If your baby wakes every two hours — or sometimes even more often — it is very easy to assume that something has gone wrong.
Perhaps you have been told that your baby should be sleeping longer stretches by now. Maybe somebody else’s baby is already “sleeping through”. Or perhaps you have searched online and found a long list of possible explanations: your baby is overtired, undertired, hungry, not hungry, napping too much, napping too little, going to bed too early, going to bed too late, feeding to sleep or relying on a “sleep association”.
Before you change anything, there is a more useful place to start: Frequent waking does not automatically mean that your baby has a sleep problem. But that does not mean you simply have to accept an exhausting situation either.
Babies wake at night
Night waking is a normal part of human sleep. Babies, children and adults all move through different sleep stages and experience brief arousals during the night. What differs is what happens around those arousals — whether we become fully awake, whether we remember them, and whether we need anything before returning to sleep.
For babies, waking can be particularly visible. Their sleep is still developing, feeding remains an important part of the night for many babies, and they may seek sucking, touch, movement, warmth or the presence of another person as they move between sleep and wakefulness. There is also enormous variation between babies. Some begin sleeping longer stretches relatively early. Others continue waking frequently for much longer. Sleep need, feeding, temperament, sensitivity and developmental timing all vary from one child to another.
Research gives us averages and ranges. You don’t live with an average baby. So there is no age at which I can look at a baby waking every two hours and say, on that information alone, This baby should not be doing this anymore.
Waking is not the same as having a problem
This distinction matters. Imagine two babies who both wake four times every night.
The first wakes, breastfeeds for a few minutes and goes peacefully back to sleep. Their parent barely becomes fully awake and feels reasonably rested in the morning. The second needs forty-five minutes of walking, bouncing and resettling after every waking. Their parent is surviving on fragments of sleep and feels completely depleted. The number of wakings may be identical. The problem is not.
This is why counting wakings is rarely enough. When I work with a family, I want to understand what the whole night actually looks like — and what the whole 24 hours look like too.
Start with the whole 24 hours
If you told me, “My baby wakes every two hours”, I would not immediately tell you to stop feeding to sleep or teach your baby to settle independently. I would want to know much more. How old is your baby? What time does their day usually begin? How much do they sleep during the day? Are naps mostly short or long? When does the last nap end? What time do you begin bedtime — and what time does your baby actually fall asleep?
Then I would look at the wakings themselves. Does your baby feed and return to sleep quickly? Are they genuinely hungry? Are they awake and cheerful for an hour in the middle of the night? Has the pattern always been like this, or did something suddenly change? And then there is an equally important question: What part of the situation is actually difficult for you? Because sometimes the answer changes what we need to do.
Could daytime sleep be affecting the night?
Yes. But that does not mean you should automatically start cutting naps. Sleep is regulated partly by homeostatic sleep pressure: broadly speaking, sleep pressure builds while we are awake and decreases while we sleep. Circadian timing also influences when our bodies are biologically prepared for sleep and wakefulness.
That means sleep across the day and night is connected. A baby who has had several short naps may have a very different evening from the same baby after two substantial naps. A toddler who sleeps for three hours late in the afternoon may simply not be ready for a long night at the time their parents would like bedtime to happen.
This becomes particularly interesting when frequent waking is accompanied by long, alert periods in the middle of the night. If your baby wakes every couple of hours but feeds or seeks contact and quickly returns to sleep, that is one pattern. If they wake at 2 a.m. and remain wide awake until 4 a.m., that is another.
Repeated long periods of wakefulness — often called split nights — are one reason I would look particularly carefully at where sleep is falling across the entire 24 hours.
What about overtiredness?
This is one of the most common explanations parents are given for frequent waking. You may have heard that if you miss your baby’s exact wake window, cortisol will rise, your baby will become overtired and the night will fall apart. The physiology of sleep pressure and arousal is real. The popular baby-sleep explanation is much less straightforward.
There is no universal wake-window formula that can tell us the exact number of minutes your individual baby should remain awake. Nor should every difficult night automatically be interpreted as evidence that you missed the correct bedtime. Sometimes a baby who is difficult to settle actually needs more sleep pressure, not an earlier bedtime.
So rather than repeatedly asking, Did I miss the wake window?, try asking: Was my baby actually ready to sleep? That question is often much more useful.
Is feeding to sleep causing the waking?
Not necessarily. Feeding and sleep are closely intertwined during infancy. Sucking is regulating, milk makes babies sleepy, and feeding is one of the simplest ways many babies return to sleep at night. Yes, babies can develop familiar associations around falling asleep. So can adults. A dark room, a particular pillow, a partner beside us, music, reading, rocking, sucking, breastfeeding or a bottle can all become familiar cues around sleep.
But the existence of an association does not prove that it is causing a problem. Observational research has found associations between parental presence or active settling at sleep onset and parent-reported night waking. That is worth knowing. But association is not causation. It cannot tell us whether parental involvement caused a particular baby to wake, whether babies who wake more frequently elicit more parental involvement, or how temperament, feeding and other factors contribute.
So I would not remove an easy, peaceful way of getting your baby back to sleep simply because somebody told you it was a “bad sleep association”. If feeding to sleep works for you, it is allowed to work. If you are feeding twelve times every night and desperately want something to change, that matters too. Then we can look at alternatives — because the current arrangement is no longer working for your family, not because you have taught your baby to sleep incorrectly.
Does my baby need to learn to self-soothe?
This is another place where baby-sleep language can make normal development sound like a test your baby is failing. Babies do gradually become capable of doing more for themselves. Sleep changes enormously during the first years of life. Some babies begin returning to sleep after arousals without signalling for a parent relatively early; others continue regularly seeking help.
Videosomnographic research following babies during the first year found substantial individual variation in night waking and self-soothing. Importantly, waking itself remained common, and even at twelve months many babies still regularly required parental involvement when they woke.
There is no good evidence that every baby needs to be taught to fall asleep without responsive help in order to develop healthy sleep or eventual independence. That is different from saying you can never change how you help your baby sleep. You can. The reason for changing it should be that a different arrangement would work better for your baby or your family — not fear that responding now will somehow prevent independence later.
Sometimes you don’t need fewer wakings
This sounds strange until you are living it. Perhaps your baby wakes three or four times, but the hardest part is that only you can respond. In that case, reducing every waking may not be the most realistic first goal. Maybe another caregiver could handle the first part of the night, giving you one longer uninterrupted stretch. Perhaps breastfeeding is not actually the problem. Your baby feeds quickly — but transferring them back to their cot takes forty minutes every time.
Then the transfer may be the thing worth exploring. Or perhaps your baby sleeps reasonably well until 4 or 5 a.m., after which everybody spends ninety miserable minutes trying to force another hour of sleep that rarely happens. The most useful change may be somewhere completely different from the place you first expected. Start with the problem, not the solution.
When should frequent waking make you look beyond sleep?
Frequent waking can be normal. A sudden or unusual change deserves more curiosity. Sleep can be affected by illness, pain, breathing difficulties, feeding problems and other medical conditions. If your baby seems unwell, is showing signs of pain or breathing difficulty, you are worried about feeding, growth or development, or something about their behaviour simply does not seem right, seek advice from an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.
This is particularly important when sleep changes dramatically without an obvious explanation. A sleep schedule cannot diagnose or treat a medical problem.
And what if your baby’s sleep is normal — but you are exhausted?
This may be the most important part. Saying that frequent waking can be developmentally normal is not the same as saying that you should be able to cope with unlimited sleep disruption. A baby can be sleeping within a biologically normal range while their family is struggling enormously.
Both things can be true.
You may need more help. You may need somebody else to take part of the night. You may need to change where or how everybody sleeps. You may want to experiment with naps, bedtime or settling. You may decide that something which worked beautifully three months ago no longer works for you.
None of that requires us to label your baby’s sleep as broken. And it does not require leaving your baby to cry in order to make meaningful changes. The useful question is not: How do I make my baby stop waking? It is: What is happening across our whole day and night — and what change would make the biggest difference to our family right now? That is where I would start.
References & further reading
- Goodlin-Jones, B. L., Burnham, M. M., Gaylor, E. E., & Anders, T. F. (2001). Night waking, sleep-wake organization, and self-soothing in the first year of life. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 22(4), 226–233.
- Burnham, M. M., Goodlin-Jones, B. L., Gaylor, E. E., & Anders, T. F. (2002). Nighttime sleep-wake patterns and self-soothing from birth to one year of age: A longitudinal intervention study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 43(6), 713–725.
- Sadeh, A., Mindell, J. A., Luedtke, K., & Wiegand, B. (2009). Sleep and sleep ecology in the first 3 years: A web-based study. Journal of Sleep Research, 18(1), 60–73.