One of the things that can feel surprisingly confusing when your baby starts nursery or spends part of the week with another caregiver is that their sleep may suddenly look completely different there. Perhaps your baby only naps on you at home but sleeps in a cot at...

Baby sleep advice has a strange tendency to become increasingly precise the longer you look at it. At first you are told roughly how much babies sleep. Then you find a sample routine. Before long, you are looking at a timetable telling you that your baby should nap at...

Nap transitions have an irritating habit of looking obvious only in retrospect. For weeks, everything can feel slightly wrong. The last nap takes forever to happen, bedtime moves later, yesterday your baby managed perfectly well on two naps and today they are falling...

Few things feel more counterintuitive than waking a sleeping baby. You may have spent twenty minutes feeding, rocking, walking or negotiating with the universe to get them to sleep, and now somebody is suggesting that you deliberately wake them up. I understand the...

There is something particularly painful about seeing 5:12 a.m. on the clock when your baby has decided that the night is over. At 2 a.m., at least everybody agrees that it is the middle of the night. At five, things become less clear. Your baby may be wide awake,...

There is a very particular kind of tiredness that comes from being awake with a baby at two in the morning who appears to have absolutely no intention of going back to sleep. They are not necessarily crying. Sometimes they are quite cheerful, which can make the whole...

Some babies seem to arrive in the world with an unexpected talent for sleep. They fall asleep fairly easily, tolerate being put down and give their parents longer stretches at night surprisingly early. Other babies wake at the slightest attempt to move them, nap for...

“Is your baby sleeping through yet?” It is one of those questions people seem to start asking surprisingly early. Sometimes it is just conversation, but when you are the one getting up several times a night, it can land differently. If other babies in your antenatal...

Your baby sleeps beautifully on you and wakes three minutes after you put them down. Is this something you need to change — or simply something babies often do? There is a particular kind of optimism involved in transferring a sleeping baby. You wait until they look...