Dana Obleman: Hi. I’m Dana. Welcome back. Today, I want to talk a little bit about waking up in the night. I get emails from people. A lot of people respond to things on my Facebook page and say things to me like, “Babies are supposed to wake up in the night, so it’s unfair to ask them to sleep all the way through when they’re not supposed to be waking up in the night.”

I want to talk a little bit about that today. “Are babies supposed to wake up in the night?” Yes, they are. We all are. Every single person has wake ups in the night. The idea that you go bed at 10:00 PM and you sleep all the way through with no wake up until 7:00 AM is a misconception. We all have wake ups. It’s a natural part of our nighttime sleep.

Anybody would have anywhere between two to five little wake ups in the night. Hopefully, they’re so brief that you don’t even remember them in the morning. Often, though, they are a full wake up, where you might get a drink of water or realize you need to use the bathroom.

That fragments our sleep, which isn’t the best, but if you get yourself back to sleep quickly after, then it’s not too bad. “Is your baby waking up in the night?” Yes, your baby is. If your baby is a newborn baby, then yes, they’re going to wake up in the night. I would never, ever, ever tell anyone that they should be expecting a newborn baby to sleep all night.

That would be an impossibility. They are not designed to sleep all night as a newborn. Do some sleep better than others? Absolutely. I get emails from people that tell me that, by six weeks, their baby slept the majority of the night. My babies by 10 weeks, were sleeping the majority of the night.

That had a lot to do with the fact that I was teaching them good sleep skills right from the beginning. You can do that with a newborn. It requires a little bit of a modified plan, but you can teach a baby to sleep well, right from day one, if you know what you’re doing.

Then they’re going to have wake ups in the night, but the fact that they have good sleep skills means that they don’t require anything in the middle of the night. If you’ve got a baby who is prop dependent, and when I say that, I mean that they get themselves to sleep by rocking, eating, a pacifier, motion. They have a prop. They have a little helper that gets them to sleep.

The problem with that is that, when they do have a naturally occurring wake up in the night, they will often notice that the prop is gone. You’re not there. The bottle’s not in the mouth. The pacifier is gone. Whatever it is.

A little, tiny wake up becomes a full wake up, and usually, the response is crying or calling, because they want you to come back and help them with whatever it took to get them to sleep in the first place. You can see how this is actually a fairly complicated question. It has a lot to do with how old your child is and if they are prop dependent or not.

The good news is that if you’ve been teaching your child to sleep well, and they can do it independently, and they don’t need a whole lot of extra help from you, you won’t be alerted to their wake ups in the night, because when they do have a little wake up, they’ll roll over and go right back to sleep again.

That’s the beauty of it, is that if a child has the skills and can do this on their own, then they will. They just will, the same way you will. It’s just natural and completely normal. I think the better question is “Can your baby sleep all night? Is your baby ready to sleep all night?”

If you ask yourself these questions about “Are they old enough? Is their weight healthy and fine and there’s no health concerns? Are they prop dependent?” If you’ve got any of those things going on, then that’s where you need to start. It doesn’t matter if you think he should be sleeping through, or you think he shouldn’t be sleeping through.

You really have to get to the root of why your baby is waking in the night and start addressing some of those issues. Thanks so much for watching. Sleep well.

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