Babies Who Won't Sleep

This article is to sympathise with parents of babies who never seem to sleep - and to offer a light at the end of the tunnel.  It does get better.

My daughter was a terrible sleeper.  As a baby she would wake every two hours at night and

would only go back to sleep after being fed or rocked, until the age of 4 months.  From this age on she would only wake two or three times each night, but each time would involve a whole elaborate feeding/rocking debacle to get her back to sleep again.

She would have two naps a day, totalling half an hour each time.  You could set your watch by her! No matter how tired she was or how you tried to get her to sleep for longer, it didn't work.

When she was four months old we gave her a dummy.  I didn't like them and didn't want her to have one, but I worked out that by feeding her every time she woke, she was actually using me as a
"human pacifier".

Gradually, (very gradually) her day naps got longer, and her night sleeps became more solid, and by the age of one she was having two good one hour naps a day and a solid night sleep with only one or two wakings a night which required a light pat and reassurance that we were still there to get her back to sleep.

Now, at age four, she goes to bed right on 7pm, and is usually asleep by 7.30pm.  She sleeps right through until 6.30am or 7 (if we're lucky!) and she has done since she was about 2 1/2.  Her afternoon naps (she still has one!) are usually around 1 hour in length, and she usually goes right to sleep without fussing, or, if she isn't tired enough to sleep, has some books and toys to play quietly in bed.

The big thing for us that helped with sleep was a routine.  Our daughter was a baby/toddler who really thrived on routine, and was quite lost if things were different.  By implimenting a regular routine of "lunch, stories, lullaby, bed" for day naps and "dinner, bath, stories, lullaby, bed" at night time, even if she was resistent to going to sleep straight after her meal, by the time the rest of the routine had been completed she was more relaxed and ready for bed and sleep. 

Also, we put up blockout blinds in her room and read the stories in dimmed lighting, while she was already in her bed, to get her further relaxed and ready for sleep.