Suggestions on how to get baby to stop waking up so much!

He's always been a lighter sleeper, but for months now he wakes up every 2-3 hours for the entire night (7pm-7am). Sometimes he's hungry, and sometimes he just wakes up screaming and I need to go in and comfort him back to sleep. When he does that he won't soothe himself back to sleep, I have to go in there or he will scream for hours. I've done every single night waking/feeding from the start (he wasn't breastfed), and I'm beyond exhausted from getting up with him so much! Someone tell me there's a solution that doesn't involve letting him scream! Please help a tired momma out!
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Are you all by yourself at night? What temperature do you keep the baby’s room and how do you dress him for bed? We have been keeping the house at 71-72ish for the whole year and now that it’s cold we are cranking the heat and dressing our baby in fleece/flannel footies. Having her room be a little warmer seems to have helped her stay asleep - or it’s just a coincidence that as we warmed up her night space about a month ago she started sleeping all the way through the night almost every night. If you have a partner who is also at home at night and you’ve done every night wake/feed since day one, I think it would benefit you and baby greatly to have a conversation about sharing night duties with them, for your mental health at the very least.

@Jess no, but my husband is such a heavy sleeper that he never wakes up to the baby crying. My little one is also a major Mommas boy, I'm the only one that manages to calm him back down. His room is at 70, but he's a hot natured baby so if he's in footie pj's they typically need to be thinner, or he will sleep in a short sleeve onesie and some thinner jogging pants. If I dress him much warmer than that he wakes up wet with sweat. I've tried to get him to share the responsibility of night feedings/waking. He's an incredibly heavy sleeper, whereas I'm a light sleeper. If I do too much activity at night then I struggle to get back to sleep. So if the baby is crying, and I'm trying to wake my husband to go deal with it, it takes him like 10 minutes to finally go. At that point baby is hysterical, and I'm already wide awake instead of sleeping. And the few times that I've tried that, hubby still has to call for me because baby is so upset that he can't calm him down, so I end up getting up anyway.

My husband is also a heavy sleeper too - I will physically push him out of bed with my feet if he’s taking too long to respond to her. We also have a 5 minute rule with giving baby a chance to settle herself back down before we intervene. We had to train her first how to self soothe, and then we had to train ourselves on how to distinguish between times where she naturally wakes up and just needs a minute to find her pacifier and lay herself back down vs when she can’t get back down herself bc she’s hungry/too cold/too hot. If your husband is genuinely a heavy sleeper and just needs to get used to waking up quicker, maybe you have a system where you help him wake up until his body adjusts. If you just get up and do the stuff and let him sleep bc you know it’s too much of a hassle to get him to do what he should, then that kinda sounds like ✨weaponized incompetence✨ and you can call it out as such. If it is that, then the only way it stops is to hold him to account every time.

I read somewhere that the thing that best determines a baby’s happiness is the happiness of their mother - it is imperative that you get rest. If you get super sick bc your immune system is shot from lack of rest and you can’t do night or day duties, what’s your husband gonna do then? Also - even though I enjoy doing bedtime with my baby, my husband will do it at least once a week so she doesn’t get too used to only mama putting her to sleep. It happened already and she would rage for an hour when he tried to put her down, bc we let her get used to mama running the routine. Your baby will get used to daddy putting his back down if you give him the chance to learn.

@Jess I have a similar rule too, he will wake up and whine for a couple minutes before falling back to sleep. Typically I leave him alone until he does a certain cry, which I literally refer to as the "I need mommy" cry. But he will do the whining cry for 5-10 minutes before I go in there. He has a floor bed, so if he just needs comfort I'll go lay down with him till he's back asleep then I sneak out. Honestly, that does sound like weaponized incompetence, cause he tends to do it in other areas of our life. 😪

My husband is a wonderful human, and an amazing new dad. He’s the smartest person I know and very much a partner in everything, but sometimes even he tries to see what he can get away with through weaponized incompetence. The only way I’ve found to address it is to call it by its name and then take away his ability to use it by not giving in.

I tend to be anxious about everything and catastrophize and he checks me on it in a similar manner.

I can’t help much on the sleeping thing…my husband works 14 hours a day and on snowy rooftops, so I let him sleep. But on the weekends I make him get up. As for the weaponized incompetence, I taught him that and he’s literally started calling himself out for it. He keeps saying he doesn’t want to be that kind of husband and doesn’t always realize he’s doing it until I call him out if he calls himself out. Maybe start with talking to him about it to begin with and then reminding him about it?

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