My Baby Falls Asleep Fast, But Keeps Needing Help at Night: The Super Sneaky Culprit

Learn why a super quick bedtime may not be a good thing.

Parents will sometimes say, “Oh, he’s great at bedtime. We just give him a bottle, and he’s asleep in five minutes. The problem is that he keeps waking up at night and I can't get him back to sleep without a feed.” 

Here’s the thing: Falling asleep fast (<10 or 15 minutes) at bedtime is not actually a good thing. We want them working harder than that. Conking out fast tells us that by the time they hit the mattress, a baby’s brain is already almost all the way down the road to sleep, and that often sets the stage for more frequent baby wake-ups overnight. 

Why does bedtime matter? 

Let’s say they fall asleep in five minutes after you put them down, it means they’re already 80% drowsy. So, they're really only going 20% of the way to sleep on their own. When they wake up in the middle of the night, they need you to get them back to 80%, and THEN they can take it from there.  

We really want them to know how to go from “awake” to “asleep” where they're going to wake up at night, so that they can say, “I know how to do this.” We really want them awake when they go into the crib. The term “drowsy but awake” trips adults up (because we know what we look like when we're drowsy). Instead of “drowsy but awake,” think, “ready for sleep and awake.” 

Here's a big takeaway: You can’t expect them to do in the middle of the night what they aren’t doing at bedtime. If you rock or feed them to sleep at bedtime and then expect them to just go back to sleep in the crib in the middle of the night, it doesn’t work that way. You need to give them the skills at bedtime that they will need to recreate in the middle of the night.

Here’s the GREAT news: You have options for working on these sleep skills.