Our only son, our darling boy, our new little man. For the past 5 nights he has slept 9-10 hours straight. He wakes up frantic and famished and I wake up in a puddle, but that’s OK. I’m doing the happy dance.
In his honor and in hopes of sharing my bliss with other moms of babies, I will repost our tips on helping babies learn to sleep through the night with minor edits and updates.
Since this can be a hot topic for some, let’s start with the standard disclaimer:
I’m going to share another of our methods for maintaining general sanity in the form of sleep patterns. This is not a principle, that must be obeyed lest ye fall into sin. This is our account of how we accomplish a goal that, we think, ultimately aids us in ordering our lives and maintaining a good attitude – something that is pleasing to God. Your mileage may vary; your childrearing style may make other methods more suitable for your family; you may think we’re callous nuts who hate our children (in that case, we’re right and you’re wrong; go read someone else’s blog).
All of our babies but one have slept through the night by 7 weeks. That one was reared under very different circumstances where we could not apply our method, and thus we saw very different results.
Here are some factors that we believe help our children to sleep for a 7 hour stretch from a very early age:
- I always nurse our babies on waking, and self-consciously do not nurse them to sleep.
Our babies sleep near us, but not in our bed. I rest better this way, and the baby learns to sleep well without depending on snuggling or nursing constantly – this also translates to better daytime naps, when Momma can’t necessarily lie down with Baby. - I nurse on demand, but I do not use nursing as an all-purpose pacifier; I try to distinguish between a hungry baby and one who just wants attention – which is a perfectly valid request on its own. Know your baby. Learn to recognise her different cries when she is hungry, dirty, lonely, etc. and respond accordingly. The breast (ok…or the bottle…) doesn’t answer every need in the best way.
- We also do not rock, pat, or otherwise “entertain” a baby to sleep. When the baby is clearly tired, we lay her down; she may fuss a little, but not much if we do this from the start.
We encourage thumb-sucking [ducking]. We think that babies who know how to pacify themselves fall asleep much more easily and are generally more content. This is especially nice when they wake up in the middle of the night and don’t *need* Momma to get back to sleep. Many people use binkies for this, but if the baby loses her binky during the night, she often can’t get to sleep until someone finds it for her. The thumb is conveniently attached, and is standard equipment with every baby. - When babies wake up during the night, we don’t let them “cry it out,” but we do make sure they work up to a *real* cry. We don’t rush to rescue a whimpering baby who may fall right back to sleep on her own. For a newborn, this may mean 30 seconds of real crying. For an older baby who usually sleeps through the night, maybe 5-10 minutes for us. This is not cruel. Babies can learn from the start that Momma will take care of them, but does not have to obey them instantly.
- When feeding a baby during the night, I keep it dark and quiet, and I make it brief. This is not a social engagement or playtime. I do not lie down with the baby, and I often will stop them before they’re quite finished. No lingering about at 2 A.M. Our middle-of-the-night feedings usually take 10 minutes or less, and baby is ready to go right back to sleep. I think this trains their systems to eat more in the morning and evening, so they are less likely to wake up at night due to genuine hunger. Then, when they wake out of habit, they go back to sleep more easily.
Again, this is just how we do it. We like to sleep all night, and we like our children to sleep in their own beds. Follow your husband’s lead.
Also, consider the season in your life and your own parenting style. Some people just don’t see a problem with waking up every hour and a half with a new baby, or waking up once or twice a night with an older baby. If this suits you and your husband, then keep doing it cheerfully.
As our helpers get older and my job gets a little more flexible, I don’t wait quite as long to pick up a crying baby during the night. It’s not such a big deal if I’m a little short on sleep because I can nap during the day now. When we had many Littles and no Bigs or Middles, nighttime sleep was essential for me to hold things together during the day.
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Kim,
Totally agree with you here. We learned the hard way. First baby did just fine with nighttime sleep on his own by 3 months, so that wasn’t so bad. Second baby, well, we had heard about demand feeding, meaning 24 hours a day feedings anytime the baby fussed. By the time he was 9 months old I was exhausted and he was just used to the habit of waking at night and eating. Just before baby three was born we were introduced to information that helped us understand the sleep/wake/feed cycle and how it effects nighttime sleep. What a blessing! I know for certain that we would not have been open to allowing the Lord to expand our family to the size it is (twelve wonderful children so far!) if we had not had a proven plan to get babies to sleep at night. I need sleep. So does hubby. As we get older, our need for sleep is even greater it seems. I sure can’t get up at night with a newborn as easily as I did when I was in my twenties! LOL!
(Please note: this sentence does not mean that I don’t get up with babies, just that it is harder . I also am not complaining or find it bad to have to get up, or we would have stopped having children long before now.) And, when baby’s eight and nine (twins) came along, the plan worked just great for them too! They were happily sleeping through the night by 8 weeks.
My heart really goes out to the sleep deprived moms who tell me they still gets up 3-4 times a night with a 6 – 8 – 10 month old. I don’t know how they do it. I would have fallen apart long before that! For some reason people think we are “lucky” to have babies sleep through the night, when really it is just a few simple guidelines we go by that yield such great results.
One little addition and that is the over stimulated baby who cries and cannot be consoled, with nursing, bottle, binky, swing?. anything. I have seen this with some of mine and some friends babies. This is usually babies under 6-8 weeks old (but can also happen with older babies who miss a nap) who stay awake too long. Happens easiest in bigger families, I think, because there are so many helpful siblings who want to hold and play with the baby. Once the baby has been awake too long, they just lose it and don’t know how to get to sleep. At this point I would want to pull out my hair, trying and not being able to find a way to console my poor baby and help her get to sleep. Some babies need more sleep or shorter awake times. For my newborns I have found that if they are awake an hour (sometimes less if nursing took a long time) after finishing nursing they are ready to go back to sleep. By encouraging a good get-to-sleep pattern during the day also encourages good night sleep patterns.
I understand this may not work for all families or every baby. It has worked for our family and had such a positive impact : rested parents, babies who know how to sleep not only during the day, but at night, toddles and older children who also know how to sleep well at night and are therefore well rested and able to start each day on the ?right foot?, and a family that eagerly greets each new baby as the blessing he/she is intended to be.
Sorry for the book! LOL! Just a subject that is near and dear to me!
~jerri
Kim -
We used the same principles and it worked out fine. To this day, all my kids are serious and focused sleepers! Any tired mom knows what a blessing that can be!
This is exactly what we did, and it worked like a charm for all 3 kids. All of them were sleeping 10-12 hours every night by 8-10 weeks. It was amazing. I was SO thankful for the great advice I’d gotten before giving birth to our first child. Start this process in the hospital and likely you won’t have to listen to much crying! My favorite part of the no sleep props, is that two of my children from 6 months up, would crawl to their bedroom…to the crib and say, “Nite-nite? Nite-nite?” They wanted to go to bed, they were sleepy!
We allowed thumb-sucking and special blankies. Thankfully, our first child gave up the thumb-sucking when we absconded with the blanket. They were attached! Our next two kids didn’t take to thumb sucking and we didn’t offer a pacifier.
I adore my sleep, and am so thankful to have it uninterrupted!
BTW, I found your blog through Meg Logan’s site. Love it!
Hmm . . . that’s what we’ve always done too, and it worked for the first, but the second is still waking up once a night at 11 months. Not sure what his deal is; not only does he need to nurse, he often wants a drink of water afterwards, too.
you are actually doing everything by the book and it seems to be natural to you, so congrats on your good instints!
I love your blog and the way you cope with life, makes me wish to be able to have a big familly someday…
BTW, your baby boy is very sweet!…
))
We too did this with all 4 and all four slept throught the night almost exactly on the day they turned 8 weeks old!
Thanks for posting this great advise we all can use as parents!
I practice attachment parenting.
Kim,
One question:
How do you break your kids of thumb-sucking?
I have a thumb-sucking phobia…I sucked my thumb (albeit in an chronically disfunctional family, so I probably *needed* it!) for a long, long time. LOOONG, long time.
Because of that, I’ve always done binkies with my kids, and with one of them who had a strong propensity towards sucking his thumb, I actually trained him away from it. I just know how hard, personally, it was to stop.
Have you had an easy time with this? What do you DO? I would love with future children to allow them this completely natural function, but I’m genuinely afraid to. Bizarre? I know…maybe so. But I would love to hear your method with this.
~Karen~
Well, first, how wonderful that Baby Dumpling is sleeping at night! Good for you, little Perry! Second, I don’t one iota of evidence in your post that you are callous nuts who don’t love your children. Exactly the opposite! You are close enough to be reassuring, you don’t ignore the baby, you attend to his real needs! I understand what you mean about the different cries. I had to learn when my first was a baby not to jump at the first ‘eh’ I heard. But I would never, ever let a baby ‘cry it out.’ I tried it once and it almost killed me. (Well, not really–but as a mom you know what I mean.) And the funny thing about it all is that someday they turn into teenagers and you can’t wake them with a bugle! (BTW, never heard the word ‘ducking’ in regards the the thumb before.)
Mom2Fur,
I meant that I was ducking to avoid the shoes and other heavy objects that people would undoubtedly throw at me when they learned that I condone thumbsucking.
Mamak,
We haven’t needed to break them of the habit. Maybe we let it go longer than most, but it really looks like a security issue to us. A secure and happy child will normally outgrow the need.
As they get older and realize that it’s a “babyish” habit, they have quit with very little help. They often ask us to remind them when we see they doing it and we’re happy to oblige, but that’s about it.
Our 6yo still does it just a bit when she’s very tired, and one of the older girls is sometimes seen sleeping with her thumb suspiciously near her mouth, but these really don’t seem like problems.
We have known stressful families where the habit hangs on much longer, but it seems to me that the habit has become a source of security to the child in a stressful environment.
We *are* thankful that all of ours have kicked the habit so easily, and hope we don’t have to eat our own words someday.
OK so I didn’t do this from the start and I need help now. DD is 5 months old and can’t fall asleep with out me. I feel I’ve ruined her. If I try to lay her down in that sleep state she screams and will keep screaming. I can’t let her go more than 5-8 minutes. She also wakes frequently, looking for me. When she is awake she is the most easy going baby, but she is clingy and needy at night. Any tips you have would be greatly appriciated.
Jasmine
jasmine, let her father put your baby to sleep. iF that’s not possible, give her a hug when she wakes up during the night and lay her on her bed. when she starts crying – she will – sit on the floor next to the bed and talk to her gently about her having to go sleep, keep her companie until she calms down. After the first four or five nights of this, she will sleep on her on own. If she’s in the sleep state and you want to lay her down, check to see if her mouth is open (this means the binkie will fall out of her mouth a little) – it’s a sign that her sleep has become deep.
Ok I tried it your way the last two nights. The first night was horrible. But, last night daddy was home and he put her to bed after I nursed her and she only got up once!!! This is the girl who was getting up 3-4 times a night.
Thank you Kim for the post and Sandra for the extra tips and thanks to all the other comments too!
Jasmine
Please please please stop saying that if you do it this way then your baby will sleep. This idea is what drove me into post partum depression with my first baby and it was HORRIBLE! I did everything you said, EVERYTHING! He went to sleep by himself, but would wake 3-4 times a night. The day I gave him solid food (at 4 months ) he slept 10 hours a night–the first time he had ever slept more than 4-5 hours a night. After getting solid food in his tummy there was no looking back, 10 became a solid 12 hours a night. That’s when my depression lifted as well.
Crystal,
I’m sorry this is such a sensitive topic for you. Any parent knows that each child is different, and what works for one won’t necessarily work for another.
It sounds like your son just needed to eat that often. We haven’t had a baby like that yet, but we may someday.
I hope I don’t sound like I think I have found the magic formula to make any baby sleep all night – I just want to share our experiences in the hopes that other parents will find it helpful.
We have used this general principle for all three of our children and now our foster son. All have done fabulously with it! Our youngest daughter even started sleeping 10 hours at night by 6 weeks. Our foster son took a little longer, but by about 10 weeks he got it too.
It really makes for great sleepers and nappers!
It’s funny, I always wondered why my kids were such good sleepers, but now I realized I followed the same “rules” as you!
It gives me hope that I wasn’t just lucky and that baby #3 will sleep through the night too! 
Thank you so much!
Okay, I hope to be expecting #7 soon ;o) and I’ve never had good night sleepers. I mostly do what you’ve described, but I can clearly see where I’ve not and it opens my eyes some in changing some things next time around!
One question, how do you “encourage” your babies to suck their thumbs? I’ve only had one thumb sucker out of 6, and I am good and tired of pacis! But anytime I’ve tried to get a baby to suck their thumb by holding their hand up close to their mouth, it completely backfires
) Do you just refuse to do pacis and deal with fussiness when the baby is just wanting sucking comfort until he/she learns to find said thumb?
Any tips…seeing as how I’m sure you have tons of free time
)
Shyla,
We never use pacifiers; if a baby in our house has a need to suck beyond breastfeeding, she quickly finds her thumb. That’s how we encourage thumb sucking. Actually, several children sucked fingers in various combinations instead of a thumb. It was really quite cute to see the variations they came up with.
So yes, what you said.
I’m glad to hear that our ‘plan’ has worked for at least someone, lol!!
We follow pretty much what you outlined above, but (so far, at least) haven’t had quite as much success. Our babies have all been up at least once a night until around the time I stopped nursing (between 9-12 months). I keep hoping the next one will sleep through early…I’m still hoping for #4!
I do hope you continue the same pattern with your babies, but just out of interest for myself, what would you do if, following the above, a baby continued to wake once or twice a night past the two month mark…getting closer to six months? Consistently each night, and really waking, even after giving them a few minutes to try to work themselves back to sleep? I’m always looking for ideas for our next one!
Oh baby. Mine is 10 months old. She wakes up… anywhere from 2 to ??? times a night. We had an unusual first few months – I live overseas and went back to the States to have her. I was dealing with: living with grandparents, sleep issues with my 2 year old (insecurity, etc with being in a different place), and other things. She slept in my bed for the first 6 weeks or so, and then for my own sanity I just had to move her to her own bed. She had colic, and for about the first 4 months I couldn’t get her to even nap in her bed without a struggle. It took 20 minutes of patting to get her to settle down for a 20 minute nap. I had to force her to take a pacifier, and it made all the difference. She never found her fingers, but once she got used to the pacifier around a month old, it helped immensely with the crying.
Now… She takes great naps for the most part. If she wakes up crying I just let her fuss and she will usually put herself back to sleep until she is ready to wake up for good from her nap. Usually takes 2 2-hour naps a day, something I never thought would happen when she was 4 months old! At night, I do nurse her before bed but not to sleep. She is very awake before I put her in bed, and sometimes will fuss but usually puts herself right to sleep. She can crawl around and find her own pacifier. The thing is, when she wakes up at night, I try to wait and see if she’ll just go back to sleep or if it’s going to turn into a full-blown cry, at which point I will either just try to comfort her and put her back down, or nurse her and then she’ll calm back down and go back to sleep. We have a lot of transition in our life – right now she’s in our room again because we have a guest sleeping in her room. In 2 weeks we’ll be traveling back across 16 time zones to visit family in the States. I don’t feel super sleep-deprived because I go to bed early (like 9 pm early – my hubby flies so he’s up at 4 am and I just go to bed when he does). But, still, HELP! The last few days she’s been going to bed around 6:30 pm, waking around 9 and 2, and then up for the morning at around 6 or 6:30. Transitioning her to solid foods did NOTHING for her sleep. Any advice? Sorry for the huge long comment!!
For all the moms who’ve had trouble with babies sleeping despite sleep training, ect., I wonder if part of the problem possibly could be the caloric content of breastmilk itself. I read a really helpful article here (http://www.westonaprice.org/childrens-health/312-successful-breastfeeding-and-successful-alternatives.html) which opened my eyes to just how much variation there can be between maternal milks, especially in their fat content (which is CRITICAL to babies). A lot of the leading pregnancy advice books say there’s no difference between whole and skim milk products, but that is absolutely false! It is crucial for breastfeeding and/or pregnant moms to get plenty of good, whole fats (not trans fats), so that their milk will be rich and creamy… able to hold babies all night long.
One more bit of advice I was given that has helped is — if your baby is waking up every night at the same time, then she is probably waking out of habit, not hunger. Let them cry it out… or if that’s too hard for you, wake them up before they normally would wake, and move the wake-up time later and later until you can phase it out. Then they stop waking at a certain time, and instead sleep until woken, by you or true hunger… which is exactly what you want.
PS- a much more nutritionally helpful pregnancy & lactation book: http://www.amazon.com/Real-Food-Mother-Baby-Fertility/dp/1596913940
I love this! I’m glad we’re not the only parents who train their babies this way. The only difference between us and you is that we put our babies in another room as well and use a monitor. All four of ours have been sleeping for 6-8 hours a night by the time they are 2 months old, even our twins. There is no quicker way to go insane than not having enough sleep, and that’s just not an option. Thanks again for your great imput and encouragement.
I am almost 34 weeks pregnant with my first child. I plan to use your tips, but I’m also a little concerned that since it will be my first, it’ll be hard to stick to my guns… especially because I lost a pregnancy and feel like I’ve been waiting for this little one for forever! Any advice for a first-time Mom who will probably want to snuggle with the newborn at every little noise?
Rachel,
If not, start training early. This doesn’t mean you can’t spend plenty of time loving on your baby – you just might not want to use that loving to coddle baby to sleep. Love, snuggle, and kiss away while the baby is awake, then lay her down before she falls asleep so she can practice dozing off on her own.
Just consideration the path you want to take with your baby. A baby who is used to being coddled at every fuss and whimper will grow into a toddler who expects your undivided attention. If you’re ok with that, go for it.