Womb to Bloom - Maternity & Beyond

Everyone has their own theory and method to get a baby to sleep through the night. The subject is the hotly debated topic of countless books and magazine articles. Many people are very passionate about their thoughts on getting babies to sleep all night. I’m not an expert or an author. I’m not an activist for my method. I just have four kids who have always been great sleepers. Some of it, I’m sure, is luck. But I’m gonna go ahead and take a little credit too.

At about four months, babies are physically ready to sleep through the night without being fed. Their little stomachs can hold enough to hold them for the night. This is about the time that each of my children started sleeping for six and seven hours at a time. God bless them. I’m not sure that I could have survived without sleep for much longer.

I’m not a baby scheduler. I know it works for some parents, just not for me. Until about four or five months, my babies did not have a set nap or feeding schedule. I let them show me when they wanted to sleep and eat. It was pretty random for a while. After they started sleeping through the night, then the daytime nap schedule fell into place. Everything hinged on that overnight stretch!

I will say this: the process of getting the baby to sleep through was never easy. Some people are blessed with babies who sleep through easily at six weeks. I’ve got four good sleepers but none of them were that good.

We did subscribe to the “cry it out” method – or at least our variation of that method. Some parents have great disdain for this method and even claim that it can be damaging to the child’s emotional development. I’m not going to argue with academic research – all I can say is that it worked well for us and our children appear to be very normal and loving kids. Can’t see any scarring from a few nights of crying at four months of age.

We’re generally not co-sleepers. However, when the babies were brand spankin’ new and eating all the time, we did have a crib, cradle or bassinet in our room to make middle of the night feeding quicker and easier. I have no moral or scientific objection to co-sleeping or to the family bed – I generally don’t judge (alright, I at least try really hard not to judge). It’s just not for me.

As soon as the babies were old enough to physically do without the middle of the night feedings, we moved them out of our room. The grunts and squeals of a sleeping baby are enough to keep me wide awake all night. So, moving babies to the nursery was always very liberating for me – the chance at a full night’s sleep was almost too exciting to handle.

So, what we did. As we approached four months with each baby, we started to see a slight lengthening of the sleep periods at night. Not much but enough to follow their lead. We tried to make sure that there was a really substantial feeding at about 11:00 p.m. Because 11:30 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.? Is totally life-changing after four months of sleep in three hour spurts.

Some nights, this worked without any resistance by the baby. Other nights, we had to bear with the crying. Our variation on the “cry it out” method was to go to the nursery upon hearing the baby cry. But, knowing that the baby did not need anything more to eat, we would check her diaper, then just lie her back down, comfort her a little bit and leave.

For me, the key is to get the baby to put herself back to sleep. This is made a lot easier if you begin putting her to bed early on when she is drowsy but before she is asleep. She then gets used to lying in her crib and falling asleep on her own. With each of my kids, I played soft classical music in their rooms while they fell asleep. It’s so much a part of their bedtime ritual that my elementary school-age children still listen to music as they go to sleep each night.

Now, this method is going to result in some pretty heart-wrenching crying for a few nights, maybe even a few weeks. I always tried to rub the baby’s tummy while she was lying in bed to soothe her. Or I would rock her for a little while to the music. But I tried not to remove her from her room. She needed to get used to putting herself to sleep in her own room – while still knowing that mom and dad were there.

This process can be pretty brutal and there were certainly nights that I just gave up and either slept on the floor of the nursery or fed the baby to get her to go back to sleep. It takes a lot of self-control.

Even more self-control is required at the next step of the process. After I felt assured that the nighttime rising was the result of habit and not physical need and after I felt that the baby understood at some level that we hadn’t abandoned her, I started to let the baby cry after checking to make sure that she didn’t need a diaper or have some other immediate need like a cold or a fever. I think we generally ramped up – first letting her cry for 5 or 10 minutes before going back to soothe her.

Then a little longer.

At about this time, the waking and crying generally became a bit sporadic. Some nights would be great, without crying. Other nights, we were back to wide awake babies in the middle of the night. I can remember a few nights when we let a baby cry for over 30 minutes after being assured that he was physically fine. (I probably cried for a portion of that 30 minutes too – out of sadness or frustration or exhaustion.) Shortly thereafter, he started sleeping through the night consistently. Again, this might not be for you. It worked for us.

And we really haven’t looked back. Oh, there are always a few blips like colds, ear infections, nightmares. One of my sons had a short bout of night terrors. But I am pretty proud of the fact that each of my kids goes to bed without much argument and has since about four or five months.

My secrets are yours. Put them in bed drowsy but awake. Start giving a late night feeding to facilitate a longer overnight sleep (my kids all started on baby cereal at about this time too – which my pediatrician claims has no bearing on getting them to sleep through the night. I don’t really believe him.).

Break the habit of getting baby out of the crib and/or the nursery when he cries in the middle of the night. When my babies were old enough to roll, I gave them each a small “lovie” stuffed animal. This “lovie” plus the soft music were their nighttime cues. And each of the four responded to these cues.

Your process doesn’t need to be rigid and inflexible. You don’t need to schedule your baby in order to encourage good sleep habits. By four months, you will know your baby and she will let you know what she needs. The biggest challenge is going to be training yourself to let that baby fuss for a while without feeding her or bringing her to your bed. You won’t be 100% disciplined every night but stay the course and you’ll eventually find success.