Helping Your Child Learn to Get Back to Sleep

In order to sleep through the night, a child must "learn" to reorganize herself after the cycle of deep sleep and waking every 3-4 hours. A baby must be able to come up to light sleep, cry out, scrabble around in bed, comfort herself, and get back down into deep sleep. This is a tall order, and it takes time. During an 8-hour period of sleep, it is normal for a baby to become wakeful and restless at least twice; in 12 hours of sleep, at least three times. To sleep through the night, she must learn to get through these times on her own.

Parents who feel the need to go to her at each rousing will inevitably become part of her pattern of settling back down. If they pick her up to feed or play with her, if they rock her back to sleep in their arms, they will become part of the child's self-comforting habits. To lead the child toward comforting herself, parents can comfort a child to the point of a drowsy state—by rocking, singing softly, or reading to her. When she is drowsy, but not yet asleep, place her in her crib. There, sit beside her to pat her, and to croon, "You can get yourself down. You can get yourself down. You can do it. You can do it." As she finally gets herself into a self-soothing ritual—sucking her thumb, curling up, fingering her blanket or a favorite stuffed animal (what we call a "lovey")—she will begin to feel competent and able to comfort herself at each waking. Gradually, the parent will need to do less and less, so that the baby can take over.

This accomplishment demands at least three things:

• the parents' determination that the baby will learn to soothe herself;
• the baby's ability to stretch out to a 3- or 4-hour pattern without hunger interfering; and
• that the baby's nervous system is mature enough to allow her to stretch out sleeping periods through the night and to find a self-soothing pattern for herself. It seems that this often becomes possible by 4 months of age.

Excerpted from:

Excerpted from Sleep: The Brazelton Way © 2003 by T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., and Joshua D. Sparrow, M.D. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Perseus.

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