I Messed Up My Baby's Sleep Schedule - DON'T Make This Mistake!!

by Vashra
(Texas, USA)

By four months, my baby was sleeping soundly through the night, in her crib rather than my bed...but there was a catch:

My daughter was on a self-created schedule where she'd wake up about every two hours to feed, then be up and about 1-2 hours, then feed and go back down. She'd stay on that cycle until about ... MIDNIGHT. Then at Midnight, she'd feed a little longer than usual, snuggle down, and sleep through the night until just after 8am...she'd wake for a morning feed and go back down until noon.

Because she's our only child and my husband was willing to handle his own needs in the mornings, this worked for us. I stay at home with her so I was able to keep this schedule just fine.

Then I made this huge mistake:

At about six months old she started waking up at 8am (after sleeping through the night from 11pm or midnight) and NOT wanting to go back down.

Now understand, what I had was a happy awake baby who would then cycle through 2-3 hours up and 1-2 hours down for naps until bedtime again. I didn't have any particular trouble putting her down for bed at night, and only minor difficulties with naps here or there.

But *I* had read *books*. And all those books said my baby NEEDED more than 8 hours of sleep a night plus naps. Why she was supposed to get TWELVE hours of sleep a night plus naps at her age! To do otherwise would mess up her development, stunt her growth, make her turn into a turnip or something!

All those books also told me that if my baby was waking "too soon" then I needed to put her to bed earlier.

So I did. I rolled her back from 12am to 11pm and on and on till she was going down at 9pm. She did NOT like the change, no matter how gradually we made it. We tried various ways to put her to bed early. We even tried (God forgive us) Ferber. By golly she was *going* to get those 12 hours of sleep plus naps! We started putting her in her crib in the dark for naps (before during the day I just had her in a bassinet in the well lit living room).

And for my efforts, I am graced with a baby that goes down for sleep at 9pm . . . and now wakes throughout the night sometimes as often as every hour. She wakes up unhappy. She fights naps with cries and tantrums. She demands to be fed at night again now while previously she'd been sleeping without feeds. And for several days after "Ferberizing" my baby, she would cry for her father when I went to pick her up and didn't even want to be around me except to be fed. And for putting her to bed at 9pm I get a baby that is up at 4am with NO chance of going back to sleep.

The moral of this story is that if you have a book that tells you that your baby "should" be doing much of anything at any given age, take it out into the back yard and burn it.

I was shocked to learn upon further research that until the 1970s and almost exclusively in the United States, nobody on earth thought babies were supposed to sleep through the night. It wasn't until the 80s that doctors decided the (normal in all non-Western countries) of babies losing up to 10% of their birth weight (more in many countries that are relatively affluent yet DON'T have America's obesity problems) was "bad" and that we should wake sleeping babies on set schedules to feed them hungry or not.

If your situation is working but not quite optimal (like having a baby that sleeps from midnight to noon with only one waking)....leave well enough alone!

Also... best advice I ever read on this site: naps in lit rooms during the day. It may not work for every baby, but it seems to help mine.

Sometimes the best advice is to realize that your baby is NOT trying to manipulate or control you by not being on a set clock based schedule, that you *don't* have to drag your exhausted self out of bed several times a night to wake a sleeping infant and feed it (UNLESS your baby is so under weight that the doctor says he/she is failing to thrive), and that babies weren't created to sleep through the night no matter what the umpteen books say.