Ok, so we’ve been through creating sleep diaries and understanding sleep windows and overtired. Now. How to actually get that baby to fall asleep.

Haaa! HAHA! HAAA!

This is where your sleep books come in. Most of them, after giving you chapters of convincing that Sleep Is Very Important and Most American Children And Babies Are Sleep Deprived And It’s Likely Your Fault, then launch into how to get your child to go to sleep. And they all give (extremely self-confident) advice, which of course wildly contradicts other sleep books, which is why you need to pick one sleep book’s technique and stick to it. Otherwise, all the contradicting advice will drive you insane and if you actually try to implement all the conflicting advice on your baby, will also likely result in a confused, tormented baby that is WIDE AWAKE LET’S PLAY PLEASE.

However, what most of the sleep books have in common is that they’re all gunning for the gold standard: a baby that self-soothes to sleep. Put baby in crib/bed during your baby’s sleep window, walk away, and have a sleeping baby within 5-10 minutes. The sleep books may conflict on how to get there, but that is the goal.

So, what is the importance of self-soothing? 1) You, the parent, get to leave the room, hooray! This is doubly important during the toddler years. 2) The theory is that a baby who is able to soothe themselves to sleep will also be able to soothe themselves back to sleep if they wake up in the middle of the night or in the middle of a nap. Which essentially means that they’ll “sleep through the night” (as far as you’re concerned, the baby may wake up but she’ll also likely go back to sleep without needing intervention.)

The methods of teaching a baby to self-soothe range from the crying-it-out method, to introducing a lovey or pacifier to help them, to over the course of weeks/months extricating yourself from a baby’s sleep time routine (ala The Baby Whisperer’s Gentle Removal approach). Again, stick to whatever method you end up choosing.

Ok, so let’s go back to the “accidental parenting” I talk about in the title. All this self-soothing talk sounds awesome and all parents should totally do it. HAHAHA!

At some point in your child’s life, during the fussy newborn stage or during the 4-month sleep regression or maybe baby got sick or you’ve traveled time zones recently, you will find that you’ve settled on some sleep trick to get your kid to sleep. Usually, this is born out of desperation and a severe level of fatigue. Nursing to sleep, rocking to sleep, walking to sleep, patting to sleep, etc. It works wonderfully and you are psyched! So you stick to it.

The problem: baby now can’t fall asleep without the trick. And, you want to wean or your 25 lb toddler isn’t so easy to rock anymore. Or, it’s a Tuesday, and suddenly the trick doesn’t work. Also, when baby wakes up in the middle of the night, she may come to need your sleep trick to fall back asleep.

This is also the time to turn to your sleep book. Because you’ll basically need to retrain your baby to self-soothe all over again. Hooray!

Which is all a long way of saying: this sleep training thing? It’s a continuous affair. I know there is this rush to have a baby that sleeps through the night by 3 or 4 months. But, even once that baby sleeps through the night or starts taking those solid naps you’ve heard about (oh JOY), it isn’t a guaranteed situation. Babies are continuously changing, becoming increasingly aware, becoming increasingly able. They get sick. You get sick. They go through growth spurts. They go through developmental spurts. They’re ready to drop a nap. A schedule change or need to run errands may throw off a series of naps. You start a new job that takes you longer to get home and start bedtime. SO many things will happen. And each one may affect your child’s ability to fall asleep. And with each change, you will have to analyze and adjust and get back to healthy sleep habits.

As my wise sister told me, “trust me, as soon as you think you have it figured out, they change.”

Finally tomorrow: accepting your limitations and learning to go easy on yourself.

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(Want more Baby Sleep Week? Check out Pick A Sleep Book, Any Sleep Book, Start A Sleep Diary, Sleep Windows And The Scourge Of “Overtired”, and Accepting Your Limitations.)