“Is your baby sleeping through the night?” my new mom friend asked me on one of our early playground playdates a few months after my son was born. Was that a thing? Babies “slept through the night”? I was dumbfounded. “No,” I answered. “Does yours?” I braced for an epiphany. “Yes,” she said. “She sleeps from about 8 p.m. until 8 a.m., and if I didn’t wake her up, I don’t know when she’d finally wake up on her own,” she explained. My head practically fell off my neck.
Canadian researchers in a recent study found that about 57% of 1-year-old babies stay asleep for eight hours straight.
I was lucky when my son slept for over two hours at a time.
And it went like that for a long time. It wasn’t until he was in kindergarten that he really began to sleep for longer stretches, and he still doesn’t really “sleep through the night.”
So I was fearfully googling “How long can you let a 2-month-old sleep for?” when my little girl began sleeping for stretches of four, five, and six hours and then seven-, eight- and nine-hour stretches. Could this be real? I asked her pediatrician about it, and he said to let her sleep.
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
I’ve considered the things I have done differently this time around with my daughter, and I realize there are a few things.
I’m a less anxious, more experienced mother now. The sleep schedule is more efficiently worked out. We have all the gadgets and tricks in place and have since she was born — we’ve got the black-out curtains, the sound machine, the temperature just right. And this time around, we have a Snoo — Dr. Karp’s electronic night nurse meets a bassinet that promises one to two additional hours of sleep a night. While I think the other elements I mentioned have definitely played some valid part, I also believe that the Snoo has delivered on its “extra sleep” promise.
The result of all is this is that I am a better, more patient, happier mom to both of my kids.
I usually put my daughter to bed around 6 or 7 p.m. at night, and she sleeps until about 3 a.m. Then I feed her, and she goes back to sleep until about 7 or 8 a.m.
I know that some parents may read this and feel jealous, angry, bitter, and maybe even disbelief, and I get it. I felt the same way.
But I’m here to say, besides a few little things that I barely had control over, I didn’t do much different. It’s not your fault if your baby sleeps through the night or not. You’re probably not doing anything wrong. All babies are different. Some sleep well; some don’t.
Of course, excessive noise and light levels are elements we can control, but even if you set up a perfect sleep environment, your child, as with my son, may not experience a positive sleeping experience every night. There are so many factors to think about.
But I can’t say how amazing it is to have one child who sleeps through the night. It’s a huge relief, too, because I still have a child who wakes regularly. They basically equal each other out.
Sometimes I think to myself, maybe one day, in the distant future, I’ll get to sleep through the night again, too.
But until then, I appreciate the fact that I got to experience what it’s like to have a baby who sleeps soundly for good, long stretches of time and — as the old, only 57% correct adage goes — “sleeps like a baby.”
