How to Get Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night

"For many parents, their baby’s sleep patterns improve just in the knick
of time, coinciding with their own growing need for uninterrupted
nighttime sleep. Although it usually doesn’t take parents long to
realize that fatigue is making life harder for them, it often isn’t
until four to six weeks after the baby is born that the cumulative
effect of sleepless nights becomes profound. At this point, many
mothers express varying degrees of depression and confusion. Most
likely, exhaustion contributes not only to the first-week postpartum
blues but also to the more profound depression that can continue. Under
the best of circumstances, sleep deprivation can interfere with a
mother’s ability to carry on a normal life.

Although there may be no particular harm in training a younger or
smaller baby to sleep through the night, we prefer to wait until a
baby weighs at least nine pounds, is five to seven weeks old, and does
not fall into any high-risk category or have any health problem. In the
meantime, though, there are several preparatory steps you can take:

As new parents, we all have the tendency to continuously hold, rock,
or nurse our babies to sleep. This is okay in the first few weeks of
life. This is not okay as a continuing pattern, though, as you will be
teaching your baby to depend on you to fall asleep. In fact, this is
one of the most common causes of sleep problems in young children: they
are unable to fall asleep on their own either at bedtime or when they
wake up in the middle of the night. Since building a close relationship
is so important during these early weeks, you should hold your baby as
much as possible during his wakeful rather than sleepy times."

Excerpted from "Helping Your Child Sleep Through The Night" by Susie Schevill and Joanne Cuthbertson, all rights reserved.