I’m going to start sleep training my six-month-old baby. While it is relatively easy to get him to sleep (he uses a pacifier and I need to rock him for a few minutes for both naps and at nighttime), he is waking up every two hours.
My question is, if I sleep train him at night, do I also need to sleep train him for naps? I’m worried I’ll be undoing the progress we make at nighttime if I don’t stop rocking him and take away the pacifier for nap time too.
—Maria
First of all, I want to applaud your planning here. One thing we know from the data on sleep training is that what matters for success is consistency. And in general, we are much more able to be consistent if we have a plan.
You can sleep train for the night without also doing the naps. The sleep experience during the day for humans differs from the night, and this is true for babies as well. Some parents find that once they sleep train for the night, naps get better, but this isn’t uniformly true. And having a different routine for the day and evening is fine. Focus on the night first, and you can figure out naps later.
When you start the sleep training process, make sure your plan is specific. Here are some questions I would ask yourself:
- What will the bedtime routine be, exactly? Babies like bedtime routines. Whatever you are doing now, will you keep it or tweak it?
- What is your plan for sleep training — are you going to go in at all to feed him at night? Or are you aiming for a full night of sleep (most appropriate if your child isn’t currently eating at night)? What time is the morning?
- Are you closing the door and not coming back, or are you planning on some checks? Both procedures can work; the question is what you can stick to.
- Finally: the pacifier. You do not necessarily have to take away the pacifier when you sleep train. You just have to commit to not going back in to return it to your child’s mouth.
Good luck!
Community Guidelines
Log in
Awesome advice and super simple! We sleep trained our son at 2 months old (9 weeks) for night sleeping because he was ready and Doctor was on board with us too. But! The naps he still wanted, contact naps for a few more months, either just laying on us or on the baby carrier. We used to Love those contacts naps so we didn’t mind but eventually, we had to get him to nap in his crib on his own so we could get Anything done. Didn’t enforce anything there, though, he just knew how to put himself back to sleep using his self-soothing techniques from nighttime. Mostly thumb sucking and rolling over. Worked great and he used to take 2 naps per day like that, then 1.