Why won't baby sleep through the night
Your baby is regularly waking up sometime during the night, and when they do, they start to fuss, they need you to soothe them back to sleep somehow. The disruptions to everyone’s sleep are leaving the entire family exhausted, baby included. So let’s be real here. When we get right down to the heart of the matter, all you want to know is why baby won't sleep through the night, am I right?
Now, I’m not going to tell you that there’s a simple “one-size-fits-all” solution to this problem, because, after all, all babies are unique and so is their sleep.
But I am going to tell you that there’s almost always a single cause for a baby or toddler not being able to sleep through the night, and it’s the same reason in about 90% of the cases I deal with. Before we get to that, we must first rule out hunger and discomfort. So if your baby’s comfortable and fed, there’s really only one major reason why they can’t sleep through the night. In plain, it's because they don’t know how.
Now I know we’ve all heard the sound bites and talking points on social media. “Babies will sleep when they’re ready!” “Sleep is developmental!” “Just ride it out. It won’t last forever.” and so on.
But in truth, babies wake up because they don’t know how to sleep through the night.
Why does baby wake up multiple times at night
All of us, babies and adults alike, sleep in cycles. When we get to the end of a cycle, we’re no longer in a “deep” sleep. We’re hovering right around the point of waking up, and a lot of the time, we do wake up. Us adults have so much experience falling asleep, we can usually just look at the clock, realize we’ve still got a few more delicious hours before our alarm goes off, and we close our eyes, maybe roll over onto our other side, and go right back to sleep.
Babies haven’t had nearly as much practice, and very often, they get a bunch of help when it’s time for a snooze. They get bounced, shushed, cuddled, rocked, serenaded, taken for car rides, rolled around in their stroller, or fed to sleep. So when they wake up after a sleep cycle, which again, is going to happen regularly for their entire lives, they can’t get back to sleep again without that extra help, so mom or dad needs to get up and repeat whatever process baby’s accustomed to.
That’s the issue, and like I say, it’s the issue with about 90% of the babies I work with.
How to get baby to sleep through the night
How do you address that issue? Well, that’s where things get tricky because the solution varies tremendously depending on the baby and their parent's compatibility with various approaches to resolving the problem. But the cause is almost a dependency on some form of sleep assistance from a caregiver.
So when you hear someone saying that babies don’t sleep through the night, or that it’s natural for them to wake up several times, that’s absolutely correct.
When they tell you that all you can do is wait it out, that’s absurd.
You can absolutely teach your little one the skills they need to sleep through the night, and I’d be delighted to show you how.
It’s not magic…it just takes consistency in sticking to new, healthier sleep habits. Need help from an infant sleep expert? I'll objectively assess your sleep situation in a judgment-free way and develop customized strategies to help your baby to sleep through the night. Chat with me for a free 15-minute sleep assessment to hear how I've helped so many babies just like yours sleep through the night.