Encouraging your baby to sleep through the night.

There comes a point in life of most new parents when they desperately need some unbroken sleep, and getting a baby who is a poor sleeper on track can seem like an impossible task. Often this point comes when your baby is three or four months old and you are back at work and yet still have to get up twice a night for feedings.

Sleep experts tell us that most babies are capable of sleeping through the night by four months, but many older babies -- breast-fed and formula fed alike -- get into the habit of relying on one or more middle of the night snacks to keep them going. What can you do to help yourselves breakout of this cycle?

If your baby is less than two months old, you should not be restricting nighttime feeding -- it is simply too early. What can you do, though, is make sure to clearly distinguish night from day and how you handle the feedings. Between one and three months babies start to develop the special rhythms that determine sleep patterns -- which means that dim lights, quiet voices, and no playing at night time to encourage an early return to unbroken nights as soon as your baby is metabolically ready.

If your baby is between two and four months, provided he was not premature and is healthy and normal, he is ready for just one middle of the night feed. By the middle of the night, we mean the time between the 10 p.m. or midnight feed and the first morning feed at around five or six in the morning. If he regularly wakes twice or more between these times, studies have shown that you can shift him onto a better pattern without skipping on the food he needs for growth, and without compromising your milk production if you are nursing. Here's how.

1. Check with your pediatrician that your baby is ready for a sleek modification program. It's important to not start prematurely.

2. Wake your baby and make sure he has a good feed between 10:00 p.m. and midnight, before you go to bed. If you are breast-feeding intend to run out of milk late in the day, consider expressing some of your milk in the morning and using it for an earlier evening feed. This will have the dual effect of increasing your milk supply overall and also providing you with a spare feed. However, even if you use this supplemental milk, make sure that your very last feed each night is my breast. If your breast get over full at night, it will tend to decrease your milk supply.

3. When your baby wakes at say, 1:00 a.m., don't immediately see him if he is just whimpering. This is very important, because it breaks is an association between waking up at night and expecting milk. Instead, go to him, comfort him, and do alternative caretaking activities such as diapering. Delay feeding for 10 or 15 minutes unless he is really awake and crying to be fed. Gradually try to lengthen the delay until he is fed only once in the middle of the night. Research has shown that you can expect positive results within one to two weeks.

4. If you are breast-feeding, remember to make up for fewer nighttime feedings by nursing longer when you do feed, to keep your milk supply up.

5. By the time your baby is four to five months old, you can try the same approach to get her to sleep through the whole might. By this time most babies are psychologically ready to manage without food for seven to eight hours or even longer, so you don't have to worry that you are being cruel. When the baby wakes up, delay feeding her for a while and try to put her back to sleep after doing alternative caretaking activities. If you have difficulty stopping the feeding, try giving an ounce of water instead of breast milk or formula. If your baby gets used to not receiving any calories during the night, her metabolism will slow down and there will be fewer hormonal changes encouraging her to wake up. One night shortly after you have committed yourself to this approach, you will wake up at 3:00 a.m. but your baby will sleep through. And then you will know that you have made it through another of life's milestones.

6. After your baby starts on her first solid food, between four and six months, try offering her one to two tablespoons of rice cereal with dinner. Most doctors say the dinnertime cereal doesn't make baby sleep through the night, and our experience is that it works for some children. As with so many aspects of parenting, trial in the error is important when it comes to working out what is best for your own baby. Don't, incidentally, add the cereal to your baby's bottle rather than giving it by the spoon -- it won't be any more effective, and your baby will lose out on a valuable practice eating solid food.