15 July 2025 · Roshni Mahtani Cheung
Cofounder, Little Rei · Mother of one
Why Does My Baby Cry Before and During Sleep?
Two entirely different things go on under this question, and telling them apart saved me more sleep than any technique I ever tried.
Crying before sleep is a live baby objecting to something. Crying during sleep is very often a baby who hasn't woken up at all, and who won't wake unless somebody goes in and helps her.
I spent months not knowing that, going in every single time.
Crying before sleep
This is nearly always a timing problem and not a settling problem, which is the reason settling techniques so often fail to touch it.
The commonest version by a distance is overtiredness. A baby kept awake past the point where she could have gone down doesn't become sleepier, she becomes wired, and the wired state looks so much like alertness that it's easy to misread, so if the crying starts the moment she's laid flat and has an angry, escalating quality, look at the clock before you look at anything else.
Undertiredness produces the same tears from the opposite direction, and the tell is that she's cheerful and chatty for twenty minutes first and only complains once it becomes clear that nothing else is going to happen. Beyond those two there's separation, which arrives properly at around eight months and is a developmental milestone and not a habit you've accidentally created. There's discomfort: a wet nappy, a room that's too warm, a label at the back of the neck. And there's the last hour before bed, which in most households is the loudest, brightest hour of the day and makes a baby go from full stimulation to nothing at all in one step.
The change that made the largest difference in our house was moving bedtime forty minutes earlier and dimming the flat an hour before it. Neither is a technique. Both remove the thing that was causing the crying.
Babies are noisy sleepers, and nobody warns you how noisy. They grunt, they squeak, they cry out in short bursts, they sound briefly as though something dreadful is happening, and then they carry on sleeping through all of it. Infants spend far more of the night in active sleep than adults do, and active sleep comes with movement, irregular breathing and noise. They also surface between sleep cycles roughly every forty-five minutes to an hour, and a partial arousal frequently sounds exactly like a full waking for a few seconds before she resettles herself. Which brings me to the best thing I learned late: pause before you go in. Count to sixty if you can bear it, because a great many of the wakings I attended in Shan's first year weren't wakings at all, and the person who woke her was me.
The other crying patterns
Sudden crying out in older babies and toddlers
From around eighteen months a different thing appears, alarming the first time you meet it. A child sits up, cries or screams, may have her eyes open, doesn't recognise you, can't be comforted, then lies down and sleeps, and remembers nothing in the morning. Shan had two that I can remember, or possibly three, though the first one I remember exactly.
That's a night terror. The child isn't awake, isn't distressed in any way she'll recall, and isn't helped by being woken. Nightmares are the opposite on every count: later in the night, she wakes properly, she wants you, and she can tell you about it afterwards.
Night terrors cluster around overtiredness, so the most effective response is usually an earlier bedtime, and there's very little to be done in the moment. Keep her safe, stay in the room, wait.
When to go in, and what to do
No rule here survives contact with a real family, so I'll offer the framework I ended up with and leave the prescriptions to somebody else.
- Wait a moment first. Sixty seconds of listening tells you whether this is a partial arousal or a genuine waking, and it costs you nothing.
- Go straight in for a cry that escalates, sounds pained, or is unlike her usual one. Trust yourself on this, and you know her noises better than any article does.
- When you do go in, do the least that works. Low light, quiet voice, a hand on her chest before you pick her up.
- Feed if she's hungry and it's the age for it. Night feeds are a normal part of the first months and aren't a rod you're making for your own back.
- Check the ordinary physical things: nappy, temperature, whether the room has become warm overnight, whether something is scratching her.
- During a night terror, stay and keep her safe, and don't attempt to wake her.
Whatever else you adjust, the safe-sleep rules stay exactly where they are. Crying is never a reason to move a baby onto her front, to prop or incline the cot, to add pillows or bumpers, or to put anything soft in with her.
I understand the temptation. At four in the morning in week eight, a product that promises to stop the crying is very hard to walk past. The safest sleep surface remains a firm, flat, clear one, and a baby on her back in an empty cot is the arrangement all the evidence supports.
When to ask
Most of this is ordinary. These are the things I'd take to a doctor and not sit with.
- Crying at night that has become inconsolable, or a cry that is high-pitched, weak or noticeably unlike her normal one.
- Snoring, long pauses in breathing, or laboured breathing during sleep.
- Waking that has suddenly worsened alongside poor feeding, poor weight gain or a fever.
- Night terrors that happen most nights, or that continue well into the school years.
- A level of exhaustion in you that is affecting how you are coping. That's a reason to ask for help in its own right, and it's the one people leave longest.
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.