Getting baby to sleep for longer at night

[Psba]

Our son is almost 3 weeks now and is back to beyond birth weight so we want to increase time he is asleep at night. But, whatever time we feed him at night he will wake up almost bang on 3hrs after previous feed.
Any tips for getting him to sleep for longer? We've done big feed at 10pmish, keeping it dark etc

Lol. Dd woke every 2 hours til we night weaned at 10m. Babies wake lots.

Unfortunately it’s what newborns do. 2 hours of sleep at a time is good for a newborn.

No baby will stick to the same routine as another baby. They’re all individuals so you just have to go with it

Just feed on demand and eventually he will start going longer between feeds. There’s nothing you can do except wait until he’s a little older

It will come with time.

I found a dummy helped get DS doing an extra half an hour or so, especially as he is a big suckler for comfort.

If you want to understand baby sleep (including what's developmentally appropriate for each age/stage) and establish good sleep habits, the Huckleberry app is a good place to start.

3 weeks is tiny! They don’t need to sleep longer yet and 3 hours feeds or even less than 3 hours is perfectly normal. You’re a parent now and a good nights sleep is something you just need to give up for the foreseeable future - the sooner you accept that the happier you’ll be.

Sorry but I agree with almost everyone else on this thread...3 week olds are absolutely supposed to wake every 3 hours and there's precious little you can do to influence it! Babies grow so quickly, and for most this knackering phase doesn't last too long.

And in any case, as soon as you "crack it" and baby is sleeping decent stretches, along comes a sleep regression/ developmental leap and you're back at square one

Best to just roll with it, feed baby when they want fed. A HV told me they need to be at least 10lb before they sleep longer stretches I think, what weight is yours?

Way to young to expect anything more than 3 hours sleep... this is the fact of having a new born...

Swap feeding with your partner if you can? so at least you can get 5 hours sleep?

It will get longer in time

Just to add a slightly less gloomy perspective - agree that this is far too early to be expecting more than 2-3 hrs at a stretch but equally, you'd be unlucky if he's never done more than three hours at a stretch by 6 or 9 months. If he's anything like DD (and I believe this is pretty normal) the duration of sleep will gradually increase - she was doing about 2 hrs at 3 weeks and 6-8 hrs by 3.5 months (for the first stretch of sleep only, always much shorter sleeps after that). Then the 4 month regression hit and it's all out the window, but very slowly improving again. Suggest doing some googling of what to expect/baby sleep patterns and not putting tons of emotional energy into this now because it will just get better, and then it will get worse again (and then better again...I hope!)

Just give it time. At that age 3 hours is pretty decent. By the time he was 6 weeks my son had stretched to longer sleeps but it wasn’t anything we did - it just takes a while for them to learn how to do it.

At three weeks old you are being unrealistic to expect your baby to sleep longer than that.

Lol my 8 month old still wakes every 2 hours. This is normal.

Try to get them in the habit of large feeds rather than snacking
A 3 week old baby feeding every 3 hours isn’t “snacking”.

They need to feed when hungry at that age. Every 2 or 3 hours is quite normal. It gets easier - they will probably wake on about that frequency for a while, but they get faster at feeding so it doesn’t disrupt your sleep as much. They also stop pooing at night so you don’t have to do as many nappy changes. But you will have disrupted sleep for some time unless you are prepared to let your child go without food for longer than is healthy.

@Psba

It's 3hrs between feeds so he is sleeping for around 2hrs each time - day and night. Want to get him to sleep longer during night

Read up on the fourth trimester. Your baby should really still be inside you. He has zero understanding of life outside you or even the difference between night and day. He is following his biological needs. Your expectations are so far off it’s laughable.

Saying our expectations are laughable is rather uncalled for. Read Gina Ford, Holly Willoughby etc and they all say that you should start aiming to lengthen the time between night feeds. It's not laughable, it's what we are trying to do.

@Psba

Saying our expectations are laughable is rather uncalled for. Read Gina Ford, Holly Willoughby etc and they all say that you should start aiming to lengthen the time between night feeds. It's not laughable, it's what we are trying to do.

Careful mentioning GF here. She has zero parenting experience.

You were advised on a previous thread about the fourth trimester. Did you bother looking that up?

Human babies are the same now as they were 10,000 years ago. Same wiring, same needs. What do you think would have happened to babies left to cry in their caves?

Your expectations of a 3 week old baby are completely off. They should by rights be still inside their mother being held and soothed and fed on demand. Hearing heart beat and swooshing body sounds. Not lying on their own away from a parent being ignored and it’s meals being stretched out for convenience. Sorry if that isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s the truth.

@Psba

Saying our expectations are laughable is rather uncalled for. Read Gina Ford, Holly Willoughby etc and they all say that you should start aiming to lengthen the time between night feeds. It's not laughable, it's what we are trying to do.

Poor baby 😢

Helpful info and advice here
www.babysleepscience.com/single-post/2014/09/03/newborns-and-sleep-the-first-six-weeks
(Ignore the old date on the URL, the content has been updated more recently)

In general I really rate the website/blog and have found it very helpful along with the Huckleberry app.

You're expecting too much, he's barely out of your womb. He needs to feed often to survive, please don't make him go longer than he needs to, not at this age.

In regards to sleep training etc, he's too young.

We did training/routine with dd at 6 months. She managed around 6 hours sleep without waking, she slept through at about 10 months.

I know it's tiring but it's par for the course I'm afraid.

Think you’re doing the right things. Baby will lengthen his sleep when he’s ready, which is likely to be earlier than if eg you were having bright lights for night wakings.

It’s perfectly possibly to encourage boring dark nights and big feeds, as you’re doing, without this meaning you’re not feeding on demand or ignoring the realities of a newborn!

Wowza. My 12 month old would only sleep in 3h stretches at a time. You've got a good sleeper there lol

3 weeks is far too young to be lengthening time between night feeds, 3 hours is great, if my baby had slept in his cot for 3 hours at 3 weeks I'd have danced on the ceiling, me and my husband were sleeping in shifts at that age because he would only sleep in arms! He will start lengthening his first stretch of sleep naturally over time, for my boy it was about 8 weeks, then he slept really well until the 4 month regression and now he's up every hour or two!

I don't see how you can lengthen so soon. Sorry. When he wakes up then feed him. Fine not to wake him up, I never actually did this anyway, but might of got one 3 hour stretch between midnight and 3am in the early days. Honestly mine slept better earlier on. It's such a shock to your system, but it will get easier, please manage your expectations, most babies will wake a lot, most of them for the first year. Mine until they were 3 years old

Are you FF or BF?

Please do not sleep train your 3 week (I say this as someone who sleep trained her 9 month old so I’m not anti-sleep training).

Your baby wakes often because her tummy is tiny so she gets hungry quickly. As she grows, this is likely to improve - though 3 hour stints at 3 weeks is blooming good going!

@Psba

So you ask for our advice because your baby wont sleep long enough, we pretty much unanimously (as people that have been there and got the t shirt) told you it's unrealistic, and now you are arguing that it's not. Why did you want our help again? Your baby isn't doing what the books say eh? Funny that because they can't read.

I got lucky, my babies were both doing stretches of 3hrs or thereabouts at 3w. Then at 4m their sleep got worse again. 3 hours turned into sometimes 30 minutes for a while and it took years for them to sleep through. I'm on my 4th wake up for my 22m old and its 1am...