Helping Your Baby Sleep Through The Night? — A Research Proven Approach.
By: Matthew Oluwaniyi
Tags: Baby, Parenting, Baby Sleep, Parenting Advice, Baby Sleep Routine

Sleep issues in baby are one of the most misunderstood child care topics

After over 7 years of serving as a consultant to one of the foremost Child Development Center in my city, facilitating small group chat for parents and also parenting two kids for about 10 years now, I have discovered that one of the major challenges parents, especially of new born babies and parents of kids about 24months old go through is sleep issues with their baby. Struggling with infant sleep problems has also become a source of stress for some parent. Functionally, it is important to establish the fact that baby sleep is different from adult sleep and every parent needs to be realistic with their baby sleep concerns, because most of the sleep issues that drives us crazy are developmentally normal behavior. Let us consider this standard reference, babies less than 3 months old have the natural need to feed frequently between 8 to 12 times every day (24 hours), and the switch to longer period of sleep is progressive. The implication of this is that babies less than 3 months old should not be expected to have a sleep duration of more than5 hours at a stretch. But does that mean we should not seek for improvement if our babies keep waking up every hour and making parents stressed out? Conversely, we have a lot we can do with respect to helping our babies have an healthy baby sleep which will also put the parents at rest.

It is important for parent to ensure that before we start trying to get sleep solutions for our babies, we need to first clarify that our little ones are not faced with some likely medical issues that could interrupt sleep in babies. However this write up will focus more on other causes of frequent roadblocks to experiencing better night rest for your babies.

Empower your baby to self-sooth

One of the major causes of short burst of sleep through the night could be caused indirectly by parents themselves when they don’t empower their babies to develop the ability to self-soothe. What do I mean by this? We all know according to the science of sleep, everyone wakes up during the night, no matter how short and we do it quite often, although most of the time we don’t recollect these waking moments the following day. As a result, even as adults, we can’t absolutely get rid of night wakings, however, we can decide on making night wakings less unsettling for our babies. Research has shown that babies can sometimes get themselves back to sleep without stressing their parent out or disturbing the night sleep of others around. Hence, as parent we need to take steps that will empower our baby to self-sooth during those night waking moments and get back to sleep with little help from parents or caregivers.

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Naturally, parents are tempted to impulsively to reach out to their babies at any cry-like sound they make. Most parents intervene too soon, even though most babies will already be on the verge of getting back to sleep by themselves and parents interrupting this process can lead can to baby sleep problems. As a result, parents are advised to refrain from the act of calming their little ones to sleep or picking them up at night immediately they let out any sound or cry. According to Richard Ferber, parental soothing trains babies to associate sleep with parental intervention (Ferber 2006), making it difficult for children to develop personal self-soothing capacities. Like earlier emphasized, all babies wake up during the night and some will cry until their parents come to pick them up, providing some sort of soothing. One way to help your baby start developing this self-soothing capacity is to first ensure that you don’t make her/him sleep off while in your arms. Alternatively, especially at bedtime, place your little ones in their cot before they fall asleep. It is research proven that when babies habitually are made to sleep during breast feeding or are allowed to fall asleep before being placed in their bed, such baby’s self-soothing capacities will be highly underdeveloped and such babies will find it difficult to soothe themselves back to sleep when they experience night waking (Anders et al 1992; Ferber 1986; Goodlin-Jones et al 2001). Other researchers have discovered that babies who are feed, held or rocked to sleep tend to report frequent night wakings (Anuntaseree et al 2008; Mindell et al 2010). This may sound confusing to a lot of parent as this seems to be the right and natural thing to do. It is a natural behavior for babies to protest by way of crying when parents or caregiver withdraw, it is a survival instinct for them which needs to be approached with some margin, otherwise this will lead to more complicated maladjustment into adulthood.

Ferber and other studies by Owens suggested that babies 6months and above should be left alone for increasing lengthy intervals over time until such learns to give up and start adapting. (Ferber 2006; Owens et al 1999; France and Blampied 1999). Initially, this may make the parent look as if they are acting insensitive to their little ones, however over time, the gains will be beneficial to both the parent and the baby.

Hunger interrupts sleep

Babies need frequent feeding times in order to nurture them towards physical growth and development. Due to the small size of their stomach, there is little they can eat each time, calling for more frequent feeding times than adults. This is one reason babies, especially under 3months old can’t in reality sleep through the night. Further if babies are not well fed, it leads to short bursts of sleep and cry through the night, sometimes coming up every hour. One approach to this would be to first ensure that the baby is well feed before bedtime and engage brief delays before deciding to feed the baby during the night. If your baby wakes up at night at a time you think she/he should still be sleeping, calling for your attention through her/his usual means, as a substitute of feeding your baby immediately, you might decide to replace the diaper first. This is an approach that will help subsequent behavioral pattern of the baby and help disconnect the behavioral link night wakings and feeding. To authenticate this approach, a researcher once recruited 26 families to participate in a study in which 50% of them were assigned to get their babies properly feed between 10pm and 12midnight. This group was also asked not to feed their babies if they woke up during the night. Great result after 8 weeks of training, 100% of the babies in this study group were sleeping from midnight to 5am, also helping parents to get much needed night rest (Pinilla and Birch 1993). However in the control group only about 23% of the babies were able to sleep till 5am. Although more of this study needs to be replicated to increase the result validity. If your baby is getting enough food and fluids and you discussed with your pediatrician, these approach is worth trying.