How heavy was your baby when he/she first slept for 8hours straight?

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My DD is 4.5months old but was 2 months early and small for dates so still only weighs around 10lbs.

She sleeps well but her limit is about 6hours at night. I suspect this is size related. Books and other posts generally talk about ages which is hard to interpret in my case.

How heavy were yours when they could go for a whole night?

Thanks for the help

And I'll give you a clue- of the 5 kids in my NCT ante-natal group, mine is not the one who's the teenage mum, the wildly out of control one, or the two who drink a lot.

From the ISIS study...

"Generally, though, babies do not sleep all night-every night until they are close to a year old. One study investigating infant sleep duration found that 27% of babies had not regularly slept from 10pm to 6am by the age of 1 year. 13% of babies had not regularly slept through for 5 hours or more by the age of 1 year.?

Popular beliefs about when babies should be 'sleeping through the night' are based on studies conducted in the 1950s and 1960s on groups of formula-fed babies. However it is normal for babies - especially breastfed babies - to wake and feed at night throughout at least the first year"

It's not galling to hear about babies sleeping through earlier, it's just your luck.

Milk ten times a night is a lot, I'm sure most people would try cuddling to sleep some of the time. My comment was more about Greedy saying that she would offer water.

My oldest was OK, with setbacks when ill. He's 4 and now sleeps 7 till 7 happily unless he had a bad dream. :)

So does his brother who was really bad at sleeping and didn't finally stop night waking until 26 months. But he'd self settled for naps and bedtime for many months before that, until night time finally clicked somehow.

I'm not being a martyr or anything, I don't think. I just didn't want to do timed feeding and our routine came from what the babies did rather than what time I thought they should do it.

Journey- don't forget they were all sleeping on their stomachs in those days as well!

'Scream itself hoarse night after night'; 'nervous exhaustion'; 'very upset baby'; 'misery'; 'tiny baby scream'; 'not help it'. Let's forget, for a moment, that no-one advocates CIO for a tiny baby. Let's ignore the blatant attempt to use every provocative adjective to inject your post with anti-routine rubbish. Let's even forget that not one person has said they would let their baby wallow in misery, being ignored for hours on end. Posts like these always suggest you're the type of woman who reads the Daily Mail. Hysterical.

Unfortunately, I think that sometimes parents who have experienced very long term night wakings want new parents to hear it is the norm, as somehow it makes them feel better. I imagine that years and years of broken nights is very debilitating and it then galling for those parents to hear about babies sleeping through at 6 months....but it is the reality.

Absolutely spot-on. You can almost smell the hatred coming from women who have spent months - years - putting up with multiple night wakings. It is not normal; it is a horrible situation to have to endure and I would rather gnaw my own arm off than put up with that nonsense.

Totally Greedy. Or course you are right. I completely see the error of my ways now. Thank you. I feel like a better person now.

And I'll give you a clue- of the 5 kids in my NCT ante-natal group, mine is not the one who's the teenage mum, the wildly out of control one, or the two who drink a lot.

Come on now..put that Daily Mail away.

So the bit where I said it's just your luck and not at all galling, you missed that?

If 27% of babies did not sleep regularly for a longer stretch by a year over 70% did which surely is considered the norm. Yes, 23% is a decent sized minority but a minority nonetheless. To say that it is the norm not to sleep through the night until 2 years old, which has been mentioned several times upthread, does not fit with these statistics.

THIS velvet glove, of course you were free to choose to do a routine or not. If it didn't suit you, that is fine. Routines clearly don't suit everyone. I think we all need to recognise what we gain by making the choices we do, but also what we might lose too. Ideally we would make choices to suit us, based on the gains which we value more than the small losses, which are different for everyone. To do this, we have to know the gains and the losses of our choices.

You say it isn't galling for those with children who don't sleep long stretches until much later,to hear about those who sleep early on. I'm sure you are right that many people decide that it is just due to luck. Even those who have decided it is due to,luck can sometimes feel a bit put out though, because it it really is due to only luck, it seems even more unfair! I'm sure that being stoical about it is good, if you can get to that place. If I had been the one with a 2 year old up at night, I don't think I would have been so magnanimous about it though. But then I am someone who highly values sleep, which is evident in my willingness to intervene to being sleep closer. If you do t want to do that, then fine of course.

Self-settling absolutely is an achievement. It's possibly THE most satisfying achievement ever, when your hard work and determination to teach your baby to be contented from an early age is realised. When a tired baby can be placed in his cot and his protests are few before drifting off to sleep by himself, it is the most satisfying thing in the world.

It was hard work, especially being back at work after 6 months but it seemed right to me.

Again you are not listening though.

We always had a routine at bedtime, routine is not something I'm against. Just expecting babies to conform to your pattern.

What a lot of crap, frankly greedy!

Each to their own I guess...

As if non trained babies aren't contented!!

Velvet, when your teenager comes home with his 'A' level grades and says his peers got better results than him, will you tell him it was 'just luck'? I suppose you would. But it isn't. It's down to hard work, practice and commitment.

Babies who wake multiple times through the night are not contented. It is absurd to suggest otherwise.

Tiny . He was a prem baby and slept for 12 hours at 12 weeks so would have been quite small at 7 weeks when he slept 8 hours .

I don't really want to join the routine or not fight. Except to say I really don't see how I could do a strict one with two older children whose daily routine differs and who are very flexible without them missing out.

But I do think it is worth stressing that a baby or child who wakes isn't always dire and I am not sure talking about nights as 'broken' is that accurate. Getting up once to give an 18 month old a drink of water and a cuddle really isn't that bad. If they do it at a predictable time you tend to be sleeping lightly anyway. Not that different to those who habitually wake for a drink of water or a wee. It isn't all about one extreme or the other.

Ffs there's no sleeping through exam, or prize for training your baby! What a nonsense comparison.

Waking up does not equal not contented. That seems absurd to me.

I wish I didn't always get sucked into these discussions.

I'm afraid greedy's superior attitude has got under my skin. :(

Everyone is free to do as they choose.
If you are not bothered by getting up to give a cuddle or milk or whatever for an older baby or child, that is fine.
However many people are not happy with this and see it having a negative impact on the older child and the adults too, so intervene to prevent it.

If you are happy in your situation, then whatever you choose is fine. If not, then doing something which might have a big effect in changing the situation, seems worth trying. Agree there is no prize for having a baby which self settles or sleeps through...it is not a competition. People do it because they feel it benefits their family, and that is what it is all about.

I think wombat my issue is not with saying that you can do it, but the many upset posts on here from people who are happy to get up with their babies, but feel they are doing it wrong!

Many books make these parents feel guilty about creating bad habits in tiny babies, where they might actually get more rest just doing as they were and quickly feeding back to sleep.

Just look at any recent batch of sleep threads and find lots.

My 8 week old won't self settle, my 5 month old won't nap at the right time, my 8 month old wants to feed to sleep and I've been told this is wrong etc.

Chocolate- my point was simply that one brief waking is a world.away from the 10Ã? a night doomsday scenarios being bandied about. It is a spectrum.

Sleep is an emotive issue. However,the fact that books with routines which have helped thousands of people should not be removed or criticised because other people feel the fact they choose not to follow them, makes them feel they are doing it all wrong.
There are books about all kinds of parenting methods. I have seen the ones about co sleeping and it's benefits. I have chosen not to do that, but I accept other people want to. It does not make me feel bad. I just see that the approach co-sleepers take is not for me.

Parenting is something which seems to make people feel guilty at every turn. We can feel guilty for formula feeding, for following g a routine, for not following a routine, for working, for using childcare, for weaning early or late, for not doing baby led weaning, for letting our child cry, for using a bottle too long, for using a dummy, for not using a dummy etc etc. and there are books about all of these, but people just have to cope and find their own way.

So if people decide they will get more sleep by feeding their baby to sleep, driving them along the motorway or rocking them to sleep, then that is fine. They can do it. However, other people don't want to do those things, but put their baby into bed at whatever time and see them again in the morning. That is fine too.

As to whether waking frequently in the night prevents a baby being contented...well I think it depends on age. All tiny babies wake and feed and wake and feed. It doesn't stop them being contented. It is different for a 6 year old at school, who needs to be able to concentrate in order to learn and to interact well with their peers and teachers. They probably would not describe themselves as not content, and clearly the occasional night waking is not the same as constant waking through the night. However, there is certainly a point when a lack of sleep has a negative effect on children, but I dont think it is at the baby stage.

I think we have to make our choices and be comfortable with them. There might always be people who eat better, behave better, sleep better than our children. People will adopt different approaches to the ones we choose. But if we are happy with our choices and the outcomes of them, that is all that matters, and we just have to live with seeing other people having different consequences because they made different choices.