Baby Not Sleeping through the Night? Drop That Rulebook and Go with the Flow
You’re in a self-congratulatory mood. You actually got the baby into bed by 8 PM. You had a nice civilized dinner with your partner. You played a little card game, and you watched a late-night show on TV. You are telling yourself by midnight that it’s time for little a well-deserved rest yourself. You could not have slept for an hour before you hear a sound leaking through the tinny speaker on the baby monitor. It’s a sound that you never wish to hear at 1 AM – it’s your baby up and kicking, waiting for you to come and see him. And even when you can get your baby to sleep for at least six hours at a stretch once he is five months old, there are times that he just decides just to see if you’re still alert to his needs. He starts setting up a wail at 4 AM just as a kind of emergency drill. With your baby not sleeping through the night even at six months, what are you supposed to do?
Talk to a baby specialist and all he can tell you is that you are supposed to train your baby by not showing up straightaway. If he’s still crying after that, you can go in without turning on the lights or anything, check to see if there is some kind of problem. If there is not, you just pat your baby asleep and then go back to bed. Perhaps somewhere on earth (or elsewhere), there actually is a baby who responds to such a strategy. For us mere mortals, things have to be a bit more hands-on.
In real life, there is often more than one baby (even if they are two or three years old). Once one of them wakes up, all the others do too. And they all want to get into bed with you. What really works in these situations is whatever works. With your baby not sleeping through the night, any method you read about can only apply sometimes. Even then, you probably have to improvise quite a little. Your pediatrician isn’t there in the middle of the night trying to see precisely how your situation is happened. It’s just you and the kid at this time.
The baby books, for example, tell you that whatever you do. You cannot feed your baby in the middle of the night – or you will have a chubby child on your hands. As many parents have discovered, there simply is nothing else that works. And you should not feel guilty about it. Your child is young, there is time to fix everything. You can have all the great ideas about raising a baby before you have a baby. Once the child is here, it’s the child who decides what’s going to work, not you. If bringing your baby into bed with you is the only thing that keeps the peace, so be it. Occasionally, having a TV in the bedroom, a big child-raising no-no, by the way, is the only thing that will work. With the baby not sleeping through the night, you can’t stick to some obscure book of what is right and what is wrong. It’s up to you baby to choose.
