How quickly should you respond to your baby in the night?

A relaxed, slower approach in the night, perhaps speaking or calling out first before you do anything, signals to your baby that you're there, and there's no need to worry. Your sleepy words might convey something like “I'm here sweetheart. You're ok. It’s night-time and I don't really want to wake up! Back to sleep!”

But parents usually try to get in and respond when their baby calls out, before she really starts to dial up. When baby's dial is turned up high, it's harder for your baby, and for everyone else in the house, to get back to sleep. And we want sleep at nights to be as easy as we can possibly make it!

As parents, we hope to teach our 21st century babies (who are usually perfectly physically safe) that we will respond when they dial up in the night, that waking in the night is not frightening, and that they can go back to sleep without worrying.

This mostly takes our little ones a couple of years or more to learn. I can imagine your heart might drop when you read that! But this is a fact of our humanness: it often takes our small people a long time to feel safe in the night, and it can't be rushed. Trying to rush their independence can backfire, and result in even more dialling up in the night. There is reason to worry that a lot of dialling up in the night might even result in less emotionally secure children down the track.

There are some things that I can say with confidence, from the research of evolutionary anthropologists, the sleep science, and from my clinical (and personal) experience.

• Human babies are hardwired to need physical contact in the night.

• Human babies are very often afraid when they wake alone, day or night. This is why they dial up, communicating their biological need for help to the parent or other loving carer. This evolutionary response to being away from the mother's or parent's body has protected the survival of Homo sapiens as a species.

• We simply need to have baby's body clock and sleep pressure in sync with our own and with the sun, so that everyone goes back to sleep very quickly in the night after waking. Then, families find life and nights with a baby reasonably manageable - not perfect, still exhausting, but manageable.

You know your baby best. You know the many complex things you and your family are dealing with right now (perhaps including older children). You know the kind of responses in the night that feel right for you and your baby. Each family experiments their way through night-time sleep, creating their own unique path. The time it takes for parents to respond to their baby in the night varies from family to family.

The time it takes for you to respond when your baby dials up in the night might depend on

• The age of your baby. You are likely to respond more quickly to your newborn than you do to your rumbunctious and spirited 11-month-old, for instance

• How many other children you have, who also require care in the night

• How sensitive you judge this particular little baby of yours to be, due to his personality or his current stage of development

• Your own parenting style.