Sleep Training: When To Start

I was once the queen of sleep deprivation. I used to pride myself on functioning with 3-4 hours of sleep per night when I was in college, so I thought the parenting thing couldn’t be so bad. My first son was the BEST at everything: the best at sleeping, putting himself to sleep, weaning from the bottle, transitioning out of the crib, etc. He slept through the night at an early age and I said “hey, I got this!”

Then my second son came around. I thought “he will be just as good as the first.” BOY WAS I WRONG! At this point, I was still working full time and trying to be a Rockstar on those 3-4 hours of sleep I was now getting, except I was far more than a decade out of college and that sleep deprivation was catching up to me. I decided it was time to sleep train. But who was I training? Me or him? At this point, my son was more than 6 months old and waking up every 1-2 hours to nurse. This life was just not sustainable. Sleep training was a must.

By 6 months of age, if your baby is waking frequently through the night, he or she has formed a strong preference, habit, and expectation to receive assistance each time he or she falls asleep, whether it be at nap time, bedtime, or night wakings. At night wakings, these are more about habit rather than hunger. 

If you wanted to start earlier, for a younger newborn, swaddling can be a useful technique to assisting with your sleep training. When used routinely and often, your baby will begin to respond to the act of you swaddling them as a clue that it's time for sleep. Check out embé® swaddles as a Safe Sleep swaddling option.