Few sentences hurt a tired parent as much as "is he sleeping through the night?". It sounds innocent, but it carries an expectation, and the expectation is wrong. A small baby is not built to sleep through the night. It is built to wake.
This makes good sense if you look back. For hundreds of thousands of years a human infant has been utterly dependent on having an adult close by. To wake, sense the surroundings and call out if someone was gone was not a fault in the system. It was the system. The babies who woke and sought contact were the ones who were kept safe. That inheritance still sits inside your newborn, whatever the baby books promise.
Biologically there are several reasons. A newborn has no internal day-and-night rhythm yet. Production of melatonin, the hormone of sleep, is minimal in the first months and only stabilises gradually. The baby's sleep cycle is also shorter than yours, around fifty minutes against your ninety, and at each transition between cycles it lies for a moment just below the surface, where it wakes easily. On top of that the brain is growing explosively and practising new skills, often at night, and every developmental leap brings a spell of worse sleep. What we call a sleep regression is usually a sign that something is going right.
That does not mean there is nothing you can do. But it moves the goal. The task is not to switch off the baby's waking as if it were a defect. The task is to make the way back into sleep as short and as safe as possible. And here, again, what matters is what happens in you. If you come calmly, with no hurry in your body, the baby reads it and sinks back faster. If you come tense, it senses that too, and the cortisol that was on its way down climbs again.
The calm evening rhythm, the same order night after night, is not a discipline. It is a language. The baby cannot read a clock yet, but it can read a pattern, and when the same things happen in the same order every time, the body begins to prepare: sleep is coming now. Predictability is a form of safety, and safety is what shuts the alarm down.
This is the kind of thing worth understanding once and for all, so you can stop measuring yourself against a norm that never existed. Then, when you are in the middle of it and the question becomes concrete, what do I do about this particular waking, at this age, you can ask Helen in the app and get an answer that fits the two of you.
