Q: I know it seems like a simple question, but my son is 6 months old and still not sleeping through the night. I feel like I’m never going to get a full 8 hours ever again. What can I do or should I be doing to help him sleep through the night?

The Mommy Panel’s Advice:

We unanimously agree that the key to a baby sleeping through the night is parents deciding to let them. Let us explain. Your baby is not waking up during the night because he is no longer tired or because he is hungry. Rather his waking is a natural break in his sleep cycle and he calls for you to help soothe him back to sleep. If you do not respond to his cries, eventually he will learn to soothe himself back to sleep.

Sleep is not a continuous process. If you think back to last night, you most likely awoke a few times (in between sleep cycles to reposition, visit the bathroom, etc. before falling back to sleep. With babies it is the same thing only when they awake they’re used to being fed or rocked back to sleep. When a baby finally transitions from being soothed by his parent to being soothed by himself you will celebrate that he has “slept through the night!”

There really is no given time when a baby “should” be sleeping through the night. Depending on whom you ask, it could happen at any point ranging from only a few months old to around six months old. It is highly unlikely that a baby will be able to soothe herself to sleep during the first month. However, by about four months of age, if a child is not soothing herself to sleep, she is not likely to do so on her own. Instead, she will need a parent’s help to learn to sleep through the night, and you help by simply no longer responding to the child’s midnight cries for soothing. This is a very heart-wrenching process for most parents. In fact, there are several mothers among us that were only able to finally accomplish the let-them-cry technique once they were nearly overcome by exhaustion from countless sleepless nights (several moms reported that at about 6 month of ages the nightime wakings actually seemed to increase.

We all think 4 months old is a good age to help your child learn to sleep through the night. The process to accomplish this is unbelievably simple. After conducting a normal bedtime routine (bath, story, song, etc., put your baby into his crib, kiss him goodnight, and leave. Let him be until it is time to wakeup the next morning.

This process may seem drastic, and trust us when we say that we know how awful it feels to just let baby cry. But it really is the only way we know for a child to learn to soothe herself to sleep. It is important to remind yourself that, at first, the baby is soothing herself by crying, but eventually she will do just as we all do – roll over and go back to sleep.

Quick Tips:

• It is advisable to put baby into his crib while he is still awake so he can practice putting himself to sleep.
• Try very hard not to go into the room unless you TRULY feel there is something wrong with the baby. Any response that you give while your baby is crying it out, will come across to baby as a tease, and will only prolong (and worsen the crying and frustrate the whole process.
• That first night we say nix to the baby monitor. It will be that much harder to let your baby be if you’re amplifying his voice into your bedroom. We can see no reason why you shouldn’t turn it off and try to focus on getting your first full night’s sleep in a long time — we know you deserve it.