How Can I Get My Baby to Sleep Through the Night? (video)

Gurinder Dabhia, MD, a pediatrician at Scripps Clinic Rancho Bernardo, discusses baby sleep patterns, including when are ready for sleep training, and provides tips on how to help them sleep through the night, so you can too.

Usually babies are able to sleep longer, stretches starting around six to eight weeks of age.

Yes, music will probably help your baby sleep, in addition to other soothing mechanisms like white noise machines and pacifiers.

You have to make sure you have an exit strategy for when your baby has been able to sleep longer through the night and soothe themselves. That means, starting to slowly wean the pacifier, starting to slowly wean the white noise machine and the music so that they can have better restful sleep as they’re older school-aged children.

The risk of sudden infant death syndrome is highest at less than six months of age and lowest after one year of age. So using blankets and pillows in the sleep space of the baby is not recommended until well after one year of age.

First, you want to ensure that your baby is developmentally ready to start the sleep training process. Usually around six to eight weeks of age, they’re able to go longer periods at night between feedings. Work with your pediatrician to ensure that your baby is ready for that.

At over two months of age, you can start to detach those things that your baby is getting used to and those habits that are being created in terms of feeding your baby to sleep, rocking your baby to sleep and starting to lay your baby down when they’re just getting a little bit sleepy.

Eventually, as they get older over four months of age, we’re really able to pinpoint more specific sleep training techniques, such as allowing your baby to lay down when they’re fully awake, maybe crying a little bit. Sometimes you can be there with them. But eventually you want to detach so that when they’re 9, 10 months, the goal would be to be able to lay them down completely, and then leave the room, ideally with a kiss good night first, so that they can really have a restful sleep. That’s so important for their development and growth.