Why is my baby waking at night?
After months of broken sleep, your little one has started to self-settle and is finally sleeping through the night. You feel like a new person and life is calm again after having a good night’s sleep. With renewed energy, your days flow and you can face any obstacles that may arise with a fresh pair of eyes. Most importantly, you are well-rested and have a happy baby to enjoy every waking minute with. Then out of the blue your baby starts to wake during the night without any warning!
Whilst your babies sleep pattern may be affected by many reasons such as change of routine, illness, holidays, development leaps etc, we suggest taking a step back and working through a checklist as a process of elimination to help pinpoint the reason.
1 – Is your baby’s room too hot or too cold?
2 – Is there any light coming into their room from outside?
3- Is your baby teething?
4 – Is your baby waking more often following an illness?
5 – Is your baby waking more frequently after a holiday?
6 – If your baby has a physical development change such rolling from back to front, front to their back, learning to crawl, pulling them self-up from a sitting position, they will want to practice their new skill at every opportunity.
7 – A development change can also impact their sleeping. At four months old, a baby’s sleep architecture changes and starts to form a more adult pattern. The amount of deep sleep reduces and light sleep increases and this means they may naturally wake more often.
8- Is your baby going through a growth spurt?
9 – Look at your baby’s routine and adjust accordingly to the right age and stage of development.
Our babies are ever developing and changing especially in the first two years. As they reach milestones or figure out something new, they may test the familiar boundaries around them to see if they stay the same. If your “normal” response changes, it becomes more unsettling and an unwanted behaviour forms. Crawling, walking, talking etc can all cause some sleep disruption but it’s even more important that you stick to your normal bedtime routine and settling so your child feels reassured by the consistency in your response.
After you have eliminated any obvious reasons for their waking and given them some time to adjust to the change, we would then look at their behaviour around sleep and would be more than happy to help getting you all sleeping through the night again. Please remember you need sleep as do your babies.