When Will My New Baby Sleep Through The Night

https://youtu.be/4rOipotARoc I’m going to answer the golden question today. “When will my baby sleep through the night?” I know just how important the answer to this question is, especially when you have your first baby and you think, “Okay, waking in the night, waking the night, I know this is going to happen, but how long is going to happen for?” And when you start hearing friends or other new mums going, “Well, my baby’s sleeping through,” and you think, “Oh, why isn’t mine? What’s going on?” So right here, right now we are going to set the record and your expectations straight so that you know what to expect and when and how you can help things along a little bit as well. First of all, let’s just acknowledge the fact that they are all different. All babies are different and some will be ready before others. That is true, but also sometimes a baby is ready and quite capable of sleeping for longer stretches if we just tweaked a little bit of the parenting strategy that we are doing. So it’s a partnership. It’s them being ready and us accommodating it as well, we want to work in harmony with our babies to help them to sleep the very best they can, as soon as they can. So, yes they are all different, but I’ve known babies to be able to sleep through as early as three months. And I know that typically six months is the target that lots of people set their minds to, and there are reasons for that, that are to do with their body clock, their circadian rhythm development, all kinds of reasons, but tal babies are different. You also have to ask what does sleeping through the night mean to you? Because that can be different too. You might be thinking, “Well, for as long as I sleep. I want my baby to sleep for eight hours through read the night and I don’t want to hear a peep.” Or you might be thinking, “Oh gosh, no, just five hours would be fine.” In actual fact five or six hours of continuous sleep is the technical term for sleeping through the night. I personally would define sleeping through as when you put your little one to bed and you don’t hear from them, they don’t need your assistance until they wake up in the morning, which would be after 6:00 AM. That’s my definition, my personal goal and target. When I say I want to help a baby to be sleeping through the night, that’s what I’m setting my sights on. We should also acknowledge the fact that we actually do all wake in the night so that won’t just be solid sleep. Not for you, not for baby, not for any living human being. We all have little wake-ups in the night. Sometimes they are micro wakings, we barely even know they’ve happened to us. We just settle back off into the next sleep cycle. Other times they’re more vivid or you fully wake up or you go to the bathroom or you shift your pillow. But for babies and young children, before they’ve developed the ability to put themselves to sleep and to put themselves back to sleep, which is a learned skill, it comes with practice. But before they have that, when they wake, they will cry and their cry is just a simple means of them saying, “I’m awake, come and help me. I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do here.” And they’re looking for your assistance. Completely understandable, but it takes our time and practice and strategies to help them to get better and better at that. Just like we help them with learning to ride a bike or learning to use the bathroom or learning anything, we will help and show them until they’ve mastered it. And it’s the same with settling and resettling to sleep. So you can make a difference to this. It definitely lies with you. Will your baby eventually learn to just sleep on their own? Yes. But it might take seven or eight years in some cases and I’m not exaggerating. It might. They might get it within two years. Maybe you’ll be lucky. But if you take a conscious approach to helping them, to paving the way, accommodating their sleep as best you can, it’s going to stand them in a much better stea