First Attempts to Get Baby to Sleep through the Night
When our babies’ grandparents were raising us, they had Dr. Spock and their own intuition… and not much else besides the guidance of their own parents. Everything has changed since our parents’ days… a lot for the better, such as the “Back to Sleep” campaign to decrease the risk of SIDS and better safety standards for most baby products, including car seats.
But the different “schools” of parenting and widely varying philosophies tailored to help parents raise happy, successful, well-adjusted children can be overwhelming for any but the most self-assured parents.
In the past few months, I’ve explored many of them, most with the goal of getting my almost three-month old daughter to fall asleep by herself, without props, and also get her to sleep through the night consistently.
On paper, Gary Ezzo’s Babywise system seems very practical and effective. In a nutshell, you try to get your child on an “every four hour” feeding schedule early and try to keep a pattern to every day—Eat, Play, Sleep. The system advocates letting your child “cry it out” in 10 minute increments in order to facilitate the child falling asleep by herself without any props, such as a binky, nursing-to-sleep, or rocking.
I tried this for exactly three days. Not so much the crying it out part—I just don’t believe in that—but the Eat, Play, Sleep. My daughter naps longer and better if she nurses just before sleep. Our schedule quickly became Eat, Play, Eat, Sleep. And considering she is small for her age and still needs to eat every hour-and-a-half or so, this works for us.
As my daughter approaches three months, I decided it was time to try to get her to sleep more than four hours in a row at night. Right now, she sleeps 3 to 5 hours, wakes to nurse, and then is up every two hours as morning approaches. I’d love to convert this into two blocks of five hours, or even six hours straight.
Elizabeth Pantley’s No-Cry Sleep Solution sounded like a better plan than Babywise – something I could live with and, best of all, no crying! Like Babywise, this plan advises you to put the baby to bed when she’s almost, but not quite, asleep. If she cries, pick her up, rock her, nurse her—follow your normal ritual—and then try again.
This plan is working for us early in the day, for naps or bedtime, but at four in the morning, it’s still easier to nurse her to sleep. That’s when it hit me: Getting the baby to sleep through the night, if she doesn’t start sleeping through on her own, will require self-discipline and patience on my part. Just like the rest of parenting. And that’s something I won’t pick up from any book or parenting expert.
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Alexandra Lutz says...
Although three months may be a little young for a 4-hour schedule, I found with my own small-for-age baby that stretching out her nursings only took a couple of days (when she was 4 months old) and she began compensating by eating more at a time. I did not follow Babywise, but at that time I also went to a sleep-eat-play routine, and discovered that it radically simplified my life and hers. I knew every morning when I would be able to go out and run errands, for example. But I hate to say it–my daughter slept great (from 9p to 5a) from 2 months to four months, but has never been consistent since then.