Baby won't sleep through!!

[emjellis1991]

My little girl is nearly 8 months old and she is still waking 1-3 times in the night.

She wants milk which we are trying to stop, she also won't go back to sleep on her own. We have tried leaving her to cry but it doesn't work.

She naps through the day 3 naps an hour each nap and her naps end at 4pm. She is eating solids for lunch and then fruit or yoghurt for dinner something light.

She drinks an 8 ounce bottle before bed after her bath at 6pm. She is usually asleep for 7pm.

She tends to wake at 2/3am then wakes every hour after that until about 7am.

I have tried EVERYTHING nothing is working. Even tried co sleeping as a very last resort and that doesn't work.

She is not teething and has no issues with colic or reflux or anything like that.

It's starting to make me poorly from lack of sleep I'm getting bad headaches and migraines and I'm struggling.

I just don't know what else to do!

Sometimes babies just don't sleep. It's a pain but that's what it is. Do you share getting up to her with your partner?

The amount of food she ate yesterday is not a large amount - looks pretty standard to me although each baby is different.

If she had a bottle at 7pm and then didn’t want another one until 2am, that’s 7 hours without food. I think that’s pretty good!

If it’s of any help, mine is a similar age and eats about the same but will have bottle in morning, sometimes before lunch, def in afternoon and before sleep. He will still wake for at least one full bottle in the night.

Most likely he will have two bottles at night, sometimes three. (Although won’t necessarily drink all 8oz, but at least 5/6).

I’ve no idea if this is normal or not, but it seems to be what he wants so I just go with it.

I guess what I’m saying is, I wouldn’t worry about it. But appreciate that isn’t a useful thing to say if you are worried!

Change doesn’t happen overnight and some babies just don’t sleep through until they’re a lot older but upping her solids at this age is exactly the right thing to be doing regardless of sleep. I’m really glad she’s enjoying her food but it’s worth noting that much as I love the pouches/jars for convenience, they often have a really high water content and aren’t that filling compared to homemade food.

One more thing you might want to consider is a dream feed. If you lift her at say 10 or 11pm for a bottle it might (emphasis on the might) help eliminate the 2am wake-up. Or at the very least eliminate hunger as the cause of that wake-up. She can obviously go 7 hours overnight so if you could nudge her to do that from say 11pm to 6am instead of 7pm to 2am it will at least help you get some sleep.

Lots of luck although I suspect you may just have a non sleeper on your hands (sorry!). Up to you if you want to consider sleep training methods as she gets older if things don’t improve.

I’m afraid it’s totally normal and months 8-10 were the hardest for us, look up the 8 month sleep regression. At 15 months we’re still waking a few times.

My partner works so he doesn't do the nights. He does Friday and Saturday nights

The food increase she loves but it hasn't changed the night time

Last night we tried a dream feed at 10pm. My god the worst mistake ever. She was up for two hours wouldn't drink any milk crying and refused to go back to sleep. Won't be trying that again in a hurry haha.

I think we just have a baby that won't sleep and it's time to admit defeat

No its time to adjust your expectations

Your baby sleeps like a baby.

The Gentle Sleep Book by Sarah Ockwell Smith gives very good explanations of sleep though various ages and what is actually normal

DD is 6 months and I’m convinced that the more solids she has the worse she sleeps at night.

She slept through the night from 2-5 months and now we’re back at 5+ wakings a night

Why don’t they come with an instruction manual??

It sounds to me like she sleeps quite well actually! Mine is just 7 months, breastfed and tends to be asleep by 7.30, then wakes about 9.30 for a cuddle, then again by about 12 for a feed, again about 4 if I'm lucky for another feed, then wakes about 6 upset because she doesn't want to be awake yet, demands the boob almost constantly (but not to feed just for comfort) until 7.30ish when I give up and get us up!

If the exhaustion is getting to you can't you have a few nights going to bed when she does as you could get a 7 hour block of sleep then. I know the timing isn't ideal as it's so early but just to catch up a bit?

I used to do what Squidgling suggested - every third night or so I'd take myself off to bed at 8pm.

Our DS, who is now 10 years old, used to wake at least twice during the night at 8 months old and even when he started pre-school at 2 years old was up at 4am every day (oh the joy...) and I wasn't the only one.

We tried dream feeds - didn't work. He was an automatic 2am waker until he started pre-school and then a 4am waker until he started in reception.

DH used to help with the night feeds as much as he could and I used to sleep in the spare room on Friday and Saturday night as he'd take over the feeds completely so I could have an undisturbed night's sleep.

Other than that it was early nights as often as possible and naps when DS had a nap.

He's still a kid that doesn't need a full amount of sleep (according to the books). He's just gone up to bed at 10pm having come down at 8.30pm because he couldn't sleep (that'll be knocked on the head over the weekend ready for school next week) and I will guarantee he'll be up at 6am full of beans.

Give the extra food time and just try to adapt to her sleep patterns for a while. A few months of early nights may be boring but if it keeps you sane it's worth it. She'll soon change especially as she becomes more mobile and begins to use up more energy.

Good luck! I never thought I'd see the day when I thought 6am was a lie in but I've survived for ten years and it did get easier.

My baby finally started sleeping through at 9 months. I think you should increase the solids during the day and refuse any feeds at night. Might mean a couple of very tiring nights, but your baby will learn to eat more during the day and should start to break the habit of waking for night feeds.

My baby is 5 years old and she's still never done a full week of sleeping through her whole life. It got better when she was 4.

Sorry.

letstry sorry but that is terrible advice. The baby is 7 months old. Night feeds are the biological norm, she doesn't need to have her habits broken. Most babies don't sleep through. It's normal, they have tiny bodies and stomachs. Parenting is a round the clock job!

My 11month old DD still gets up between 3-5 times a night but luckily I still breastfeed so she settles pretty quick with a feed. I just look at it as our babies obviously want to spend more time with us becauase we are such awesome parents

I know your saying she ‘still won’t sleep through’ but really most babies at 8 months do not reliably sleep through. Obviously it does happen but most don’t. The boards on here are testemant to that. Night waking isn’t always related to hunger, they can wake for many different reasons. I know it’s hard but it won’t be like this forever.

I disagree. The boards are bound to represent the non sleepers as the good sleepers are less likely to look for a skeep advice forum! Having had 4 children of my own and countless friends and relatives with babies I remain adamant that an expectation of sleeping through from 4-6 months at the latest is more than reasonable. That's not to say the parents who don't have sleepers are doing anything wrong, but most babies are capable of sleeping generally well most of the time once they're past the first few months.

Desmondo everyone has countless friends and relatives with babies. It's still anecdotal as to whether they sleep through early or not, plus people's idea of "sleeping through" drastically varies. For some that means more than 4 hours undisturbed, for others it's 12 hours.

Objective research on infant sleeping (i.e. not from a forum) doesn't support what you're claiming at all. Most babies don't start to consolidate sleep until 12 months, but it's still totally normal to wake once or more well past 2 years.
Saying a 7 month old is being unreasonable by not sleeping through is really unhelpful to mothers trying to learn to parent biologically NORMAL behaviour.

Er yeah I'm afraid both my twins woke at 330 at that age . And stayed awake till about 6. I accepted that was when my day started. It gradually got later and later now at 16 months they wake at 6/630 which is better.

@InFrance2014 - the objective research actually shows something a bit different:

pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/126/5/e1081.full.pdf

Based on this review:

• The most rapid consolidation in infants’ nocturnal sleep occurs within the first 4 months of life.
• Over 50% sleep 5 hours at 3 months
• Over 50% sleep 8 hours at 5 months

Of course, babies' sleep changes all the time and, of course, babies will continue waking up during the night but "early independent settlers" will not need parents' sleep to go back to sleep. During 8-10 month sleep regression, my DD used to occasionally wake up, clap, move around her cot, babble but she never cried and she never expected me to intervene.

She’ll do it when she’s ready and not a moment before.

My twins are about to turn 1 and they’re still up once overnight each. So it goes.

Mum of 3 boys here. You learn as you go along but generally it's best not to have any expectations in regards to when you think your baby should 'sleep through' (whatever that means anyway) as it's setting yourself up to fail and feel stressed.
My 2nd child was a great sleeper, number 1 & 3 were not. I did nothing differently with them other than by child number 3 I was so tired I was more inclined to leave him a little longer to see if he would self settle which he generally did.
At 8 months I would still be expecting a couple of night time wake ups but to be settled back to sleep relatively quickly and easily, also perfectly normal for them to start the day at 6am!

Hi wintertravel,

Thanks for that paper. What seems to be going on from that graph is that young babies show a drastic improved longest sleep period because they are more settled in evening sleep, with an increasingly earlier bedtime. Not necessarily waking up less over the "night", as we adults would think of it.

It also says that at 6-9 months between a third and 25% aren't getting an 8 hour stretch, which means if they're going to bed on average before 9pm, then they'll certainly be waking probably twice over the whole night.

Even by 12 months, one quarter aren't sleeping a whole night (22:00- 6am). That's still a lot of babies, and it's the point I was making, that most babies will have got much more settled overall by a year, but a good amount still won't. And that's normal too.

I find their conclusion that "2 months is the age when infants are most likely to be sleeping through the night" pretty misleading (and potentially awfully stressful for parents), when what their data appears to show is that only two out of three babies aged 2 months who go to bed on average at 10 pm (!) are sleeping for 8 hours at a stretch. It could encourage parents to think they should be trying sleep training at a ridiculously young age because their baby is being difficult or whatever. Also, the study doesn't say what the sleep arrangements were, whether there was sleep training going on, how responsive they were.

If most babies slept through the night from 2 months the mumsnet sleep board would be dead 😂