How to get 12 week old baby to sleep through?

[Belle723]

Just looking for some advice. Im a first time mum and haven’t got much of a clue about how to do things. I’m generally winging it most days (as I think many do). I’ve always let me baby bottle fed on demand and she generally goes 3-4 hours between feeds throughout the day but when I put her down at night she’s starting to do some 6-7 hour stints between her last feed to the first morning one which is obviously amazing - but it’s very inconsistent and I’d like to try and get a bit more routine out of her.

On a good day she will feed around 4am, 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm then 8pm then go to bed around 9ish. She takes approx 6oz at each feed - sometimes she doesn’t always finish the bottle.

However sometimes she wakes up at midnight/1am for a feed and I’m not sure what I’m doing differently? The only thing I can think of is actually putting her to bed later? But I like to have an hour in the evenings to tidy the house etc and actually have a hot cup of tea!

We’ve always had a relaxed routine and a baby every other day and get changed into her sleepsuits in the evening. We use white noise and she has a dummy to help soothe her for sleep.

How do i get her to sleep more consistently? Am I doing anything wrong?

I am big into regime, have followed Gina F from birth with DS (also 12 weeks) - but even I would say that you are expecting a bit too much!

I would ensure you are structuring the day predictably for the baby, getting as much milk in as possible, starting and ending the day the same time every day etc. But every baby is different and if he's hungry he's hungry!

Ultimately you can't leave the baby if he's hungry - what I do is leave it 20 or so minutes if he stirs at night before 5am (unless he cries, in which case I go straight away). After 5 am I give him a full breast feed immediately (idea being that he almost always sleeps 12-5 now, so wake ups before 5 are not likely due to hunger...).

As he grows he is naturally extending the time of his first wake up post 12 am anyway, it was regularly 3am, then 4am, then 5am, now 5.30am - occasionally he makes it all the way through to 7am - but I am confident that he will start going longer and longer as he gets older.

As you are bottle feeding you could try slightly reducing the size of the feed every week and see if he then takes more at 7am.

Sorry, just noticed your baby is a she, not a he!

Can't state enough how great it is to have predictable structure if you are that way inclined, it is wonderful knowing that he will be down from 7pm, giving us loads of adult time in the evening. During the day I have 45 mins to myself in the morning and 2.25 hours in the afternoon so I can have a lovely relaxing lunch. It has made a huge difference to how I feel about being a mum!!

My 23 month old doesn’t sleep through the night, she will when she’s ready. It might be next week, it might be in 2 years. You can’t force these things.

Crazy cat - what if she still isn't when she is 8? 10? Interestingly Gina F coslept until she was a teen and blames this for her insomnia, although this seems unlikely to me.

Alyosha what they do at 12 weeks doesn't always reflect what will happen after the 4 month sleep regression.

Actually nobody "sleeps through", we all stir in the night, but most people learn to settle back.

Sleeping lightly and waking regularly is a survival strategy for small babies.

Later on light sleepers pretty much get themselves night dry as toddlers unlike heavy sleepers who's parents can end up trying to "train" 6 or 7 year olds when to see instead of setting the bed every night or wearing a pull up.

Yes I know, my baby regularly stirs and sometimes wakes fully in the night or in naps, settling back to sleep by himself. Unless he cries I leave him to it.

I found people’s definition of “sleeping through” differed wildly. After constantly being got at by MIL on the umpteen things I was doing wrong from bf to using slings, she let slip once that DH didnt in fact sleep from 7-7 as she led me to believe. In fact, if he slept from midnight to 5am she classed that as sleeping through!

This, so much. I have a friend that had the easiest babies sleeping through, except that she didn't go to bed herself till the last feed at 1 AM and got up at 5 for the morning feed. The night is not through after 4 short hours! She turned really bitchy for a while due to sleep deprivation because she didn't want to give in to more sleep. She mellowed a bit by the third DC though.

I think midnight to 5am is the medical rule of thumb for unproblematic sleep in a child over 2 years old though - I took my eldest for assessment (as it turned out unnecessary) for add or epilepsy when she was 7 and her school teacher had said she was often away with the fairies daydreaming and missed chunks of lessons. When they took the family history I mentioned that 2 year old dc3 was a poor sleeper, and was told that if he didn't sleep midnight to 5am within the next six months I should get him refered to the sleep clinic at the center we were at!

Midnight to 5am isn't an everyday/ layman's sleeping through though, nor is "only waking for 3-4 hourly feeds but sleeping through between them and going straight back to sleep" - if that were the definition my dc2 "slept through" from birth with only a glitch at 10 months when he was trying to learn to walk... and it does make it a meaningless term when everyone means something different by it!

Crazy cat - what if she still isn't when she is 8? 10? Interestingly Gina F coslept until she was a teen and blames this for her insomnia, although this seems unlikely to me.

I coslept and slept through at 2. My brother coslept and slept through at 8 months. My mum has terrible insomnia and was left to cry in a room alone from the day she came home from hospital 🤷‍♀️ No idea what point you’re trying to make there.

My point is that at some point your child will have to learn to get to sleep by themselves. My opinion is that is a skill best learnt sooner rather than later.

I am also saying that no matter your parenting style, there is always something someone will criticise! Odd that you coslept but your brother was left to cry alone in a room by himself, why was that?

Reread my post. My brother wasn’t left alone to cry himself to sleep, my mum was. You don’t have to teach children to walk - you can guide their natural progress but you don’t decide at 6 months ‘hey I think you should be walking now so I’m going to force you to do it before you’re naturally ready’ 🙄 millions of children aren’t ‘taught’ to sleep by themselves, they manage just fine, just not at the rate we in the west assume they should.

You said your brother on another post on a different thread.

We live in the west though, not somewhere else. We live in a society where most of us are on a 9-5 schedule, we can't sleep when we want.

Babies have to fit into that paradigm from at least nursery/school; for the sake of their parents it's easiest if they learn to sleep in the night as much as possible from the beginning.

If you find the answer, please share it with me. Mine is 2 now 😂

In all seriousness, PPs are correct. It can be dangerous to sleep train under 6m. It's very normal for babies to wake frequently at night. Wishing you the best of luck, it's hard at the beginning but it does get easier. Someone once told me that the days are long but the weeks fly past, always helps me when I'm feeling exhausted.

My point is that at some point your child will have to learn to get to sleep by themselves. My opinion is that is a skill best learnt sooner rather than later.

It isn't a skill they learn once and forever more, it really isn't. And an older baby can actually learn it (ideally very gently) whereas I don't think a baby who doesn't know what their own hands are actually 'learns' to go to sleep independently. I know you think you've got this all figured out (with your 12 week old!) and maybe you'll be lucky and never got any sleep problems but it's quite annoying/patronising that you keep sharing the pearls of your wisdom with people who are at a stage you haven't actually dealt with yet...

The learning to walk analogy is a good one.

All very small babies learn is whether or not their distress is responded to.

It's a competitive parent question. It will soon lead to who's crawling first, who's walking, first words, first conversations, place at the best school, reading chapter books at five, best role in school play, school reports, best at football/cross country/gymnastics/swimming, SATS results etc, etc...
Its best to learn early not to get sucked in to these conversations.
My girls were both terrible sleepers for years and these days I have to drag them out of bed by their feet on a school day.

I agree sleeping through at such a young age isn't the norm. I don't know why people keep asking such a daft question.

Gosh, I'm sure ds will go through lots of different stages in his childhood! But having read around on this, I'm not the only one who thinks self settling can be learnt at a very young age, or that harmful sleep associations can be formed too. Its not some crazy minority opinion.

Self settling is developmental. Some babies can do it very early, others take years. I'd be interested to know what self settling techniques are used on a 12 week old that don't involve them learning that no-one will help them when they cry? But again, what works for one baby won't for all!

Wait, either self settling is developmental or it can be learnt?

What is the developmental difference between self settling at 8 weeks and self settling at 8 years?

Surely it is simply the ability to fall asleep on your own after waking up...not sure why this would take years to develop or why it couldn't be taught?

Even as an adult I have issues self settling sometimes if I have looked at my phone during a night feed for example...

Don't worry, DS still cries - although he is still generally a happy baby!

Surely most baby skills are both developmental AND taught? For example a three month old can't be taught to talk - they're neither physically nor mentally capable of it - but on the other hand a child that never hears anyone talking can't do it, so it's a skill that is taught once they reach the right developmental stage.

I'm also not convinced that self-settling is a binary thing that they either can or can't do (just like learning to talk, I think it's a series of incremental steps), or that it's necessarily a distinct skill in itself. For instance, DS's sleep improved dramatically overnight when he got physically strong enough to roll himself over in his sleep/when barely awake so that he didn't always have to sleep in one position - but I think that's 'being able to make himself comfortable', which is just a consequence of his general physical development, not a distinct skill called 'self settling'.

Also an adult if thirsty in the night can get themselves a drink, a baby can't.

Think of the very description of ‘self soothing’ and self regulation. Babies literally do not have the mental ability to self sooth, an 8 year old is much more able to do so. Useful info graphic attached.

Also, as previously mentioned you can guide a children’s learning when it comes to speech but you can’t just decide at 3 months the baby should be speaking already, it takes time.

Sorry most babies can learn how to go to sleep on their own given the opportunity... It is why sleep training methods and sleep coaches work

Mine would just go apeshit screaming, how can anyone learn anything in that sort of state?