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 Sonia:

“My 8-month-old baby has had difficulty sleeping since he was six months old. He wakes up three or four times at night. I have to walk in to his room, pat and shush him and he will fall back to sleep. Lately, this is taking longer. I can be shushing and patting for 30 minutes or more two or three times a night. I do not want to pick him up first from his crib, but I do not know if I should let him cry. This can last for hours, what should I do?”

I like this question, Sonia, because it really talks about sleep props and I just want to spend a minute going over what sleep props are. If you think about sleep as a journey, then point A is awake and B is asleep. How you get yourself from A to B is often the trickiest part of a baby’s night.

Most babies, especially babies that I see and the babies of people who read the blog are hooked on some prop. They attach themselves to things and it could a soother, the breast, a bottle, rocking, or bouncing on a ball. It can be anything that carries your baby from A to B. In the night, when your baby has a natural occurring wake up instead of just going back to sleep quickly, it turns into an actual full wake up and now they’re usually crying. They want you to come in and do all the things that got them to sleep in the first place; this is a good one Sonia because it is not sort of the normal prop, it’s not one of the most popular props, it’s shushing and patting prop.

I would assume that at bedtime when you put your baby to sleep for the night, you are probably standing by the crib and doing some shushing and patting. That is his way into sleep, mom pats him, mom shushes, and I make my journey to sleep. When he’s waking in the night, he wants you to come in and do that all over again.

It sounds like in the past it was relatively easy, you just had to go in and do a bit of patting and he was back to sleep. However, what I find troublesome about props is that they do not work and they become more difficult as time goes on. What used to be a quick fix is now turning into a frustrating 30 minutes or more which is common with all props.

This usually suggests that he is probably not thrilled with the idea of you coming in to shush him and pat him all through the night. He might be looking for some strategies of his own that are a bit more independent so this is a good time to guide him down that road.
I would start at bedtime and it is okay to be there. However, for the next three nights, I want you to just pat and shush less, making it intermittent. You might pat for 30 seconds and then stop for a minute, maybe do it again and then you are going to stop. Every three days, I want you to back away from the crib and I want you to do a lot less shushing and patting.

You will wean him off the idea that you need to be there shushing and patting in order for him to sleep. By night seven you should be at the door and once at the door, I do not want you to go over to the crib anymore at all. There will be no physical contact and by then he should be exploring some other options such as, hugging his little teddy or doing something with his blanket that he finds soothing.

This will take the focus off you helping and guiding him into a direction of finding things that are soothing for him. In the night if he has awakenings, you are going to follow the same system. You can shush and pat intermittently and as the nights go on, you are going to do it less and less as you are backing away. That should get him sleeping through the night.

There is no reason why he should not be sleeping through the night just looking at his age here and he is definitely over eight months old so there is really no reason why he can’t be going a solid 11 or 12 hours with no visits from you. He should be able to handle this on his own.

It starts at bedtime and then it moves through the night and really some of the other props I have heard over the years are playing with mom’s hair. Many children like to play with mom’s hair as they fall asleep or holding hands. I even had a client who had a little mole on her neck that her two-year-old liked to touch until he fell asleep.

Props can be anything you have convinced yourself that you need in order to fall asleep. However, the truth is, you do not need it, you can definitely sleep without it but it is just the absence of it causes you a bit of anxiety.

Thanks a lot for your question, sleep well.