An early extract from The Baby Sleep Handbook by Alexandra Kalmár.
When you are exhausted, it is completely understandable to want someone to tell you what to do. My baby wakes every two hours. How do I stop it? My baby only sleeps for thirty minutes. How do I make the nap longer? My toddler suddenly refuses bedtime. What time should I put them to bed?
Sleep advice often answers these questions by jumping straight to a solution: stop feeding to sleep, move the last feed earlier, teach independent settling, shorten the nap, lengthen the nap, change bedtime or follow a particular schedule.
Before jumping to a solution, I want to make sure we understand the problem we are actually trying to solve.
If your baby wakes every two hours, for example, I want to know more than the number of wakings. How old are they? What happens when they wake? Do they feed for a few minutes and fall straight back to sleep, or are they awake for long periods? What does daytime sleep look like? Has anything changed recently? How long does bedtime take? Where does your baby sleep, how are they fed and who can settle them? And perhaps most importantly: which part of the night is hardest for you?
Sometimes the answer changes what we do next.
You may come to this book wanting your baby to stop waking and realise that what would make the biggest difference is for somebody else to handle the first waking so that you can have one longer stretch of uninterrupted sleep. Feeding to sleep may not be the problem at all; perhaps feeding takes ten minutes and the cot transfer afterwards takes an hour. A 5:30 a.m. start may lead us to look at the whole twenty-four hours rather than searching for a trick that will make your baby stay asleep in the morning. A short nap may need changing, or it may fit perfectly well into a day that is otherwise working.
And sometimes, once you understand what is happening, you may decide that you do not need to change it at all.
That is why, throughout this book, we will keep coming back to the whole picture: your baby’s age and development, sleep across the twenty-four hours, feeding, health, sleep environment, what happens around sleep and waking, and the reality of your family’s days and nights.
Not because you need to analyse every nap or keep perfect records. You do not. We are simply trying to understand what is actually making life difficult before deciding what might make it easier.
What worked before is allowed to stop working
There is another reason I do not want you to think of sleep choices as right or wrong: something can work beautifully for your family for months and then simply stop working.
Feeding to sleep may be the easiest, calmest way to end the day with a six-month-old and feel exhausting eight months later. Bedsharing may help everyone get more sleep for a while and later leave you longing for your own space. Rocking may be easy with a small baby and physically difficult with a much heavier toddler. You may happily manage most of the night waking while you are on leave and find exactly the same arrangement impossible once you return to work.
Wanting to change something now does not mean that choosing it earlier was a mistake.
I think this matters particularly with the things parents are so often warned not to “start”. Feeding to sleep, holding a baby for naps, rocking, lying beside a toddler — these can all become things you later want to change. But the possibility that something may become inconvenient one day is not, by itself, a reason to avoid something that is helping your family now.
And the reverse is true too. You do not have to stop something just because your child has reached a particular birthday. If breastfeeding to sleep still works well at eighteen months, eighteen months does not magically turn it into a problem. If your two-year-old comes into your bed at four in the morning and everybody goes back to sleep, you do not have to turn that into a project simply because somebody thinks they are old enough to stay in their own bed.
There is no prize for changing something before you need to.
As your baby grows, you may make a choice, live with it for a while, change it, return to it or find an entirely different solution. That is not inconsistency. It is what happens when a baby develops and family life develops alongside them.
This is an extract from The Baby Sleep Handbook, my forthcoming guide to baby and toddler sleep from birth to three. I’ll be sharing more from the book, along with new baby sleep resources, here on BabySleep.now as it gets closer to publication.