5 baby sleep mistakes you don’t know you’re making

3. Misunderstanding the causes of night nursing. Most babies who wake at night want to breastfeed. If they’re not breastfeeding, they want a bottle or a pacifier. This is not necessarily because they’re hungry. It’s because sucking releases calming hormones that help your baby sleep. If you think the nighttime feedings are motivated by hunger, you might be tempted to try starting solids to get your baby to sleep better. But this usually doesn’t work. After the newborn stage, most babies aren’t eating at night because they’re hungry–unless, of course, they’re reverse cycling, or in the middle of a growth spurt, or in a wonder week, or too busy learning to crawl to eat during the day, or getting more exercise and needing more food. Ok, so maybe they are hungry. Who knows?

All of which is to say: it’s hard to know why your baby is waking at night. But just as with anything else, if you try to stop night waking with a solution that doesn’t address the real reason for the wakings, it’s not going to help.

But you could try sucking your own thumb. The calming hormones work for adults too.

4. Wanting a single magic solution. It’s easy to think that if you could just figure out the right solution, your baby would start sleeping all night, every night. In reality, it’s never that simple. There are thousands of reasons why babies wake at night, and sometimes the only real solution is time. It’s frustrating when your neighbor or friend keeps telling you that such-and-such solution is the magic answer to every parent’s sleep problems. But just because it worked for their baby doesn’t mean it will work for yours.

Which isn’t to say you can’t try. The more solutions you try, the better chance that one of them will work, at least for a while. As long as you don’t feel strongly opposed to a particular solution — say, letting your baby cry for long periods — it’s worth a shot. Try The No-Cry Sleep Solution, which has a nice method for reducing the suck-to-sleep association, or Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, which has a lot of different ideas for different parenting styles, or Sleepless in America (my absolute favorite book on sleep), which has a lot of solutions for high-needs babies. Oops, I mean babies with a strong survival instinct.

Or, you could try this magic baby sleeping pill.

5. Thinking you can solve night waking once-for-all. Sleeping all night — or at least going back to sleep without help — is a developmental ability that every child achieves eventually. But even if your child does it once, that doesn’t mean he’ll do it regularly. With most developmental milestones, we expect this pattern. If your baby rolls over once, you say he’s achieved that milestone — even though he may “forget” how to do it and not do it again for weeks. Ditto for walking, talking, and climbing to the top of the bookshelves when you’re not looking. Sleeping long stretches is the same. Most babies will do it once or twice just to tantalize you with the knowledge that they can right before they hit another growth spurt and start waking again because they’re actually hungry. Or because they’re teething and in pain. Or because they had a nightmare. Or because they know you’re in a deep sleep and they want to test your zombie survival skills, which include the ability to wake up quickly in response to sudden noises.

The bright side? You will survive this. Really. On the other side of the mountain of sleep deprivation, there’s a green valley full of bright flowers, peaceful streams, and long nights of sleep. Someday, you’ll look back on the years of night waking and remember them like something in a dream. (Actually a nightmare.) “Sleep problems?” you’ll say, shaking your head like a war veteran. “Let me tell you about sleep problems.”

Yes, it’s hard to imagine now, but someday, your baby’s sleepless nights will be a distant memory. You’ll remember them with something almost like nostalgia. I did it, you’ll say to yourself: I survived the zombie years.

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