Baby’s Beauty Sleep

As a baby sleep consultant, I approach my work with full confidence that every baby or toddler I meet can sleep well. I almost always have much more confidence about the baby’s potential to be a great sleeper than the parents. I put a lot of energy into transferring that belief to the parents, and now I’ll share the reason for my confidence with you.

Often parents have a whole laundry list of reasons why their baby is not sleeping. It’s understandable. They’re tired, they’re getting a lot of inputs from well-meaning friends and family, and they’re trying to make sense of a baby’s ever-changing sleep needs. The three most common reasons I hear as to why a baby isn’t sleeping are:

1. Baby is teething

Babies have new teeth sprouting constantly throughout their young life, so I don’t feel that teething should be a reason to indefinitely postpone sleep training. There may be a few days of acute pain when the baby is cutting teeth for the first time. They may have fever and the pediatrician may even recommend some medication. I don’t recommend working on sleep training if your baby has fever or is otherwise unwell. But sleep is still important. I remind parents that when we as adults feel unwell (have a headache or fever), the first guidance is always to get lots of sleep. It’s when we’re sleeping that our bodies heal and we’re least aware of the pain and discomfort. The babies I’ve worked with that sleep through the night usually sail through the teething phase without much trouble.

2. Baby is going through a sleep regression

Yes, babies go through a lot of developmental changes and leaps in the first year of life. And yes, this impacts their alertness, their naps and their night sleep. However, what I see is that parents use “sleep regression” as a catchall phrase to explain why their baby is not sleeping. This goes on for months and months. And then they start to think “Hmm … why is this regression never ending?” Great question! I went through the same thing with my daughter, and ultimately by the time she was 7 months old I realized that it wasn’t a sleep regression, teething or a growth spurt. She simply didn’t know how to fall asleep on her own or connect sleep cycles in the night.

The 4-month sleep regression.

The regression I focus on with parents is the 4-month regression. At 4 months, your baby will start to have more alertness and awareness. As a newborn, they could fall asleep anywhere — in the car, in the pram, at a party. By 4 months, it’s a good idea to offer consistency in their sleep location. At 4 months, it’s easier for your baby to get more overstimulated, so nap timings are very important. Tiny wake windows in between naps is the name of the game. Your baby may get more distracted during daytime feeds (again, because they are more alert), and the parents may worry they are not feeding enough. They may want to add in more night feeds, but instead I would check with the pediatrician and make sure you’re giving day feeds in a calm, boring place. Feeding in the living room with the TV on and family members around and the doorbell ringing will be way too distracting. Around 4 months, your baby will likely be shifting from 4 naps to 3 and bedtime can happen earlier.

To summarize, when your baby is 4 months old, they won’t be as oblivious as they were as a newborn. They won’t be quite as portable, or willing to take a nap anywhere. They won’t go with the flow quite as much. Hence, it’s important to honor their need for sleep and work around their nap and bedtime schedule.

3. Baby is going through a growth spurt

Well, yes, obviously! The first years of life are times of tremendous growth. However, by the time they have crossed 6 months, if there are no health problems and the pediatrician agrees, they will not need to wake up every 20 minutes or every 2 hours for night feeds. There’s an interview in my book Sleep, Baby, Sleep with Dr. Ravindra Chittal, a pediatrician in Mumbai, who shared that the baby calculates their milk intake needs over 24 hours. While the milk intake can be distributed in any way, if the baby is consuming all of their calories at night, then sleep goes for a toss. He suggests to parents, “instead of training the baby to sleep, you can train the baby to feed more in the daytime. We need to eat in the daytime and sleep at night.” The reason this is so important is because the pituitary gland produces growth hormone at night, and “interrupted sleep is interrupted growth.”

Please do speak to your own pediatrician about the appropriate number of night feeds for your baby.

Now, I will share what I consider to be a far more significant reason as to why your baby (over 6 months) may be waking up every hour at night:

Babies don’t like location changes.

They don’t like surprises.

They don’t like to fall asleep in one way (rocking, breastfeeding) and wake up in between their sleep cycles in a different way (alone, in the crib).

When this happens they say, “Hey! Please re-create the conditions that are required for me to fall back asleep!” They will want/need to be rocked or nursed back to sleep. When I speak to an exhausted parent who is perplexed about why their baby is waking up all night, they are almost always being fed or rocked to sleep. Once the parent understands this principle — that the baby doesn’t like to fall asleep in one way and then wake up (in between sleep cycles) in a different way — the solution emerges. Instead of feeding to sleep, they give the bedtime feed 30 minutes before bed. Then they finish the bedtime routine, and put the baby in the crib to sleep. Instead of rocking to sleep, they rock the baby for a few minutes, then put the baby in the crib and do some patting and shushing.

When parents understand this insight, then it also becomes clear that changes start at bedtime. Never in the middle of the night.

It’s because I understand this insight that I’m pretty confident that your baby’s interrupted sleep is not only because of teething, sleep regression or a growth spurt. And finally, this is the reason that I can be so confident that your baby can sleep well at night. It may not be easy, but it is simple. If we can put the baby to bed in a way that does not include surprises or location changes when they have the small night wakings in between their sleep cycle, then they will easily be able to fall back asleep.

This article was originally posted on Parent Connect! To get more insights on parenting and win a photo-album, sign up here.