What to do when your 6 month old wakes up several times a night?
My 6 month old daughter wakes up to eat every 4 hours at night and has been on the same schedule for 2 months now with no end in sight. She will occasionally go 6 hours but 4 hours is the norm. This seems very unusual for her age to be waking up to eat so much and I have no idea what to do. I can't deprive her of eating and let her cry it out but I don't see it getting any better. Shouldn't she be sleeping through the night now?
1 Answers
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If you ask it that way, yes - for sure people will say that kids that age should be able to sleep through the night. But ours didn't. And I kept thinking that pediatricians were setting this "sleep through the night" norm even at ages when many if not most kids don't do it. (also note: for pediatricians, the definition of sleeping through the night means sleeping from midnight to 5 am, not from 8pm to 8 am)
To me waking up every 4 hours is one wakeup in the night (which sounds less bad than every 4 hours!), and we kept having recurring issues like that for a long time after age 6 months. I put up with it until I couldn't, and at about 7 months of age we tackled the issue properly. Our first problem was bad naps (we discovered this after doing a sleep and feed log for a few days). Improving naps improved night sleep, as well.
The second thing when we started to wean her off night feedings was first gently reducing and shortening the feeds, and making sure she fed well before bedtime as well as during the daytime, making sure she was getting her calories then. Then after a couple of days it was daddy who went in to comfort her, so no nursing. The actual quitting night feedings was not that difficult for us. After discontinuing the feedings, night sleep did improve, but we still have recurring bouts of one wakeup a night.
Hopefully better feeding in the day time and better naps will make it easier to shorten and eliminate night feedings (which are increasingly just habitual, not necessary) which will in turn make for longer sleep. Good luck!
Thanks! I'll give it a try.
- LeahB, Jul 20, 2010