Most babies don’t sleep through the night (defined as a 6- to 8-hour stretch) until at least 3 months of age or until they weigh 12 to 13 pounds. Some don’t reach this milestone until closer to their first birthday, and that’s completely normal. The good news: there are concrete steps you can take to help your baby get there, starting with understanding what’s happening in their developing brain and building habits that support longer stretches of sleep.
Why Babies Wake Up So Often
Newborns aren’t wired for long sleep yet. Their internal body clocks, the systems that distinguish day from night, don’t even begin developing until around 2 to 4 months of age. Those rhythms aren’t fully established until at least 12 months, and often later. So when your 6-week-old wakes every two hours, it’s not a problem to fix. It’s biology.
Around 3 to 4 months, a major neurological shift happens. Your baby’s brain starts transitioning from newborn-style sleep into more mature sleep stages with distinct cycles, similar to adult sleep. This is actually progress, but it doesn’t always feel like it. The transition can cause what’s known as the 4-month sleep regression, where a baby who previously slept decent stretches suddenly starts waking more often. This regression is temporary and signals that your baby’s sleep architecture is maturing, which is ultimately what allows longer consolidated sleep.
Set Up the Right Sleep Environment
Keep the room between 68 and 72°F (20 to 22°C). Babies sleep best in a narrow temperature range, and overheating is both a comfort issue and a safety concern. Use a firm, flat mattress with only a fitted sheet. No loose blankets, pillows, stuffed animals, or crib bumpers. Your baby should sleep on their back, in their own sleep space, with no other people in the sleep surface.
Darkness matters. Once your baby is past the newborn stage, a dark room during sleep times helps reinforce the developing circadian rhythm. White noise can also help by masking household sounds that might trigger a wake-up during lighter sleep cycles.
Build a Consistent Bedtime Routine
A good bedtime routine runs about 30 to 45 minutes and follows the same sequence every night. The repetition itself is the point: it teaches your baby’s brain that sleep is coming. Effective activities include a warm bath (which triggers a natural cooling of your baby’s core body temperature, a process linked to sleepiness), reading a book, playing soft music, gentle rocking or cuddling, and a feeding about 15 minutes before placing them in the crib.
The key is putting your baby down drowsy but awake. This is the single most repeated piece of advice from sleep researchers, and for good reason. Babies who fall asleep independently at bedtime are far more likely to resettle themselves when they naturally wake between sleep cycles overnight, rather than crying for you to recreate whatever conditions (rocking, nursing, bouncing) were present when they originally fell asleep.
Sleep Training Methods That Work
Sleep training is generally appropriate starting around 4 to 6 months, when your baby’s circadian rhythm is developing and they’re physically capable of longer sleep stretches. There’s no single right method. The best one is whichever you can follow consistently.
Graduated Check-Ins (Ferber Method)
You put your baby down awake, leave the room, and wait a set number of minutes before briefly checking in. On the first night, you wait 3 minutes before the first check, 5 minutes before the second, then 10 minutes for all checks after that. On night two, the intervals increase to 5, 10, and 12 minutes. By night three, you’re waiting 10, 12, and 15 minutes. When you check in, you keep it brief: reassure your baby with your voice or a pat, but don’t pick them up. These intervals can be adjusted to fit your comfort level. Most families see significant improvement within 3 to 5 nights.
The Chair Method
This is a more gradual approach. You place a chair next to the crib and sit quietly while your baby falls asleep. You don’t pick them up if they fuss. Every few nights, you move the chair farther from the crib, toward the door, then outside the door, until eventually you’re not in the room at all. This method takes longer but involves less crying, which some parents find easier to sustain.
Pick Up, Put Down
When your baby cries, you pick them up and soothe them until they’re calm, then put them back down awake. You repeat this as many times as necessary. It’s the most hands-on approach and can take longer to show results, but it works well for parents who aren’t comfortable with any amount of sustained crying.
When Night Feeds Are Still Necessary
Hunger is a legitimate reason for night waking, especially in the early months. Breastfed babies typically need night feeds longer than formula-fed babies because breast milk is digested faster. Formula-fed babies over 6 months are unlikely to be waking from genuine hunger.
For formula-fed babies, you can consider phasing out night feeds from around 6 months. If your baby is drinking 60 ml (about 2 ounces) or less during a night feed, you can stop that feed entirely and resettle them instead. If they’re drinking more than 60 ml, gradually reduce the amount over 5 to 7 nights. For breastfed babies, night weaning is reasonable to consider from 12 months, when most children are getting sufficient nutrition from daytime meals.
Trying to sleep train while your baby genuinely needs to eat overnight will frustrate everyone. If you’re unsure whether your baby still needs night calories, their weight gain and daytime intake are better guides than their age alone.
Get Daytime Naps Right
Overtired babies actually sleep worse at night. It sounds counterintuitive, but skipping naps or keeping a baby up late rarely leads to better overnight sleep. It usually leads to more night waking and earlier morning wake-ups.
From 4 months to about 9 months, most babies need three naps a day: morning, early afternoon, and a shorter late-afternoon nap. Around 9 months, you can try dropping that third nap. By 10 to 12 months, many babies consolidate down to one or two naps. Watch your baby’s sleepy cues (rubbing eyes, yawning, fussiness) rather than sticking rigidly to a clock, especially in the early months when schedules are still forming.
What to Do During Sleep Regressions
Even after your baby starts sleeping through the night, regressions happen. The 4-month regression is the most well-known, but disruptions commonly pop up around 8 months, 12 months, and 18 months, often tied to developmental leaps like crawling, walking, or language development.
Regressions typically last 2 to 4 weeks. The most effective strategy is to stay consistent with your routines and avoid introducing new sleep associations (like bringing your baby into your bed or restarting night feeds you’ve already weaned) that will be harder to undo once the regression passes. It’s fine to offer extra comfort, but try to do so without completely abandoning the habits you’ve built.
Realistic Expectations by Age
At 3 months, a 5- to 6-hour stretch is a genuine win. Your baby’s brain is just beginning to develop the circadian rhythms needed for longer sleep. At 6 months, many babies can manage 6 to 8 hours, and this is when sleep training tends to be most effective. By 12 months, sleeping through the night in the adult sense (10 to 12 hours with brief self-settled wake-ups) is realistic for most babies, though some will still wake once.
“Sleeping through the night” doesn’t actually mean uninterrupted sleep. Adults wake briefly between sleep cycles too; we just don’t remember it. The real goal is a baby who can fall back asleep independently after those normal wake-ups rather than needing you to intervene each time. That skill, more than any specific method or schedule, is what gets everyone in the house sleeping again.