I fixed my baby’s sleep when I stopped making this common parenting mistake

It was 2am and my baby was bouncing around my bed, twerking her nappy bum in my face, squealing with joy and making it clear that she was up for a party.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t.

It was the third night in a row that my darling eight-month-old daughter Ruby had decided sleep was for the weak. A few weeks earlier, she had been happily sleeping through the night save for the odd brief wake-up.

Now she was regularly spending hours awake in the middle of the night, absolutely vibing all over the bed, usually between 2am and 4am. Fun for her, very not fun for me and her dad. We were baffled – her sleep hadn’t even been this bad as a newborn.

Like many parents, I turned to sleep apps, social media, ChatGPT and parenting forums for answers, with most pointing to the same culprit: overtiredness.

I was told Ruby wasn’t getting enough sleep during the day. She needed longer naps. Earlier bedtimes. Shorter wake windows (the time babies spend awake between sleeps).

Overtiredness is the scariest concept in the baby sleep world. It crops up everywhere from Instagram reels to parenting forums, and the theory is so powerful because it appears to explain everything. A baby fighting a nap? Overtired. A baby waking up crying all night? Overtired. A baby waking at 4am ready for the day? Overtired.

Convinced I had accidentally created a chronically exhausted child, I started trying to squeeze more sleep into Ruby’s day.

It did not help and, if anything, things got worse.

At the end of my tether, I sought help from baby sleep consultant Lauren Eells, founder of Sound Asleep Guru, whose science-led and direct approach to sleep had long stood out to me among the sea of conflicting ‘experts’ on social media, who each insisted they had the top method to help your baby sleep.

The first thing Lauren had me do was work out how much sleep Ruby actually needed. For 10 days I tracked every nap and overnight sleep. The result? Ruby averaged 13 hours of sleep across a 24-hour period.

That number changed everything and, instead of encouraging more sleep, Lauren wanted us to try for less.

At the time, I was giving Ruby around two and a half hours of naps a day. ChatGPT was suggesting shorter wake windows, and the popular sleep app Huckleberry was steering me towards earlier bedtimes. Lauren, meanwhile, wanted Ruby awake for at least four and a half hours before bed and to reduce her daytime naps to one hour and 45 minutes in total.

I remember worrying that Ruby would be so exhausted. What about everything I had seen about overtiredness – wasn’t that exactly what I was supposed to be avoiding?

The explanation for approaching sleep in this way, Lauren says, comes down to two biological processes that need to work together.

The first is melatonin, the hormone that helps us feel sleepy as bedtime approaches. The second is sleep pressure, which builds the longer we stay awake.

‘What we do know is that there is melatonin that releases, and that you want to time your baby’s melatonin rise with going to bed so that you get the nicest settle to sleep,” she explains.

‘But in order for that nice settle to then lead to a nice night, you also need the right sleep pressure behind you.’

In practical terms, a baby who has napped too much or too recently before bed may still appear tired enough to fall asleep. But they may not have built enough sleep pressure to stay asleep for long.

That, Lauren believes, is where many parents get caught out.

‘The number one myth that I think harms sleep is overtiredness, because it leads parents to put their baby down too early, for too long and at the wrong times,’ she says.

‘They’ve used too much of their 24-hour sleep budget before they’ve even gone to bed that night.’

To my astonishment, Ruby could handle being awake for longer before bed. In fact, for the first time in weeks, I saw her getting properly tired before bedtime.

The very first day I capped Ruby’s naps, she slept for more than 11 hours overnight without waking. Then she did it again. And again and again.

Soon, it became clear that we didn’t need to sleep train at all. Ruby still fell asleep in our arms before being transferred to her cot, but she was sleeping through the night without needing us.

Lauren explains that while routine carries most of the weight when it comes to sleep, some babies are more sensitive to sleep associations than others.

A baby who is fed, rocked, cuddled or helped to sleep may expect that same help every time they wake overnight (which happens several times a night and is biologically normal), meaning they struggle to resettle independently, and this is where sleep training can come in useful – but it only works once the schedule is sorted.

Ruby, however, appears to be one of the rarer babies who can happily drift off in our arms and still connect her sleep cycles without needing us through the night.

According to Lauren, that’s because routine matters far more than many parents realise.

‘Sleep training is the icing on the cake,’ she tells me, adding: ‘The cake itself is getting the routine right.’

In other words, many babies aren’t waking because they’re getting too little sleep. They’re waking because they’re getting too much. Astounding, right? But spend five minutes on Reddit or on social media looking at baby sleep advice and you will generally hear that overtiredness is enemy number one.

Lauren believes one of the biggest problems facing parents is the rise of generic sleep advice that treats all babies as though they need the same amount of sleep.

At the time I tweaked Ruby’s sleep, both Huckleberry and various Google sources suggested she should be getting around 14 hours of shut-eye in a 24-hour period, including up to three hours of naps. For my daughter, aiming for that amount of sleep was exactly what caused the problem.

‘This idea that every baby has a 14 to 16-hour sleep tank just isn’t true,’ Lauren says. Sleep doesn’t breed sleep.’

Lauren’s entire approach is built around the idea that babies, like adults, have different sleep needs. The challenge for parents is working out which type of baby they have.

She argues that generic schedules, wake windows and sleep apps can make parents lose confidence in their own instincts.

‘It really robs parents of their ability to read their baby and get to know their rhythms,’ she says.

In the end, my biggest takeaway from all of this was simple: my baby is my baby. Her sleep needs are individual, and trying to force her into somebody else’s ideal schedule was never going to work.

Everyone wants their baby to sleep well, of course they do. But trying to cram more sleep in than they need will set you up to fail.

And yes, sometimes you have to accept less naptime in the day to get a good night’s sleep, but I’d bet most of us would rather have a baby who slept more at nighttime.

Ruby is now nearly 15 months old and, at time of writing, she still sleeps over 11 hours overnight (touch wood) when we keep her naps in check.

We still get the bedtime cuddles but, thankfully, the 2am nappy-bum dance parties are mostly a thing of the past. If she’s teething, it’s a whole other story, but that’s a topic for another day…

For more about the overtiredness debate and baby sleep schedules, Lauren discusses the topic in depth in Overtiredness, season three, episode seven of the podcast Spilling the Tea on Zzzs.

Huckleberry has been contacted for comment.