Hi! I’m Dana Obleman, creator of The Sleep Sense Program. If you’d rather read than watch, I’ve transcribed the text of this video below.

This week’s question comes from Cathy:

“My four-and-a-half-month old daughter was sleeping well during the night. Five hours, then up for a feed and back down for another five hours. Now that she’s begun teething, she rarely sleeps for more than two hours at a time. What can I do to help her sleep through the night?”

A lot of the questions on the blog are about teething, and I think it requires a few minutes of discussion over the whole issue. I tend to declare myself a bit of a fence sitter about teething. I think some children breeze through teething without any problems at all and others struggle. I look at my three children, and with my first two sons, I didn’t pay much attention to their teething. They didn’t seem to be bothered too much by it. One day, their teeth were there. But with my daughter, I noticed that she was a little grumpier on the days teeth were actually coming through. It didn’t really affect her sleep; it almost seem like she needed a bit more sleep to get through the teething.

So I do know that every baby responds a little differently to pain, as we all do, but I think sometimes teething gets blamed for everything. If you’ve got a child who nurses to sleep and is up five times a night, a lot of parents say, “Oh, he’s teething.” So you really have to look at the big picture. If you’ve got a baby who falls asleep totally independently, traditionally sleeps through the night, and then has a couple of nights where he’s awake here and there, it could absolutely be teething. But what you don’t want to do is think “Oh no, he’s teething. I’m going feed him or rock him” or do all the things that you’ve worked hard to get out of. Because a night or two of that, and you could be right back at square one, and you’ll have to start all over again with your training.

So if you think it’s teething, all you can do is give some pain medication or go in and reassure her that it’s still nighty-night and that she’s okay, and just know that within a few nights, it’s going to blow over. So you just want to be careful how you react to it. You said that she was sleeping well. I don’t know if that means she has her own skills for sleep, but if she doesn’t, then I would guess that’s probably more the problem than teething.

I do find that, if a baby has lots of props and they slept fairly well, sometimes at a certain age the props stop working so well, and all of a sudden you have a baby who was going six hours through the night and now they’re up every two. Then I encourage people to have a good look at that and whether the props are causing some problems now, as the child becomes more aware of what it is that actually gets him or her to sleep. Then that could lead to, waking up a few times in the night, realizing “Oh right, where is my soother, where is that breastfeeding, where is that rocking?” And now they’re awake more often, looking for that. So have a look at the big picture here, Cathy, and see what could really be going on.

Again, if you really think it’s teething, do a few modified things to your night time response. But, again, teething is something that has to happen; every child goes through it. It’s got to be at least livable, so the more you can put it out of your mind, the better off you will all be and the less likely you’ll be to over-react to it.

Keep that in mind as your children go though teething. You don’t want to start over every few months because you suspect teething. Really hang on to your consistency and your expectations for their sleep. They still need to sleep, even if they’re teething, so you just have to keep those things in mind.

Thanks for your question and sleep well.