How To Handle Night Waking in Older Babies?
After six months, children may be excellent sleepers. If parents have helped children to foster the healthy daytime activities that correctly reset the biological clock such as getting sufficient exposure to morning sunshine and getting adequate exercise and if parents have been careful to protect their children from the known causes of sleep disturbances such as caffeine, stress, and discomfort night wakings should rarely occur.
The beautiful ease with which most children sleep at night is often greatly envied by adults. For this reason, I suspect that the occasional episode night waking is less a problem for the child than it is for the parent.
The parents will typically have a much harder time getting back to sleep whereas the child will settle back to sleep with ease. A baby who is six months or older, for instance, who sleeps with parent, may awaken during the night for no other reason than to reassure himself of his surroundings. He may remain perfectly quiet. Once he felt the reassuring presence of his mother or father, the baby may fall back asleep just as silently as he awoke in the first place.
The emotional causes of the night waking may be exactly the same for babies who sleep with a parent and those who sleep alone, but the child’s reactions will necessarily be different. The child’s need to establish bodily contact with the parent is just as strong, but the only way for the solitary baby to signal that such contact is required is through crying.
Other older babies, for reasons that we may be unable to ascertain may wake up and want to breast-feed. Usually this contact with the mother is less in response to a nutritional need and more in response to an emotional need. We cannot always know what is going on in a baby’s mind.
Additionally, unsuspected stresses encountered during the day may lead the baby to seek to reestablish emotional balance by gentle suckling at night. Mothers should support this need. Only good can come from allowing a baby to reassure herself in this positive manner.
