It’s normal for babies to wake every couple of hours during the night

Most normal healthy babies wake and call out for their parents during the nights, right into toddlerhood. It's hard when I tell parents this, because often they're very worried about how they'll cope. But I need to be honest about what I know is the truth, both from my experience working with families over many years, but also from the research.

Most babies, and plenty of toddlers too, will wake every couple of hours during the night. At one year of age, depending on the research studies we look at, perhaps half of our little ones are sleeping through most nights. But the other half are still waking!

Once parents know waking to their baby in the night is a normal part of parenting, it's amazing how quickly they adapt. It can also help families to know that women who are directly breastfeeding get at least as much sleep as parents who are needing to use bottles.

What really matters is that

• Everyone gets back to sleep quickly after your little one has woken you

• Your baby is not waking excessively.

If I was to tell parents that most babies sleep through the night from a certain number of months of age in the first year of life, I'd not only be misrepresenting the research, I would be creating unrealistic expectations. My words might create terrible sleep battles down the track in that family, and high levels of sleep worry. High levels of worry about sleep make life - and sleep - much harder than it needs to be.

It's best not to look at the clock in the night, because sometimes your baby might sleep for more than two hours and other times less. Often (though not always) your baby has a bigger block of uninterrupted sleep in the hours immediately after bedtime. This is another reason to work with your baby's circadian clock so that his bedtime is closer to your own, and you benefit from that bigger block of sleep - if yours is a baby who has it!

This is a very challenging time of life, regardless, and you may feel more exhausted than you'd imagined possible a lot of the time! A great deal of self-compassion, and some ways of managing difficult thoughts and feelings, are required.

But trying to make your baby not wake in the night often creates stress and distress around sleep, which worsens your exhaustion. Unfortunately, we know from the research that the sleep training strategies don't reliably decrease the frequency of a baby's night waking. Because sleep training methods often disrupt our little ones' body clock settings, sleep training and all the advice that comes along with it (which you might not even identify as belonging to the sleep training philosophies) can actually make sleep worse.

The quickest way to get your baby back to sleep in the night is a breastfeed, or bottle if you are needing to use the bottle. If you are breastfeeding, you might offer one or both breasts, depending on what feels easiest. Don't feel you have to fill your baby up with breastmilk. A breastfeed is a mix of rich sensory motor experience - the closeness of baby's body to yours, the rhythmic sensation of sucking, your loving caresses and murmurs. Babies breastfeed in the night as much for the sensory nourishment as for the milk, so it doesn't really help to try to separate out the two.

Breastfeeding women typically report that they are back to sleep within 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes. But don't look at the clock! And believe it or not, you don't need to burp your baby or hold your baby upright after feeds. It's a little bit harder if you have to prepare a bottle, but try to keep the process as simple and as quick as you can, with dimmed lights, and soon you'll be back to sleep, as long as your body clocks are all in sync.

If they're not, and your baby is waking excessively, then there are things we can do to repair that.

Selected references

Dias CC, Figueriedo B, Rocha M, Field T. Reference values and changes in infant sleep-wake behaviour during the first 12 months of life: a systematic review. Journal of Sleep Research. 2018:doi:10.111/jsr.12654.

Galland BC, Taylor BJ, Elder DE, Herbison P. Normal sleep patterns in infants and children: a systematic review of observational studies. Sleep Medicine Reviews. 2012;16:213-222.

Paavonen JE, Saarenpaa-Heikkila O, Morales-Munoz I, Virta M, Hakala N, Polkki P, et al. Normal sleep development in infants: findings from two large birth cohorts. Sleep Medicine. 2020;69:145-154.

Pennestri M-H, Laganiere C, Bouvette-Turcot A-A, Pokhvisneva I, Steiner M, Jeaney MJ, et al. Uninterrupted infant sleep, development, and maternal mood. Pediatrics. 2018;142(6):e20174330.

Price A, Brown JE, Bittman M, Wake M, Quach J, Hiscock H. Children's sleep patterns from 0-9 years: Australian population longitudinal study. Archives of Disease in Childhood. 2014;99:119-125.