Wake-and-Sleep: Teaching Babies to Sleep on Their Own

Surprise: Sleep training isn’t about getting your baby to sleep through the night. The truth is no baby…no child…no adult EVER sleeps through the night! Yup! You read that right! We all rouse at least a tiny bit three to four times a night. In fact, newborns have lightning-fast sleep cycles, which means they return to very light—easily disturbed—sleep about every 45 to 60 minutes, making them vulnerable to wakeups throughout the night. So, your sleep-training goal is not really about getting your baby to sleep through the night, but to help them learn how to self-soothe when they inevitably wake up in the middle of the night and need to get back to sleep. Good to know, right? But it’s even better to know how to teach your little one how to do it! Here’s help.

Rethink infant sleep training.

What is sleep training, anyway? Sleep training is often used synonymously with the “cry it out,” but that’s not accurate. There are plenty of sleep training methods out there. The “cry it out” sleep training method is just one of them. But in the end, all sleep training methods are about the same thing: teaching your baby that they’re capable of falling asleep independently. Learning to self-soothe in the middle of the night will not only help your little one get more sleep, but you as well.

What’s the right age for sleep training?

Sleep training should start based on your baby’s development. This usually means that babies are ready for traditional sleep training between 4 and 6 months old, before they’ve had time to get too used to rocking or nursing to sleep. The big exception to this rule: If you use the wake-and-sleep method, you can start sleep training whenever you like!

Teach your baby how to self-soothe.

As tempting as it is to rock your baby to sleep in your arms and stealthily slide them into their bassinet, doing that every night makes your little one reliant on your help during those little middle-of-the-night wake-ups. Of course, you can still enjoy letting your baby sleep in your arms, but I suggest you also help your baby develop the skills they need to fall asleep on their own, because, frankly, they can!

So...how do you teach a baby to self-soothe? Training your baby to self-soothe and sleep through the night is made possible with something called the wake-and-sleep method. Here’s how to “sleep train” your infant using this gentle sleep training method: