How to get one year old to sleep through the night?
Dear Exhausted, The challenge with babies is that their genetic makeup is essentially from the stone-age. Whether you believe humans started off in the Garden of Eden or a primeval forest doesn’t much matter. The point is that moms didn’t have to go to work the next day, and babies couldn’t sleep by themselves without getting eaten by predators. So babies are designed to sleep with their moms. When they wake slightly between sleep cycles – which all of us do – they don’t put themselves back to sleep naturally. They first look around for mom and make sure everything’s ok. So the bad news is that many babies do not fall asleep without being held, and do not sleep all night in their own bed, unless they are “trained” to do so. It simply isn’t a “normal” thing for small humans to do, biologically speaking. But of course that presents a problem for parents who expect to get a good night’s sleep so they can function the next day. The good news is that if your baby is over a year old, you can
