There are many big challenges with a newborn baby: figuring out the soothing thing, unbreakable swaddling, learning how to feed a baby, wrestling them to sleep, etc. Usually by the 3 month mark, those hurdles have all been conquered. You are now a confident parent rocking the baby play groups, champion of navigating the grocery store with a baby, and chilling with other parents at Starbucks.
Champion parents will also have already read What You Need to Know About Sleeping Through the Night Part 1. It’s long and not particularly funny but it will explain the single most important thing you need to know to stay the course towards sleeping all night long. Go read it and then come back when you’re done (I’ll wait).
Now you know why it is so critical that you teach your baby to fall asleep without you (nursing, rocking, cuddling, etc.).
Note: A small percentage of babies will continue to sleep well even if they are being nursed, rocked, etc. until they are fully asleep. If you are the parent of an older baby who is sleeping like a champ (then you probably aren’t looking for answers for sleep problems on the internet but….) then you may have one of these rare babies who CAN be nursed, rocked, etc. until they are completely asleep without any problems. YAY!
For the other 98% of babies, failure to teach them to fall asleep on their own leads to many sleepless nights and days filled with short crappy naps.
Putting Your Baby Down Awake
By the time your baby is ~6 months old (give or take 2 months) you need to have figured out how to put your baby down awake and have them fall asleep without your assistance.
If you have already mastered the ability to put your baby down to sleep awake, good for you! Now stop gloating and please go away, the rest of us are still struggling with this.
Every parent has read that it is important to put your baby down to sleep awake. And every parent has tried this at various points in their newborn babyhood. Some babies are pretty cool about the whole thing and after a few minutes of futzing about, fall asleep. Most babies aren’t as keen on this plan and express their displeasure loudly and at length. So you fall back on whatever technique has been working successfully for you up to that point (rocking, nursing, etc.) and you continue about your business. Until this stops working. In a big way.
How to Put Baby Down Awake
1. Use the Baby Swing
If your baby is under ~6 months of age the baby swing can be an excellent tool to help your baby fall asleep without your personal assistance. Further, if you are currently rocking, bouncing, or wearing your baby while walking around to help your baby fall asleep then your baby is telling you that they really need motion to fall asleep.
You can choose to ignore what they are telling you and try to force the crib. Or you can hear this message and embrace, temporarily, the baby swing.
If you’re going to try to use the swing to help your baby fall asleep on their own make a commitment to work with the swing for 4-7 days. Often parents will put baby in the swing for one nap, it won’t work well, and they’ll write the experiment off as a failure. You’ve spent months teaching your child to fall asleep in a specific way, and now you’re asking that child to adopt to a new method. It may take a little time for her to figure it out.
Once baby is happily sleeping in the swing, gradually decrease the speed of the swing (6-5-4….). If your baby continues to sleep peacefully great! If lowering the speed results in shorter naps or difficulty falling asleep, then your baby still needs the speed. No problem, you can try again in another week or so. At this age babies are developing so rapidly, what didn’t work this week can work like gangbusters next week.
Eventually you’ll find yourself with a baby who is sleeping in a non-moving swing. At this point the transition to the crib is relatively painless. Put the non-moving swing NEXT to their crib for at least a few days. Then, keeping everything else the same (sleep routine, white noise, etc.) just put them down to sleep in their crib. They may grumble for a few minutes but most babies accept this transition without much drama.
For younger babies, or babies who are motion junkies (love to be bounced, rocked, etc.) the swing is my favorite method for teaching them to fall asleep alone. Bar none.
2. Make it Gradual
This is one of the most challenging methods and the easiest to mess up so let me say this first: take a good look at you and your partner. How are you guys doing? If you are ground to a pulp (sleep deprived, just recovering from the flu, stressed out, have little/no support) then skip this method, it’s not for you. On the other hand if you’re feeling fairly chipper, read on.
Basically your job is to take whatever technique you are using to help your baby sleep and gradually make itty bitty modifications (typically over many weeks) to slowly wean baby off this technique. By the way, this is pretty much the entire message of The No-Cry Sleep Solution (minus the guilt-inducing part that makes you feel like a failure if you can’t pull it off). So there, I just saved you $10.
Take co-sleeping as an example. Your baby is now used to falling asleep in your bed, next to your body, and the routine probably involves nursing. To gradually wean off this you might put the crib in your room, put a futon mattress next to the crib, drop the side of the crib and replicate (making sure that the scenario is safe for baby) the co-sleeping environment only now the baby is sleeping in her bed instead of yours. Of course you are now sleeping on a futon next to the crib but hopefully this is temporary.
Over weeks you might work on nursing baby until she is drowsy but not asleep, gradually moving the futon away from the crib, putting the crib side back up, etc. Your goal is to do this so slowly that baby barely registers the change.
This can be difficult. Babies can be remarkably observant about your efforts to monkey with their system. Also illness, teething, etc. can all interfere with your progress. And if you are tired and frustrated it is FAR TOO easy to simply fall back to whatever works for you and let your baby nurse to sleep or pull her back into your bed, undoing all the progress you might have made.
I just LOVE this picture. Been there, done that.
For these reasons I suggest this method is really challenging. Thus my initial question – how beat up are you? If you and your partner are shuffling zombies your chance of success is low. You are welcome to try, and I encourage you to come up with a plan and give it a go. But don’t beat yourself up if, after a few weeks, you’re feeling frustrated by the lack of success.
Note: This method can be extraordinarily challenging if your baby uses a pacifier to fall asleep. Most pediatricians recommend loosing the pacifier by 6 months of age because this little tool which was so helpful for baby sleep when they’re little can become the bane of your existence when they’re older. I have never found a gradual way to remove the pacifier as they seem very binary – either you give them a paci or you don’t. If anybody has any “gradually loose the pacifier” methods, please share in the comment section!
3. Cry it Out
1. If your baby is older than 6-8 months old and…
2. she’s sleeping poorly (waking up frequently throughout the night, taking short naps, fighting naps, etc.) and…
3. you’ve tried the other two techniques, or for whatever reason, they didn’t suit, you’ve pretty much landed in cry it outsville.
Cry it Out is a big topic and you can lots of information about how, when, why, and why not in this sleep training resource page. But I want to briefly make a quick distinction here: cry it out is a technique that forces babies to learn to fall asleep on their own. And frankly, if done right, it’s a really effective technique. Cry it out is NOT the best way to get out of night feedings (another topic of an upcoming post). Parents often mistake these two issues.
If your baby has been consuming lots of milk/formula all night long and you decide to go cold-turkey and simply stop night feedings, both you and your baby are likely to have a pretty miserable time of it. Also there are more effective and gentler ways to night-wean. I would suggest you consider cry it out as a method to help your baby fall asleep solo at bedtime but that when they wake up at their regular night-feeding schedule, you go and feed them.
If you have stumbled upon some other way of helping babies learn to fall asleep on their own NOT covered here, please share in the comments! Otherwise it’s time for the final step on sleeping through the night, read up on how to gently finish night feeding your baby.
If you haven’t already done so you may also want to check out the other posts in this series:
What you need to know about sleeping through the night: Part 1 and Part 3.
Hi, my 8 month old has become very restless, goes down fine for the first few hours then tosses and turns and shifts into her cot til she wakes herself up (after waking me up lol). She will do this in periods I. E. Sleep fine for a few nights just waking twice or three times for feed then sleeping normal, then for several nights just sleep 2-3 hours then toss and turn and wake the rest of the night, not seeming hungry, not crying, just waking. We have always head her in her own bed, and CIO is not an option as a) I am not for it and b) she doesn’t cry anyeay. If she wakes and we leave her, she stands up and rocks the side of her crib and starts happily chatting away like its play time. We get plenty of activity during the day and she is down to just two short naps (around 30-40mins) one at around 9-10am and one at around 2pm. So not sure what is going on.
BTW we use a dummy sometimes (mostly for when teething) , but she doesn’t really “need” it to fall asleep, and if we use it she normally spits it out almost instantly when asleep and sleeps fine without it, so don’t think this is the issue….
Question about CIO, when they wake at a time when you know they do not need to eat (say 44 minutes after falling asleep) do you just let them CIO again? And all night? (Unless it’s to feed of course) and what method of CIO do you suggest? Ferber or just cold turkey let them cry until they sleep?
Hi, Thanks! these articles are very helpful!
My son is 9 mos old, and we are starting sleep training now. Is it better to wait till he is a year old? Would his separation anxiety have gone past it’s peak? Thanks for any thoughts back based on your experiences!!
Hi, love your blog. Our son is almost four months old. Sleeps through the night with a bedtime of 7/7:30 and only wakes once to feed. However, he recently fighting all naps like a bear. Soothing methods aren’t working to induce sleep. Any tips?
Is the swing method just for naps, and then they’ll eventually be able to be laid down in their crib at nighttime? Also, for nap time, should the swing be in a dark, quiet place? I can’t imagine my little guy falling asleep in his swing in the living room where it is currently.
I have the same question. If using the swing method, do you put him in the swing for the whole night and have it running all night long? My 7 month old is currently only sleeping if he’s in bed with us, so the goal is to at least get him out of our bed and into the crib in our room.
Hi Thank u for this precious blog.
I have 9 week old son who sleeps well through the nights but I wonder how long is it OK to sleep without feeding.
He was born with 3700 gr and now he is about 5.5 kg. He is fed wih a mixture of formula and mother’s milk.
My mom let us have pacifiers till we were a year old. Her solution to dependency was to cut off the ends of the pacifiers, just a little bit at a time. We all eventually decided we didn’t want the pacifiers anymore. Haha!
My little girl is 8.5 months now and used to put herself to sleep and not anymore….putting her on bed drowsy ends up her waking up screaming immediatly…ps….What is drowsy….eyes half open or half asleep….now she wakes every two or 3 hours…she had previously dropped the 3 am feed or just holding and has regressed back….any clue what happened and how I can help her sleep without crying it out.
Hello,
I’m SO grateful to have stumbled upon your website. My almost 6 month old has been a good sleeper since 2/3 months but just in the last 2 days all she does is cry the second I put in her crib. I know I should have been putting her to sleep awake but when I nurse her before bed she always falls asleep & the I put her in crib asleep. This has worked well until now so thought I was doing everything right. Now that I’m reading otherwise I am wondering what advice you have for me to still nurse before bed but not have her fall asleep on me? I’m nursing around 7:30pm & she asleep and in crib by 8. Should I start bedtime routine earlier & nurse around 7:00pm?
My other question is about naps. Something I’ve been bad about is letting her nap on me, but as a first time stay at home mom I was soaking in all the snuggles. But now it sounds like this will only come back to haunt me. Recently she’s been taking much shorter naps throughout the day—15-30 minutes when they used to be a couple hours. Should I put her in crib awake when I anticipate she’s ready for a nap? Again, she usually nurses & falls asleep for nap. Please let me know your suggestions for nursing & not allowing her to fall asleep on me for nap. Thanks so very much!
P.S I tried the CIO first time last night after reading you site & she only cried for 8 minutes & slept from 10:15pm-6:45am! It wasn’t easy hearing her scream, obviously no one likes to do this but we’re confident that if we stick to this, we will all benefit & sleep better. So thank you in advance!
Question for me regarding sleeping in a swing, for night sleep surely they should be moved at some point into their crib as the swing is not flat? Confused how this is then the same scenario that they went to sleep in? Thanks, love the website and unicorn references
HI there. I have been doing sleep training for the past 2 1/2 weeks and seeing good results, except for the 1am/ 2am waking. I used to put baby in the bed next to me during this time and then we would sleep all cozy until the morning. Now I want him to stay in his bed. I have gotten rid of the dummy and the night feeding, with not much issues. Now the only thing is for him to remain in his bed. The problem is that he gets totally hysterical and refuses any type of soothing from me. the only thing that works is for me to pick him up and put him in bed with me. Then he sleeps. Almost like he is throwing a tantrum 🙁 . So my question is – how do I get through this phase without him getting all hysterical . I have tried to let he cry it out, but he keeps on crying for 30 to 40 min 🙁 which obviously is also not the answer. Any advice on this, please???
Could be loads of things and I don’t have enough details to really answer the question conclusively. But my best guess is he has a lingering sleep association that involves YOU. So I would look at bedtime and mix up the routine. Make sure he’s 100% awake going into the crib. Remove YOU as much as possible. IF the last step involves cuddling, rocking, singing, etc. – cut that stuff out. Also consider looking at the schedule to ensure he’s tired ENOUGH at bedtime. Use the guidelines in the book to see if you’re in the right zone. And if you’ve done AAAAAL that and he’s still refusing the answer might be behavioral – sleeping with you is a reward and “yelling 30 minutes” is rewarded by getting to come into your bed. If you’ve ruled out all possible other culprits the answer might be that you need to stop bringing him in and let him get super pissed at you for a few nights.