Hi, I’m Dana, creator of the Sleep Sense Program. I often say to myself if I had a nickel for every time I heard that question. But one of the most popular questions that I get asked all of the time… In the last 19 years, I have heard this question almost daily. Is when will my baby start sleeping through the night?

I know as a new parent myself, that was a question I asked repetitively, daily, hourly even sometimes. When will this baby sleep through the night? Because as a parent of a newborn baby, you have an expectation that you’re not going to be sleeping much. You know that this baby’s going to require food, is going to need attention 24 hours around the clock, every couple of hours. But somewhere in the back of your mind, you start to think, “Well, yes, it’ll be hard at first. And then as this baby gets older, he or she will start sleeping better and things will get easier with time.” And in a perfect world, that’s exactly what happens, but for the majority of our customers, that doesn’t happen. And it certainly didn’t happen for me.

I can remember with my first son, five or six months had gone by and he was sleeping no better than he had from day one. In fact, some nights it felt like he was sleeping even worse than he had been as a newborn baby. And so it’s a question that I understand well, it’s a question that I think is fair to ask of this baby. When will you please sleep through the night? So I want to give you some tips today on what are the signs that you can be watching for that will show you or indicate that a baby may ready to start sleeping through the night. Now I want to just precursor this with the fact that your baby needs to be healthy and gaining weight well. And so always check with your pediatrician first before you decide to pull any kind of nighttime feed situations.

But the number one thing to look at is how your baby falls asleep initially. That is the crux of the issue. That’s the heart of what we need to focus on, is how does this baby fall asleep? Because how he fall asleep is very habitual and repetitive. And so if a baby is falling asleep with assistance, which I like to call asleep prop, meaning that they’re getting help from someone or something, and that helps them make the journey into sleep. Now, common sleep props are feeding to sleep, whether breast or bottle, or rocking to sleep. Those are the two, or being held until they’re asleep, are the most common sleep props we see. But if a baby begins to associate the fact that feeding and sleep go hand in hand, or rocking or being held and sleep go hand in hand, then they’re going to continue to wake in the night and want the same experience again. And if you think about it that way, it makes complete sense.

If you tell yourself, “I need these things in order to sleep,” and then those things are not there when you wake up in the middle of the night, you are going to want them back. And that’s exactly what happens to be babies. So it goes past needing the calories, it goes past needing the food, and it starts to become an association with sleep. And so that is where you need to look first. And if you can answer, yes, fairly confidently that your baby is relying on help from someone or something in order to fall asleep initially, then that’s where you have to start to solve this problem.

So the Sleep Sense Program is going to walk you through step by step, how do I do that? How do I break the association with the sleep prop and help my baby find strategies and skills that are internalized and independent that they can rely on repeatedly through the night? And the amazing thing is that they can learn it and everyone has to learn it. That’s how we all turn into independent sleepers, is finding the skills and strategies that we need that make the journey into sleep easier. And once we know and trust that we can do it ourselves, then we do. When you have a wake up in the middle of the night, you get yourself back to sleep. And your baby can do it too once they have the skills. So check out a copy of the Sleep Sense Program today and start making the changes you need to make in order to get your baby to start sleeping through the night.

Thanks so much. Sleep well.