travel.
We have purposefully chosen to offer sleep aides that are simple to use, and we think help our kids learn to sleep under the most realistic circumstances. For us, that means a small blanket or stuffed animal to snuggle. We trade them out so that if we’re ever left without a specific blanket or animal, it won’t be a major meltdown and baby can still sleep.
4. Have a Simple Bedtime Routine
A bedtime routine will signal to your child that it’s time to start sleeping. The quicker and simpler, the better. If the routine takes too long, it might not fit into a busy night, meaning it might not happen consistently enough to work. Consistency is the key to making any routine work.
Our bedtime routine is snuggling or rocking while reading a story. Then we sing a song and tuck in. For nursing babies, I nurse before that. By the time we wean, we don’t give a bottle or nighttime snack.
Some suggest a bath as part of the routine, but you don’t need to bathe your baby everyday. So we may or may not bathe before our routine. If it’s easier, bathe during the day. Don’t feel the need to wait until bedtime when your baby might already be tired.
5. Put Baby Down Tired and Awake
This is one of the biggies for helping your baby learn to put herself back to sleep when she wakes in the night. Help her learn to fall asleep on her own at the beginning of the night and naps too.
Unfortunately, this can be easier said than done.
Watch for signals that your baby is getting tired such as rubbing his eyes, yawning, having to be held, or general fussiness. At that point, soothe your baby and put him in bed calm but awake.
Eventually build a routine so naps and bedtime happen at the same times each day. This will help with your baby’s natural sleep rhythms.
If your child is falling asleep nursing or seems really cranky at bedtime, push bedtime earlier until you find the sweet spot. If bedtime is really hard, experiment with a short cat nap or quiet time in the early evening.
That being said, snuggling a sleeping baby is one of the true joys of parenthood. Enjoy it when you can. Some naps falling asleep on your chest outside the crib will not shatter your hopes of an independent sleeper.
6. Don’t Be that Quiet
Don’t worry about keeping your home super quiet during naps or nighttime. Although it might seem like noise will undo all your hard work in getting baby to sleep, some noise can bolster good sleep habits.
In the womb, your baby actually slept quite a bit, regardless of what was happening outside. Even without the sound blockage provided by the uterus, many newborns have a hard time staying awake! It is healthy for our infants to continue with the same sleep habits.
While sudden loud noises might be a different breed, a baby can sleep through the common noises of daytime living and parents awake in the evening.
With my first, I was worried about being too quiet by myself during the day. So during naps I would vacuum, talk to myself (yes), and turn the radio on and off. It probably seemed silly, but these noises can help a baby learn to become and remain a sound sleeper.
When babies are used to having sounds in the background of their sleep, it allows them to sleep through a wakened sibling and rest on the go when needed. Additionally, this habit allows the rest of the family to continue living regardless of sleep hours.
7. Wait to React
When your baby wakes in the night or doesn’t immediately go to sleep, be patient. Give your little one some time to calm himself or go back to sleep on his own.
Using a timer or consciously checking your watch can be helpful. It may seem like eternity when your baby is crying, but sometimes it’s actually five minutes. Additionally, some crying will not hurt your baby in the short or long-term.
If you react immediately every time your baby cries in the night, you might interrupt his efforts to go back to sleep. Plus, you’re teaching your baby that he always needs you in order to calm down or fall asleep.
8. Remember, Baby Isn’t Always Hungry
When your child does need attention in the night, remember that feeding is not the only option.
Especially if you’re breastfeeding, it can seem like the easy answer for soothing in the night (or anytime for that matter) is the breast. However, there really are other reasons that babies cry too. And while breastfeeding usually does calm a child, it might be creating hard habits to break.
If your baby is old enough that she doesn’t necessarily need to eat during the night (or if it isn’t time for a feeding yet), try first to soothe your baby without picking her up. If that doesn’t work, check the diaper, burp, or rock and sing. Swaddle and sway and when baby is calm, put her in bed and give her a few minutes to go back to sleep.
A good step is to rock baby back to sleep. It will take longer than nursing, but after a few nights of getting help going back to sleep but not eating, the nighttime wakings usually lessen.
9. Own It
Sometimes we do things that hinder our child’s sleep or our own. Maybe we schedule nighttime activities, so we can’t put our child to bed consistently. It might be that we don’t want to try something new. Perhaps we’re tired because we watched TV instead of sleeping ourselves.
Whatever it is, we make a lot of choices that affect our children’s sleep. I don’t mention it to increase guilt. Instead, I bring it up so we can own it. We don’t have to pass the blame, only complain, or feel helpless. We can consider our own choices and decide whether we’re happy with them or not. And if we weigh our options and sleep doesn’t win out in this stage, we can be sure of our decisions and move forward with confidence.
10. Hold On and Remember What Matters Most!
We all take different lengths of time to learn new skills. So while some kids become sound sleepers quickly, others require more patience. How a baby actually sleeps is not something we can control. We set up the best possible circumstances, and love no matter what. However long it takes, hang in there. Your kids will learn eventually.
I hear there aren’t many teenagers who cry out for their parents in the night.
While we might be exhausted as parents, remember a good night’s rest does not a happy family make. We can be happy and at peace no matter what is going on around us. Even when we’re tired, we can dig deep and stay patient and kind.
Additionally, remember that having your baby sleep through the night is not the end all be all of parenting success. In fact, it says very little about our parenting success. Instead, we are successful parents when we try our best to help our kids feel loved. And tired or not, half-asleep or not, we can love our kids.
These late night visits and early mornings won’t last forever. As long as days might feel, the kids really do grow up fast. So let’s treasure the snuggles while we can, no matter what time of day or night they happen.
What challenges are you having with your baby’s sleep? What tips have I missed that work for you? Please share in the comments.
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