Ep #51: Sleep Training Part 3: Conquer Night Wakings

We talked about bedtime. Now we’re gonna talk about overnight. How do we handle those pesky night wakings while you’re sleep training your baby? Stay tuned.

Welcome to Parenthood Prep, the only show that helps sleep-deprived parents and overwhelmed parents-to-be successfully navigate those all-important early years with their baby, toddler, and child. If you are ready to provide the best care for your newborn, manage those toddler tantrums, and grow with your child, you’re in the right place. Now here’s your host, baby and parenting expert, Devon Clement. 

Hello, and welcome back to the Parenthood Prep Podcast. I’m going to dive right into our topic today because I know you’ve been waiting for it. A couple of weeks ago we talked about the bedtime aspect of sleep training. How do you get your baby or your big kids falling asleep at bedtime without you there, without being rocked, without being fed to sleep. 

And hopefully you did that and things are going well or you listen to it and you’re getting ready to start doing it. I have faith in you. It’s gonna go amazing. I’m so excited. I can’t wait to hear all about it.

So now what? You put the baby down in the crib awake, they give you a smile, they maybe roll over and they fall asleep and you get to leave the room and go eat your dinner while it’s still hot or watch a television show or talk to your partner. And it’s amazing. Your life has changed, but they’re still waking up during the night. And I told you that was totally okay. And it is.

Once you get started learning that new skill of falling asleep on their own, now they have the skill. Now they’re doing it. Now we want to get them to do it during the night as well. So if you’re already not feeding them overnight, but they’re needing to be like rocked back to sleep or held or bounced on a ball or whatever. And hopefully, once you start with the bedtime process and get them falling asleep on their own, you’re going to see improvement in the night without doing anything else. And that’s because they’re learning that skill again of putting themselves to sleep.

So during the night, they go through these lighter sleep states, or maybe they even completely wake up. You know, sometimes in the middle of the night, you wake up, you go pee, or you take a sip of water, you look at the clock, and then you go right back to sleep. Sometimes you wake up and you don’t even realize it and you’ve gone back to sleep and you don’t even remember. Sometimes you wake up and have a whole conversation with your partner about something bizarre and you don’t remember that either.

The point is we wake up during the night, but because we as adults are sleep trained, we are able to go back to sleep on our own. And when your baby starts falling asleep on their own in the crib, then when they go through those lighter sleep states at night, or they even wake up completely, they’re going to be able to quickly put themselves back to sleep with very little intervention from you. However, they may still be waking up and that’s totally fine, especially if they’ve been feeding overnight and they’re used to getting those overnight calories. 

I did a two-part episode a while back on night weaning that was really focused on like the early days, the newborn stage, those tips can also be applied to older babies. But a great thing about older babies is that a lot of times you can change things with them much more quickly just because they can handle a little bit more. 

So a four-week old, we’re going to want to just slowly and gradually stretch the time in between their feeds. But like a six-month-old that’s still eating overnight and doesn’t need to be, like if your pediatrician says they don’t need to be eating overnight, and most likely they don’t, then it’s much easier to just leave them to put themselves back to sleep. 

So what I recommend to start this process, well, first of all, much like I said in the night weaning episode, I want you to understand that if your baby is a good weight for their age, if they have not had any growth issues, if they don’t have anything medically going on, then they would survive just fine if you did not feed them at the beginning of the night until the morning. 

You could just say, much like Tribeca Pediatrics recommends to their patients and lots of pediatricians with books about sleep recommend, just don’t feed them overnight. Just stop doing it. They’ll start eating more during the day. You can absolutely do that and everyone will survive. Is it the easiest way? No, especially when you’re the parents and you have other responsibilities during the day, other kids, jobs, even just taking care of your baby and you don’t want to be up for hours in the middle of the night. 

So what I recommend is taking it step by step. So we did bedtime first. Now we’re going to work on like the middle stretch of the night. And you have a couple of options here, kind of depending what’s been happening. So I want you to look at what’s been happening. 

When has your baby typically been waking up? When have they typically been feeding? If they’ve been waking up and you’ve been like rocking them back to sleep or whatever, that’s going to be a little bit easier to get rid of than if they’ve been feeding back to sleep.

So I’ve been listening to some of the episodes lately to kind of figure out what I’ve already said over and over and what I need to say that’s new. And I realized that I talk in this sometimes like jumpy way and I’m trying not to do that. So forgive me for that. It’s because I’m trying to think and talk at the same time. It’s just too difficult.

So you’re thinking about what your baby is doing overnight, what time they’re typically waking up, what they’re needing from you. First of all, if what they need from you is to pop the pacifier back in and they’re under six months, I would just take the pacifier away. And I probably should have talked about that in the bedtime put down episode, and I’m sorry that I didn’t.

I love a pacifier. I think they’re great. I think if your baby has a high need to suck and really enjoys the pacifier, then you can use it and it’s a great tool. Some babies don’t need it, they don’t want to take it, they don’t have a high need to suck and that’s totally fine. But if they’re very into it, it’s going to be something that’s very soothing for them and it’s going to be much easier for you if they have access to it.

However, it’s not till they’re about six months, maybe five, that they can manage it on their own, meaning find it and put it back in their mouth. So if you have a baby that’s that age or older, you can throw 10 pacifiers in the crib. Just do that instead of letting them have one because what happens? They have one, they spit it out, they roll away, and then they wake up in the middle of the night and they can’t find the pacifier, which of course they can’t. It’s like three feet away at the opposite end of the crib. 

Honestly, I have had sleep training clients and even just friends I’ve given advice to where that was the only piece of advice they needed to completely change their baby’s sleep is just put eight pacifiers in the crib, put them around them in a little circle like you’re doing a ritual or something so that there’s always a pacifier that they can access, that they can find and grab and put in their mouth.

What you’ll probably find is that you wake up in the morning and they have like fistfuls of pacifiers and they’re like Scrooge McDuck swimming in his gold coins because they can’t believe their luck at having all these pacifiers available to them.

If all you’re doing is popping the pacifier back in, don’t do that. Let them find it on their own. Let them figure it out. Remember, this method of sleep training that I love is called the figure it out method. They need to figure things out. They need to figure out how to roll and get comfortable. They need to figure out how to find their own pacifiers.

Say they normally wake up around nine and you go put the pacifier back in. Just don’t go in. Just like you did with bedtime, we’re gonna let them put themselves back to sleep. And you’re gonna watch them on the monitor. You can do checks if you want, like I recommended in the bedtime episode, which means that you set a timer for increasing intervals where you’re gonna go in and just verbally check them. You’re not gonna pick them up. You’re not gonna rock them. You’re not gonna give them the pacifier.

The goal of the check is not to calm them because all that happens when you do that is that they get even more upset when you leave and they get confused. And we do not want them to get confused. That is like the non-C of the four Cs. It’s the one that we absolutely don’t want is confusion.

So they would be very confused if you came in, rocked them like you normally do, and then put them back down, they’re going to freak out. So it’s much better to just let them be. The purpose of the check is to reassure the baby and yourself that you’re still there, that you have confidence in them, that they’re okay, because a lot of times they’re going to chill out and stop crying as soon as you come in and look at them and say, you’re doing a great job, I’m so proud of you. 

The important thing about doing checks is that the clock starts over if they calm down. If they have even a short pause or even if they like wind down to just fussing for a few minutes, we’re going to reset the clock. That’s why actually in the past when I’ve had people do checks or when I’ve done checks, you actually end up doing very few checks because they stop pretty quickly. 

That first initial bedtime when they’re kind of, you know, what is going on? I don’t know what’s happening here. Kind of losing their marbles. You’re going to do more checks. But once they start to figure out, oh, actually, I’m okay. Actually, this is not the end of the world. Actually, mom and dad are still here. My parents are still here. They’re still cool. And I’m just learning how to go to sleep on my own. 

So anyway, do checks or don’t, it’s up to you. Just don’t do them in a messed up way. And if you want to understand more about that, listen to the sleep training part one about bedtime. 

So they wake up, it’s not a feeding time, we’re just gonna let them go back to sleep. Now you have a decision from here. We’re gonna call that episode of putting themselves back to sleep a session. A session of learning, a practice session, a practice session. 

So one of my previous Baby Sleep Club members started using it as a verb. She’s like, well, she woke up at nine, so I sessioned her. So we can use that too. So basically we just want them to get more and more practice putting themselves back to sleep. 

So in the early part of the night, just let them do it, especially if you’re still awake. When it starts to get to be like three in the morning and you just wanna go back to sleep, especially after four, you could go in and resettle them however you want. And we’re gonna talk about feeding too.

But in that early part of the night, give them some practice sessions, falling back to sleep. Just keep an eye on them on the monitor. Only if they’re really, truly like redline hysterical for more than five minutes or 10 minutes if they’re just generally a hysterical baby. 

I can’t really give you a time limit on this, but I will say give them longer than you think you should. But also again, you wanna be really listening to them. Watch them on the video monitor. Are they trying to fall back asleep? Chances are they are, especially if they’ve been consistently putting themselves to sleep for a few nights now. 

Now, when do you know when to feed them? Set a benchmark. So normally your baby wakes up at one a.m. to feed. We’re going to set that as our benchmark and we’re going to try to push them a little later. So anytime they wake up before one, even if it’s 12:45, we are gonna do a session of falling back asleep. 

I’m gonna use my favorite analogy, the stoplight. If you think about the bedtime, that baby is green. They’re full of food. They’ve had their diaper changed. They’re super tired. They’re ready for bed. We can session them at bedtime as much as we want, no problem. 

As the night starts to go on, they start to get into yellow. They’ve digested that food, maybe their diaper’s wet, they’ve kind of had a little more sleep, so they’re feeling a little less tired. Yellow is where we wanna push the envelope and it’s maybe gonna be a little bit more difficult. 

Now red is where we really don’t wanna mess with them. So, and listen, if I’m their sleep training, your baby, we’re going into the red, but that’s where it gets really difficult for the parents, especially because you’re tired, you wanna go back to sleep, you’re exhausted from just the process of letting your baby get practice, falling back to sleep all night. So everybody’s in the red zone. We want to make that yellow zone more green. We want to extend that green zone. So what that means is getting them used to going longer and longer without a feed.

So if they normally wake up at one, then say we’re gonna feed them that first night, we’re gonna feed them any time after one. So you set that benchmark. Any sessions before that, they’re gonna go back to sleep. Now, here’s what’s important. If they wake up at 12:45 and they’re fussing in the crib and suddenly the clock turns and it’s one, do you go in and feed them? No. You let them go back to sleep.

The biggest thing with sleep training that you should never, ever, ever, ever do really with like habit forming in general is give up halfway through. I would rather see you feed your baby on demand overnight, every night for a week, than have sessions where you give them 20 minutes to try to go back to sleep and then you throw in the towel and you go scoop them up.

Listen, if it happens once in a while, it’s not the end of the world. You can get back on track. But what ends up happening is that just becomes the new normal. That just becomes the new routine. The baby figures out that they have to cry for 20 minutes in order for you to come in and get them. And they’re like, fine, that’s our routine, I’ll do it. I’ll cry for 20 minutes. If that’s what you want, I don’t understand why you want that, but that’s fine.

So that is the thing that you absolutely should not be doing. And in fact, prior to sleep training, if you have been doing that, if you have been trying to let them go back to sleep and they are not doing it more than 50% of the time, I would actually take a step backwards, start responding again for maybe three nights and then switch back to not responding, but this time really see it through to the end. So we’re gonna give them a session of falling back to sleep.

Now, maybe you set your benchmark as one, and they were up at 11, and they had a session of 30 minutes of trying to fall back asleep and they were crying on and off and it was hard for you and you wanted to go in and all this stuff and they fall back asleep and then they wake up 30 minutes later and it’s whatever time, 12:30 and it’s not your benchmark yet, they did a good session, you did a good session, I’m proud of both of you, you can go feed them at this point. 

You can always decide to change the plan to go in right away. But basically your choices are go in right away or don’t go in at all, not including checks. When I say go in, I mean, you know, feed them, rock them, do whatever you normally do. Either do it right away or don’t do it at all. 

This is why when you’re doing checks, we’re not gonna be picking them up, comforting them, doing these things, because again, it leads to that confusion. But if you go in right away, they don’t get confused. They’re just like, either she comes in right away or she doesn’t. The end.

So you set your benchmark time, say one a.m. I’m not going to feed you until after that. And then if they’re really pushing the time and they’re not waking up until two or three, amazing. Feed them the normal amount. If they’re waking up around one, let’s try decreasing that amount that we feed. So a minute less of nursing or a few minutes less of nursing, an ounce less in the bottle or half an ounce less in the bottle.

And the biggest thing here is that you wanna continue making progress. So, if one night they’re not up at one, they sleep till three, guess what your new benchmark is? We’re gonna keep pushing that. And even if they wake up at one and they haven’t had a session yet and you’re feeling like I’m ready for this, you can let them fall back to sleep at one.

I feel like I’ve made this a little bit confusing, but basically the idea is that for wakings overnight, you want to go as long as possible letting them put themselves back to sleep.

You can set a time where you’re gonna stop doing that and start being responsive to them. Maybe it’s four a.m. A lot of times things get really chaotic after four for a variety of reasons. Maybe that’s when you decide you’re gonna keep a night feed. Maybe it’s one, maybe it’s later, maybe it’s five, maybe it’s even six. 

But you want to make that decision every time they wake up, am I going to go in and respond or am I going to let them put themselves back to sleep? That’s your choice. And as you keep choosing to let them put themselves back to sleep, you’re going to see them learning that skill and practicing that skill and getting better and better at putting themselves back to sleep overnight.

What about a dream feed? I love a dream feed. First of all, what is a dream feed? A dream feed is when you go in while your baby is asleep and feed them. You pick them up out of the crib, you feed them a bottle, you nurse them, and then you put them back down in the crib. Ideally, they stay asleep the entire time. If they wake up and fall back asleep, that’s fine. If they wake up and you put them back down awake, that’s fine. But the point is that they are asleep when you are doing that dream feed.

A lot of times I have parents say to me, oh, she woke up for her dream feed at like 11. A dream feed is not an overnight feed. It is a specific tool where you are picking them up and feeding them while they are asleep. Now, is it a silver bullet? Is it gonna solve all your sleep problems? No, but giving that baby a full tummy when they’re used to eating overnight, you know, say they normally wake up at one to feed, we’re gonna do that dream feed at 10. 

We’re used to them doing a six hour stretch. Now that six hour stretch is gonna go from 10 to four. So if they wake up at one, guess what? You know they’re not hungry. You’re gonna let them go back to sleep. You’re gonna let them have a practice session. Sometimes people say, well, I tried the dream feed and it didn’t make a difference. They still woke up.

It just means you don’t need to feed them at that wake up. It just means that we’ve extended our green zone a little longer because now they have a full belly. Also, if it is a baby that’s used to eating a lot overnight, it still gives them that feed without confusing them that sometimes they wake up and feed and sometimes they don’t. Which again, we’re picking our battles here and sometimes we are gonna respond a little bit differently. And yes, it might be a tiny bit confusing, but it’s like baby steps.

And so we wanna be able to be responsive in a way that’s going to be like the least amount of confusing as possible, which is either we go in right away and respond, or we don’t go in at all. So I feel like I’ve confused you. But the point is, the dream feed is a feed that you direct, the baby is asleep, so if you say, I’m gonna do the dream feed at 10 and they wake up at 9:45, you’re gonna wait till they go back to sleep before you go in and do that dream feed. 

And then hopefully they’re gonna sleep a longer stretch, but even if they don’t, you’re going to feel confident that they are able to get themselves back to sleep because they are not hungry because they’ve had that dream feed.

So that’s an option. You can do it or you don’t have to. If your baby’s only eating once overnight, I love a dream feed, and then you can wean off of that either by reducing the amount night overnight or just pulling it entirely. Honestly, it can work a few different ways. So much of this is so dependent on your baby, which again is why I’ll like never write a sleep training book, but I am trying to give you the tools to at least work on your baby’s sleep on your own, even if it’s not perfect.

And of course, you can always reach out to a sleep consultant or to me or whoever. Be wary of any sleep training method that requires some kind of adult intervention or some kind of like tool that you’re using. There’s some weird like sleep trainer around here that uses some kind of sheet that straps the baby down to the bed or something. I’m not talking about the Snoo. I’m talking about an older baby and some, I don’t even know what it is, but it sounds crazy.

There’s also ones where they say, sit with the baby and repeat this phrase over and over, like, go to sleep, go to sleep. But then every time the baby wakes up in the night, you have to go in and do that. You have to go in and keep doing that. So we don’t want them to continue to be dependent on your support.

I call that the drag it out methods, because what ends up happening is that maybe the baby cries less in the first night, but in the aggregate, the baby cries so much more, and I just really hate that. I hate that for the baby, I hate that for you, and I just don’t want everybody to be miserable. 

So don’t drag it out, keep it clean. I promise we’re gonna get through the crying part so much faster if you set yourself up for success, like I’ve explained, and you really have the confidence and the trust in your baby that they can do this and they can figure it out. 

And in hardly any time at all, they’re gonna be going to sleep happy, maybe a little fussy just because they’re tired and it’s the end of the day, but so much better. And they’re gonna wake up so happy in the morning and they’re gonna be like thrilled to see you. So good luck. Let me know how it goes. I am very excited to hear from you.

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Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Parenthood Prep. If you want to learn more about the services Devon offers, as well as access her free monthly newborn care webinars, head on over to www.HappyFamilyAfter.com.