How to Get Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night

"For many parents, their baby’s sleep patterns improve just in the knick of time, coinciding with their own growing need for uninterrupted nighttime sleep. Although it usually doesn’t take parents long to realize that fatigue is making life harder for them, it often isn’t until four to six weeks after the baby is born that the cumulative effect of sleepless nights becomes profound. At this point, many mothers express varying degrees of depression and confusion. Most likely, exhaustion contributes not only to the first-week postpartum blues but also to the more profound depression that can continue. Under the best of circumstances, sleep deprivation can interfere with a mother’s ability to carry on a normal life.

Although there may be no particular harm in training a younger or smaller baby to sleep through the night, we prefer to wait until a baby weighs at least nine pounds, is five to seven weeks old, and does not fall into any high-risk category or have any health problem. In the meantime, though, there are several preparatory steps you can take:

As new parents, we all have the tendency to continuously hold, rock, or nurse our babies to sleep. This is okay in the first few weeks of life. This is not okay as a continuing pattern, though, as you will be teaching your baby to depend on you to fall asleep. In fact, this is one of the most common causes of sleep problems in young children: they are unable to fall asleep on their own either at bedtime or when they wake up in the middle of the night. Since building a close relationship is so important during these early weeks, you should hold your baby as much as possible during his wakeful rather than sleepy times."

Excerpted from "Helping Your Child Sleep Through The Night" by Susie Schevill and Joanne Cuthbertson, all rights reserved.