Our Top Solutions for Helping Your Baby Sleep Soundly

She was doing so well. Two entire weeks of it, long enough that you'd started telling people. Now she's up three times a night and nobody in the house has any idea why.

This is for that situation, the one almost every family hits: a baby who was fine and now isn't.

The instinct at that point is to change everything at once, which I can tell you from repeated personal experience teaches you nothing at all.

Do the opposite. Work down the causes in order of how likely they're and how cheaply they can be tested, and stop the moment one of them works.

Start with temperature

It's first on the list because it's the most common and the least suspected. A baby who wakes an hour or two after going down, hot at the back of the neck, is usually overdressed, and very rarely hungry, and in a warm climate this is the default failure mode, made worse by the instinct to add a layer when a baby wakes crying. Check the chest or the back of the neck, never the hands or feet. Damp hair, a flushed face or a sweaty back all mean take a layer off. If the air-conditioning cycles off partway through the night, the room a baby was dressed for at 8pm isn't the room she's in at 2am, and that swing is the one that catches people out.

Then look at the day, not the night

Almost every night problem is a day problem. Four of them.

• Overtiredness. The most common cause of frequent waking is a bedtime that arrived too late. Try moving it fifteen to thirty minutes earlier for four nights before concluding anything.
• Undertiredness. Less common but real, usually in older babies: a late nap that has crept longer, or a final awake window that is now too short.
• Too little daylight. Morning light anchors the body clock. A baby who spends the day indoors under even lighting has a weaker signal to work with.
• Not enough movement. From around six months, a day with real floor time settles better than a day spent mostly in seats and carriers.

Young babies wake to feed because they need to, and no amount of routine changes that. What I'd separate out is the difference between a baby who wakes hungry and takes a full feed, and a baby who wakes and takes two minutes before dozing off. The second is using the feed to get back to sleep, not to eat.

Both are fine. If you're hoping to reduce wakings, the second is the one with room to move, and the usual first step is to make sure the last feed of the day is a full one and that daytime feeds aren't being cut short by distraction, which is a real phenomenon from about four months onward.

Everyone falls asleep with conditions attached, a particular pillow, a particular side, and babies are no different, except that they can't recreate their conditions alone. If a baby always falls asleep being rocked, then a normal wake between sleep cycles becomes a call for rocking, because that's what sleep is supposed to feel like.

There's nothing wrong with that if it's working for your family. If it isn't, the change is a gradual one: rock until nearly asleep and not fully, then to drowsy, then put down awake with a hand on the chest. Expect it to take a fortnight and to go backwards during teeth or illness.

Regressions are usually progressions

Four of them in the first year, and only one is permanent. The rest are phases.

The four-month one isn't a regression at all. It's a permanent change in how a baby sleeps, so it doesn't simply pass. The others generally do, and in all of them the right posture is to hold the routine steady, offer more support temporarily, and resist rebuilding the whole approach during the worst fortnight of it. I rebuilt ours twice, I think, neither time to any effect.

Teething is blamed for far more than it causes, and it does disturb sleep for a day or two around a tooth surfacing. Illness does too, a blocked nose in particular, because babies are obligate nose-breathers early on. During either, the answer is comfort, and method can wait. Sleep habits aren't undone by a bad week. They're undone by three weeks of a bad week's improvisations becoming the new normal.

I changed four things in one night, more than once.

Darker room, different sleep sack, earlier bedtime, and I dropped the late catnap, all at the same time, because I was too tired to be systematic and I wanted it fixed that night, not in a fortnight.

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Sometimes it worked, and because I'd changed four things I had no idea which one had done it, so the next time it fell apart I was straight back to guessing.

The slow way is the opposite of that: one change at a time, held for four nights. I know exactly how unreasonable that sounds when you're this tired, because I ignored it for months, and it's still the faster route.

Changing three things at once tells you nothing about which one worked.

• One change at a time, held for at least four nights before you judge it.
• Temperature and layers first, cheapest to test, most often the answer.
• Then bedtime, and earlier is almost always the answer.
• Then the last feed of the day.
• Then how the baby is going into the cot at bedtime.
• Then, and only then, anything more structured.

Keep the bar somewhere reasonable.

A baby who wakes once and resettles quickly is a baby sleeping normally. That isn't a problem waiting for a solution. It's the solution.

This guide is general information, written to help you understand a topic and ask better questions. It is not medical advice and does not replace your own doctor, midwife or paediatrician. Anything that worries you about your baby belongs with them.

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