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

I too had a small baby, just 4 pounds. This naturally meant that her tummy was tiny too. So she ate little and often, every one or two hours for 5 months. Hence zero sleep. Never more than 90 minutes at a time.

I used to look at websites and the formula box, stating how much she 'should' be eating and despair.

Then at around 5.5 months she could just go a bit longer between feeds, and this stretched to longer at night.

She's now ten months. Never drinks more than 140 a sitting.

Sleeps 7 til 6 but we dream feed at 1030 every night.

I really can't see why some people believe there is no link between CAPACITY to sleep through and weight. It is clear that a very tiny newborn is likely to have to wait longer for it to be possible, whereas a big 10lber is likely to be able to do it faster. They can simply eat more and so sleep longer. However, I say again, that weight is not the only factor. Lots of big, heavy and much older babies and children do t sleep through for a variety of reasons.
However, being a reasonable weight is a pre requisite for sleeping long stretches,whether you call that an 8 hour stretch or a 12 hour one. I'm sure there will always be exceptions, but for babies who don't have other things preventing them sleeping, being a certain weight,so their tummies can hold enough food so they can sleep longer, seems a basic requirement.

For all of you whose babies are older and heavier....it isn't the weight that is preventing them sleeping through, but other things. I have no idea what they are in individual circumstances.
I was always told that the things that helped babies sleep, were first of all, being big and heavy enough (simply down to time passing) and then having eaten the calorific requirements for 24 hours during daytime hours, then being able to self settle when waking (which we all do regularly). Probably most older babies/children who don't sleep have issues to do with food intake during the day, or self settling, because for them it is not related to weight. For those who are 3 or 4 months and sleeping through, it seems they have reached the necessary weight and also eat enough in the day to be able to sleep and can self settle.

And sometimes babies weigh enough, can self settle and eat plenty in the day and still don't sleep through.

Hmm. But what would you call it apart from not self settling, if they wake up in the middle of the night and then don't go back to sleep? Surely that is an inability to self settle. I realise there maybe many causes of this, such as habits they have got into such as needing to be rocked, or driven around, or fed, or cuddled, or due to illness....or probably many others too, that I am not aware of. But surely, apart from the ones which happen as one offs (such as illness which can disrupt anyone's sleep) most other things come under the heading of failure to self settle.

I am not saying this is the parents fault, or the babies fault or anything like that...just a fact, that some babies and children do not seem to self settle. There are those even at 5 years old who are up every night and sometimes several times. They go off to sleep, but when they awake, they can't get back off to sleep quickly and without help.

OK, I suppose you could say it's a failure not to bother their parents in the night which is the root of not sleeping through.

Mine doesn't sleep through, never been able to self-settle. Any tips?

Ds was 8 weeks not sure on weight but been between 91st and 98thcentule since born. At 4mo all went out the window but even then was once a night until maybe 10mo.

Can't believe how old some of the children mentioned on here were before sleeping regularly I wouldn't have survived

Six weeks, forget the weight (he is 29 now!) and never woke us at night again - in fact for a time when he came out of nappies we woke him before we went to bed.

He's the eldest of six cousins on DW's side and she had two very, very envious brothers and SILs!

8 weeks, bf and he is still a sleep machine 10 years later. We were lucky, very lucky! One of the reasons we haven't had another as I don't believe I will be as fortunate ever again!

Sorry, forgot weight. Approx 10lbs?

And is there evidence to prove that weight is directly to stomach capacity? Surely babies of the same weight could also have vastly different stomach capacity.

Obviously ability to last without a night feed for hunger or thirst purposes (and, incidentally, I am in my 30s and rarely last a night without a drink. So funnily enough ability to drink water from a sippy unaided was a pre requisite for us) is a pre requisite. But the OP was talking about whether weight was stopping her baby longer. Which is a bit like asking whether bladder muscle strength is related to potty training- ie it needs to be there, but the fact it is there is only one aspect of a complex picture.

My formula-fed twins (born at 39 weeks at 6lb and 7lb) slept for 8 hours straight at about 4 months. Then straight through from 7pm to 7am (ish) at about 7 or 8 months.

DC3 (popped out at 8lb), who was breastfed, slept through from 11pm to 7am (ish) at four weeks. Yeah, baby. Four weeks. Because I stuffed blutac in my ears.

DS1 was 7 months and 9kgs, DS2 was 2 years and 11kgs.

Sorry not very helpful. Some babies sleep well, some babies can be coaxed into sleeping well (this was DS1), and some just don't.

6 hours at 4.5m and premature sounds good to me (when I am not the one getting up in the night!). Good luck.

My memory is fuzzy (lack of sleep back then) but I think both my kids were sleeping 8+ hours per night reliably by about 2. Hard bloody work!

About 32 pounds and 3 years old.

Thanks for the further comments. I think that she should physically be able to go longer than 6 hours and that probably the current position is the result from gradually extending the NICU's three hour routine at night.

I may start trying not to offer a feed if she wakes after 6 hours and gradually stretch out the nights.

I know I'm lucky to be getting as much sleep as I have.

Quite a few if the babies described as tiny here were more than double my girl's weight at birth! I also have often had people stop me to say my baby is tiny. There was one who asked how many days old he was and looked very sceptical when I said 113.

Rather than discouraging her to feed at night, try to get her to feed as much as possible in the evening, not an easy task with a sleepy baby but worth trying.

My first ebf was waking 2hrly and feeding for an hr thought would never end went 4hrs at 4-5wks and 9hrs at 8-9wks and slowly longer going 12hrs from 15wks.

As a maternity night nanny ideally if full term baby with no other issues I aim for a dream feed at 10.30/11pm and then baby should go til 6/7am.

Dream feeding doesn't work for all babies though :)

Both of mine slept through from a week old, nobody believes me when I say we didn't get " sleepless nights " though my dd is making up for it now. She's 3.5 now and wakes up almost every night between 3-4am and falls asleep on the floor.
Mine were both 2 weeks early, small birth weights and bottle fed.
With dd, we used to wake her as a new born at 2am ish for a feed but she wasn't that interested, looking back now it doesn't sound normal but that's how it was.

First night we had DS, he slept nine hours. MW was horrified we let him sleep that long without breaking up for a feed but I'd always heard "never wake a sleeping baby". He would sleep in until 10am and I worried myself silly! Then we hit the 4 month sleep regression and it took a year to get back to sleep normality.

He now sleeps 13 hours straight but whilst it also must be about size of tiny tummies/needing to top up often, I don't think enough people fully understand that a tiny baby has a completely different sleep cycle to an adult. It's like we try to impose our sleep needs onto them when the biology is vastly different. Of course there's always exceptions to the rule but I think there's been a lot of studies that have shown they just have different sleep needs and once you accept that, it's easier to deal (resign yourself to) their sleep needs. Doesn't help in the middle of the night though!

Warwick - that is the first time I have seen a night nanny admit that. Thank you. Books and friends all rabbit on about dream feeds. All three of mine either won't take one, or wake at the time they would anyway.

I don't remember it being a linear thing.

I think both of my children slept for an 8 hour stretch before 2 months. However, that wasn't consistent - every time they had a major developmental spurt (agree about 4 month sleep regression), a cold, the clocks went back, we went on holiday, they were teething etc. etc. etc. there were more night wakings.

The big leap for me was when they woke up once a night but could reliably go back to sleep without too much fuss. I think this happened at around 2/3… but then you move onto night terrors, toilet training.

They were good sleepers by the time the youngest was 5 - but then we got a puppy.

The idea of a feed at 10.30/11 is a good one for little babies, esp if their previous feed was before they went to bed around 7 ish. Not sure it has to be a 'dream' feed though...as in they are almost asleep still. They could be work up properly for it, esp if they are not keen on the dream feed Idea. Is a good idea though, because often even small babies can then get to morning with only 1 further night feed, and that night feed is the one that gets dropped anytime after about 3/4months (weight related?!?) meaning they. An then make it from about 11.30 until the morning.......whether you call that sleeping through or not does not matter really....means parents get a decent stretch of sleep, as does baby. Makes a HUGE difference to parents. The full 12 hours takes a bit longer, but for a baby without feeding/self settling issues, I think it is possible by 6 months.

I think the OP has a little baby. She hopes her baby will sleep through soon and that she won't be someone who is still waiting at age 3 or 7.
You can't control babies weight,It just takes time to grow. If it were me (and I realise OP may prefer something different) I would focus on ensuring baby is getting enough food between 7am and 10.30pm, so there is no genuine hunger need to wake. I would also focus on ensuring baby can go into cot just awake and can self settle, so that when baby wakes in the night on numerous occasions, he is just able to roll over and get back to sleep. This is only possible with a big enough tummy, which has been filled enough during the day,so they are not woken by hunger.

Penguins - it didn't work for mine either! Their longest sleep is from bedtime, so can sleep 7pm-2/3am. Even with a feed at 10/11pm they still wake at 3am

Yup, mine too Fledermaus.

I also find the 'make sure they eat enough and pop them down awake' advice utterly impractical for us. You can offer, but bf babies eat what they eat. And, from birth, attempts to put them down sleepy eesulted in them screaming like they were being tortured. Perhaps you can do this to amenable babies, but short of cc, not to mine.