Getting Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night

Children often have sleep problems during the first year of life, including trouble getting to sleep, waking up in the middle of the night and having irregular sleep patterns. Remember that there are no definite rights or wrong ways to put your child to sleep and that if you and your baby are happy with your current routine then you should stick to it. However, it is not good if it is a struggle to put your child to bed, if he gets overly frustrated in the process, strongly resists being put to bed or if he is waking up so much that he or other family members end up not getting adequate sleep.

Parents who don't want to leave their baby while she is still awake may opt for the gradual removal method. According to this technique, sit in a chair next to your baby's bed and wait there until she falls asleep. Do this for two nights. Then move your chair two feet away on the third and fourth nights and five feet away from the bed on the fifth and sixth nights. By the seventh night, sit in the doorway, and on the ninth night, stay in the hallway. Shortly after this, by the 10th night or by the end of the second week, the baby should be able to fall asleep by himself.

Put the baby down and let her cry herself to sleep without any additional comforting. Experts caution, though, that parents using this method might ignore their crying baby when she has some other real, not sleep-related, and problem.

This method can also be a great test of parents' will. It is difficult to do nothing while your baby wails away. But by giving in after 15 minutes, a half-hour, or even more, the baby learns that her parents will come and get her if she persists, making sleep training more difficult.

With the scheduled awakenings method, observe and record your baby's natural waking times during the night for a week. A pattern of regular waking times should emerge. Then, following this schedule, wake the baby 15 minutes before each of those natural awakening times and soothe the baby back to sleep each time.

The baby's "unscheduled" awakenings, those that don't follow the regular pattern, should gradually stop. At that point, over a period of weeks, cut back gradually on the number of times you wake your baby before his "scheduled" awakenings until he is able to sleep through the night.

Desperate times can call for desperate measures, but don't even bother with some popular but ineffective ways to get your baby to sleep through the night. Giving your baby solid foods at an early age in the belief that she is waking during the night because she is hungry. There's no research to support this, and you'll just condition her to want to eat during the night.

Eliminating naps during the daytime. Don't do it. This risks making your baby overtired, which will make it harder for her to fall and stay asleep putting your baby to bed later. Like eliminating naps, this will likely make your baby overly tired, making it harder for her to fall asleep.

Baby sleep through the night is the task all parents to look into.