Why your baby will never sleep through the night

From about month 2 of a baby's life, most moms start wondering if their little one will ever sleep through the night.

By month 4 (when the vast majority of babies go through a sleep regression), sleeping through the night can become an obsession, or a seemingly impossible dream.

The truth is, technically, your baby will never sleep through the night.  That's right. Never!

That's because none of us ever does.

All human beings sleep in cycles. We start out in Phase 1 or light sleep - the kind when you're just nodding off and it's easy for someone to wake you. Then we move into Phases 2, 3 and 4, each becoming progressively deeper. (You know when your alarm clock wakes you and it takes a minute to figure out where you are and what's happening? That's because you were woken out of stage 4 or deep sleep.)

After that, we move into dream sleep, also called rapid-eye-movement or REM sleep because of the rolling eye movements that happen while we're dreaming. If we're woken during this phase, we often remember our dreams. 

For adults, each cycle lasts about an hour and a half. But the really important point for you and your baby is what happens after we've cycled through all of these phases?

We wake up. Every time.

Remember before you had kids, when you would blissfully sleep 8 or 9 hours straight and wake up feeling refreshed? You didn't know it, but you had actually woken up about 5 times during the night; maybe you rolled over, adjusted the covers, or nudged your snoring partner. So why don't we remember all these little wake ups?

The reason is simple: we learned at a very early age how to go from one complete sleep cycle to the next with barely a conscious moment. That is the key behind the commonly used term "self soothing." When it comes to your baby's sleep, self soothing is simply the ability to go from one sleep cycle to the next without waking up fully and crying out for help to get back to sleep.

So while it may seem like your baby really wants something else, once they reach a healthy 6 or 7 months and move past the age of actually needing calories to get through the night, what they're really crying out for is more sleep!

I know, I know - your baby drains two breasts or downs an 8-ounce bottle every waking, so they must be hungry, right?

Well, yes and no. If every time you had a little trouble falling back to sleep during the night, you got up and ate a peanut butter sandwich, pretty soon your body would start waking you up at those times, expecting calories, even though you didn't need them. You would probably even feel some pangs of hunger (and you wouldn't eat as much for breakfast because your belly was still full from your night-time picnics).

So if your baby is waking up every hour or two (and let's face it, a 6-pound newborn doesn't even need to feed that often), it's because they just haven't figured out that ever-important life skill for getting the sleep their brains and bodies need: how to go from one sleep cycle to the next without help from something or someone else.

That's where sleep "training" comes in. As circus-animal as the term can make our babies sound, sleeping is actually a skill they need to learn.

The good news is, you don't have to shut the door and let your baby cry-it-out until 7 a.m. (ugh). There is a supportive, gradual way that gives your baby the chance to learn with you right there beside them, while also shifting their metabolism toward getting all their calories during the day, rather than at the all-night snack bar. (It also works for babies who wake up after every sleep cycle looking for their pacifier or Dad's arms to be rocked in.)

In fact, most moms I've worked with tell me that daytime feeding becomes way better once their babies ditch the snack-and-snooze habit at night. (They also tell me that it's like "a miracle", "amazing" and "OMG I can't believe she slept through the night!" when their little one starts knocking off 11-12 hours without a peep.)

Once your baby learns the skill of moving from one sleep cycle to the next, they start to do it with just a quiet little moment of changing position, just like we do. They'll do that new trick 6 times a night until they're actually ready for food.

And the best part is, when morning comes, everyone wakes up happy.