Here is what’s happening in the middle of the night, when your baby wakes up and starts crying: You jump up, as quickly as you can, and run to your baby’s room. You don’t want your baby to wake up too much, so as soon as you get there, you put the dummy in his mouth and start patting him back to sleep. Luckily it only takes him a few minutes to go back to sleep, but it’s happening 4-6 times at night.  I’m exhausted!!  Why can’t my baby resettle himself back to sleep?

There are 2 big reasons why:

1. Sleep associations
2. Resettle time

1. Sleep associations:

Do you see what happened? Every time your baby wakes, he started crying, because he is unable to go back to sleep without your help. He needs something (dummy, patting, feeding) from you (external) to help him to go back to sleep. He is unable to self-soothe. The only way he is going to learn how to self soothe is by identifying all the things (dummy, patting, feeding) he needs from you to go back to sleep, you need to say “good-bye” to it and then you need to teach your baby how to self soothe.

2. Resettle time:

​When your baby wakes up in the middle of the night and you go into your baby’s room straight away, when is your baby going to learn how to resettle himself? He never gets the chance (time) to learn. You’re always there. The resettling back to sleep is always assisted. You need to give your baby a chance to learn. The next time when your baby cries, wait 10 min before you go into his room (newborns 5 min). Give him some time to learn. Usually the first couple of nights you still need to go into your baby’s room after the 10 min, but then he starts to learn how to resettle within the 10 min time frame. If you do this together with the removal of your baby’s sleep association, your baby’s sleep will start improving ALOT!

Good luck
Sleep well

Christine