Sleeping Through The Night Is Not A Trophy In Parenting

With the increasing awareness of the importance of sleep, sleep training and its benefits for helping babies sleep through the night, more and more parents feel pressured to sleep train when they realise that their baby or toddler is still waking up frequently at night.

In Malaysia, parents have different views on sleep training, with some embracing it as a way to establish healthy sleep habits and improve their own well-being, while others prefer gentler methods or prioritise cosleeping.

Either way, reading and hearing about friends and other parents' kids who are sleeping through the night already will impact how you feel about your child's sleep to some degree.

What's considered sleeping through the night?

There are many varying ideas about this. Some parents think it's 12 hours of consolidated sleep. This is a dangerous expectation and pretty unrealistic.

The core definition revolves around a 6-8 hour sleep period, but in my definition, if your baby is under one year old and sleeps for 4-6 hours straight at one stretch, that's considered sleeping through the night. Because your baby might still need a night feed or two, wake up to check if you're there and need some parental comfort, as they haven't yet felt confident enough to put themselves back to sleep on their own.

Also, it's important to remember that sleeping through the night is a milestone that each baby will achieve in their own time. I've seen babies sleeping through the night as early as 3 months old while others get there in years (2 years old and above).

That doesn't mean that parents who have babies sleeping through at an earlier age are more 'superior', or that they have won at parenting. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Some babies and toddlers may sleep through the night sooner, while others take longer to do so. And that's okay. It has nothing to do with your parenting and is not a reflection of it.

Why do some babies sleep through the night sooner than others?

(1) From my experience, it has a lot to do with their temperament.

Group 1: Easy-going and adaptable personalities seem like they're 'less needy' at night and their parents don't have to do much to help them sleep longer stretches at night. They are just natural with it. I would say this is a very small percentage though.

Group 2: For babies who display strong-willed behaviour, are persistent, are highly sensitive or slow to warm up, they continue to wake up in the middle of the night once or twice to check their surroundings and signal to you to comfort them back to sleep.

Group 3: The majority of babies and toddlers I've worked with fall between the characteristics of Groups 1 and 2.

All groups need the same things for healthy sleep: a bedtime routine, consistent wake-up and bedtime times, age- and developmentally appropriate naps, and co-regulation with parents or caregivers.

(2) The next factor that influences night waking frequency is whether the baby or toddler is independently settling into sleep on their own.

If your child still needs a particular way to fall asleep, such as a feed (which is probably no longer needed but offered out of comfort and that can be a lovely, easy thing), a pacifier that needs to be replaced, being carried and rocked/patted, or you lying down next to them, then it's very likely that they wake up at the end of a sleep cycle looking for that same way to be settled back to sleep.

This is one of the biggest reasons parents want to sleep train or use gentle methods to teach their child to settle into sleep with minimal parental comfort or intervention.

When their baby or toddler is encouraged to fall asleep with little help from their parents, they won't startle as much when they wake up to check their surroundings or call out to you to help them back to sleep. They simply use their own strategy to go back to sleep without you knowing about it.

(3) The last factor is that their baby or toddler has an appropriate daily rhythm that suits their sleep needs.

Each child has their own unique amount of sleep that they need in 24 hours. Say, for example, a 7-month-old baby who has low sleep needs - 13 hours of total sleep.

Typically, babies at this age sleep about 10-11 hours at night, and that leaves about 1.5-2 hours of daytime sleep. But let's say the parents aren't aware of this and they let the baby sleep as much as they want, totalling up to 4 hours. That baby will not have sufficient sleep pressure to consolidate 10-11 hours of nighttime sleep and may end up waking every hour, having a split night, or waking early.

Some of the parents I've worked with just needed a tweak in their baby's or toddler's daily rhythm and instantly, their child's night wakings dropped significantly.

Sometimes sleep is influenced by multiple factors that are beyond your control.

You are not failing as a parent if your kid is taking longer or the 'longest' than their peers to get to sleeping through the night. You didn't mess up or do anything wrong.

For the mom who is reading this at 3am, I hope this is what you need to hear.

If you're aware that you probably can do some changes to the way you're settling your baby or toddler to sleep but haven't got the bandwidth to commit to something like that, and their overnight wakings are not a big problem to you, don't feel guilty or think that you HAVE to do it or that you're doing it wrong.

You shouldn't feel pressured by anyone about how you're settling your child to sleep if it's working for you.

In the future, that might change and you might feel it is no longer sustainable for you. At least the information here helps you know what to do when that time comes.

And if you're ready but you don't know where to start or you have tried a lot of things but you're still stuck and unsure, then a tailored approach and support may be what you need.

With my LARAS method, you have the best chance of achieving restful nights within two to three weeks.

L - Listen closely to your concerns and sleep goals.

A - Assess your baby or toddler’s sleep needs and patterns.

R - Recommend settling methods that fit your baby or toddler’s temperament, fears and needs.

A - Action and implementation of the recommended method.

S - Support and guide you without judgment and trust that you are the expert in your child.

Let's schedule a discovery call to explore how I can assist you and determine if we're a good fit. My sleep approach is not suitable for everyone, so let's see if we're a good fit to work together!