– Hi, I’m Dana. Do you know what the most, the number one, the most searched parenting question on the internet is?

When will my baby sleep through the night?

Hands down the most searched term on the internet for new parents and I wish that I could give you a definite answer.

I wish that I could say, by six months, this much weight, your baby will all of a sudden on a glorious night start sleeping through.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that and nobody can say that. Your doctor can’t say that, your pediatrician, your parenting guru, your lactation consultant. No one can give you that answer because it’s so unique for every baby but I can give you some things you need to put in place to make sure that this happens as fast as it possibly can.

The single most important thing you need to do as the parent is make sure your baby knows how to fall asleep independently. That is the key to a good sleeping child, independent sleep skills.

So what do I mean by that? Well, that means exactly what it sounds like.

You would take a child baby, you would do a little routine with him or her before bed, you would put them into the crib awake and they would drift off to sleep peacefully on their own.

That sounds like magic, doesn’t it? That doesn’t even sound possible to some of you I would imagine but it’s doable. It is absolutely doable. I mean, sleep is a biological necessity. We all need to do it but why we don’t sleep so well is because we associate all kinds of extras into our strategies for sleep and most babies attach extras in that look like nursing to sleep, bottle feeding to sleep, being rocked to sleep, being swaddled to sleep, being worn in a baby wearer to sleep.

These are all what we call sleep props. They are an association to sleep that without them makes the whole experience very challenging for your child. So if you’ve solved that problem then the good news is your baby has a very good chance of just starting to sleep through the night independently, naturally without a lot of extra work on your part.

When they’re ready to end those nighttime feeds, when their weight is good enough and everything is fine in that department, they will most likely start to sleep right through the night or pretty close to it.

Now, if you’re thinking, I’ve got all kinds of props, that could be why my child’s still not sleeping through then I would encourage you to pick up a copy of the Sleep Sense Program. Got a couple of different options in there for how to tackle this issue but the good news is you can absolutely teach a child to fall asleep independently without a lot of fuss and that’s what people are always worried about, the fuss.

There might be some fuss on the start, right? It’s hard to change our habits around sleep. That’s just a given but once they’ve developed the skill set, they become great sleepers, bedtime’s not a struggle anymore, it even starts to transfer over into nap time so that becomes much easier as well.

So it’s really a win-win situation in the end and you’ll have a baby that can sleep through the night without needing a lot of assistance from you, without needing a lot of attention from you and that can happen sooner rather than later.

Thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well.