Does Your Baby Really Sleep Through The Night?

According to a new poll, well over a third of mums and dads have lied about their children’s sleep patterns.

The survey, conducted to mark the beginning of National Child Sleep Week in the UK, has attempted to lift the lid on the untruths parents tell about their children in order to make themselves look better mothers and fathers.

And it appears that there is no greater area where parents lie than when it comes to their little ones sleep routine. The survey by NetMums found 43 per cent claim their child sleeps through the night while meanwhile, 11 per cent of parents admit having to get up and down two or three times in the night.

This survey is obviously meant to be representing the truth of the matter, but to be honest who is to say that in actual fact the number of children really sleeping through isn’t lower and the number of children waking up several times in the night isn’t higher?

The survey is nevertheless certainly a revelation to a lot of parents who will have felt completely isolated in their suffering with a child who refuses to sleep through until morning. The majority of parents like to give the impression that they have no problems with getting their children to sleep through the night, so the fact that over half have actually admitted in this survey that in reality their children are not sleeping well is a positive step in the right direction.

Of course in essence it doesn’t matter if most parents make out their children are sleeping better than they are because they still have to deal with the reality of the matter when they get home.

But the problem does come when it leads to other parents feeling so down and depressed about the fact they can’t get their children to sleep as well as others seem to be. And with so few people being open about how they too are feeling exhausted and frustrated this probably only adds to and exacerbates the problem.

I’ve been there myself. I still recall with a shudder those first few weeks, no let’s be honest, few months, when my newborn daughter’s ability to sleep through the night was literally nil. I remember my husband coming home from work and recounting the tale one of his work colleagues had told him about how his own daughter had not only slept through the night from six weeks old but had even gone into her own room.

Through my sleep deprived haze I managed to compute these words and thought, well I feel a complete failure. It didn’t help that every parenting book and website you turned to rammed the message home that you must get your newborn baby into a routine immediately and they should be getting this amount of hours sleep at this time of the day and another amount of hours at this point and then if you do this and this you are guaranteed they will sleep through the night.

Luckily now I not only see the lunacy of the advise of these so-called parenting experts but realise that most of those parents who made out their children were such amazing sleepers were just lying or at least trying to kid themselves.