Need help now?

Click here to find other sources of support

Need help now?

Click here to find other sources of support

Waking & Crying at Night

It is normal for babies to wake and cry for feeding in the day and night during the first few months.

Changing patterns of feeding and sleep as babies grow

  • Responsive feeding (that is, feeding ‘on demand’ when a baby cries) is normal in the first few months.  It supports breast-feeding and infant growth.
  • After three months of age, most babies start to sleep for longer periods in the night.  Breast fed babies may be older when this happens, but around 70% of infants sleep for long periods at night by six months of age.
  • Sleeping through the night is an important milestone for many parents. There is evidence that some baby care methods can help to bring it about. However, not all experts – or parents – accept these findings.
  • The key issue is whether to continue ‘infant-demand’ baby care beyond the early months, or to switch gradually to ‘limit-setting’ methods.
  • ‘Limit-setting’ baby care introduces limits and barriers, e.g. delaying responding when infants cry in the night to help them learn to settle back to sleep by themselves.
  • Supporters of ‘infant-demand’ baby care argue that limit-setting care is cruel and may hamper infant-parent attachments. The debate involves cultural values and beliefs as well as evidence.  The argument is often heated.

“It was just a nightmare, it got to the point where I was dreading him at night, to be honest, from sort of 6 o’clock the crying would start and it would go on probably until 6 o’clock the next morning. So myself and my husband were just like ‘right it’s time now for it to turn into a nightmare’, really.”

Michelle,

(Parent with an excessively crying baby)

“I remember being there in the middle of the night thinking ‘why can’t you just sleep like a normal baby?'”

Jessica,

(Parent with an excessively crying baby)

Making a decision about night-time crying

  • This website’s focus is on babies who cry a lot.  That happens mainly in the daytime and evening in the first 4 months. Waking and crying at night in older babies involves issues which we cannot cover adequately on this website.
  • Still, parents’ decisions on how to respond to night-time crying in the first three months can affect what happens later on. You might find it  helpful to think about these issues early on and agree a plan between you. Disagreements over these issues can make things more difficult for everyone.
  • To help you discuss these issues, we have included some guidelines which have helped babies to settle at night here.  These guidelines were found to be effective in studies in England and the USA.  They were also approved by the English parents and Health Visitors involved.

We want to emphasize that the evidence is not clear enough to recommend these guidelines to all parents. Some parents may not find them acceptable.  Our aim in including them is to support discussion between parents to help them make their own choices.  References for the research and a critical review can be found in the News & Research section by clicking here.

It came as a shock when my third son was very unsettled.

Alison

View story keyboard_arrow_right

I felt so lonely and isolated.

Susanne

View story keyboard_arrow_right

She cried just about every waking minute.

Caitlin

View story keyboard_arrow_right

Copyright © Surviving Crying