Infant Self-Soothing Development: A Comprehensive Guide

Understanding how infants develop the ability to self-soothe is crucial for parents and caregivers. This article explores the concept of self-soothing, its development, and practical techniques to encourage it, drawing upon research and expert opinions.

Understanding Your Baby’s Need for Co-Regulation

Babies can’t self-soothe for quite some time. This might seem surprising in a culture that expects infants to be independent, sleep alone, and handle stress without much help. The reality is that your baby’s brain is still developing and isn’t equipped for self-soothing in the early years.

What is Co-Regulation?

Co-regulation is the process where an adult helps a baby manage their stress and emotions. Infants often become overwhelmed and need external support to calm down. For instance, when a baby cries or a toddler has a tantrum, they struggle to regulate their stress on their own. They rely on the soothing presence of a caregiver to help them find calm.

Why Co-Regulation Matters

Babies are born with basic reflexes and instincts, but their ability to manage emotions, behaviors, and stress develops gradually. This means that in the early years, they look to their caregivers to help regulate these aspects. Co-regulation involves providing comfort, soothing, and stability to help them feel secure and manage their emotions. Just as we provide food and care for their physical needs, we also support them emotionally.

Debunking the Self-Soothe Myth

Many parenting resources suggest that babies should learn to self-soothe from a young age, but this can be misleading. Early on, self-regulation and impulse control are not yet developed. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for these higher-order functions, doesn’t fully mature until around age 2 or 3, and even then, it takes time to develop these skills fully.

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Different Temperaments, Different Needs

Not all babies are the same. Some might seem to need more comfort and help to fall asleep, while others might require less. This doesn’t mean that one set of parents is doing it right and another is doing it wrong. It simply means that different babies have different needs. Understanding and responding to these needs with patience and flexibility is key.

Parenting with Intuition

Trust your instincts. When your baby cries, pick them up. If they seem scared or need help falling asleep, provide comfort. This instinctual response to soothe and care for your baby is natural and important. Sometimes, despite all efforts, you may find that what worked for one child doesn’t work for another. That’s okay. Each child is unique and may require different strategies.

Managing Your Own Well-Being

Parenting can be exhausting. It’s important to take care of yourself, too. Seek support when needed-whether it’s from family, friends, or professional resources. Taking care of your own needs helps you better support your baby. Consider ways to make your life easier, such as meal prep, support groups, or finding a sleep consultant if necessary.

Final Thoughts

Remember, your baby’s needs are not a reflection of your parenting skills. Each child is different, and what works for one may not work for another. By focusing on understanding and meeting your baby’s needs, you’re fostering a secure and loving environment for them to grow and thrive. Parenting is a journey, and it’s okay to seek help and adjust as needed.

Self-Soothing vs. Self-Settling

Self-soothing and self-settling are different. Self-soothing enables children to regulate their emotions, while self-settling is a useful tool children use to fall back to sleep without assistance from a parent/caregiver. These are life skills that will continue to develop over time, and every child can learn how to self-soothe and self-settle with the right support.

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Self-Settling Explained

Self-settling is when a child wakes up and falls back to sleep without assistance from a parent or caregiver. In the first few months, most babies need hands-on assistance, such as shushing, rocking, or holding. Around the four-to-five-month mark, a baby’s circadian rhythm matures, and you will start to notice a change in their sleep patterns.

Self-Soothing as a Social-Emotional Skill

Self-soothing is a social-emotional skill that children use to regulate their emotions. It’s a life skill that will continue to develop over time. It tends to be habitual in nature and is considered comforting by the individual. Self-soothing is closely related to sensory preferences. Self-soothing is comforting, and all children can learn how to self-soothe with the right guidance.

Common Signs of Self-Soothing

Older children often self-soothe using the below methods:

Looking, listening, or touching preferred stimuli (toys, blanket, pacifier etc.)
Movement.

Age-Related Development of Self-Settling

From birth to three months old, most children need physical or emotional assistance from a parent/caregiver to fall back to sleep. Rocking, feeding, holding, or offering a pacifier are common ways to achieve this. At between four to five months old, you will start to notice a change in your child’s sleep patterns. At this stage of development, a child’s circadian rhythm and sleep cycles are maturing. This is a great opportunity to introduce self-settling techniques, particularly before the four-month sleep regression phase.

How to Encourage Self-Settling

It’s important to create a safe sleeping environment, bedtime routine, and avoid overtiredness when trying to encourage self-settling. From timings to safe sleep methods, follow the below steps to ensure your child has the best chance of learning how to self-settle.

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Master the Timing

On average, children will begin to demonstrate self-soothing behaviors between three to four months old. By this time, their sleep cycles have begun to mature, and they may not be able to fall back to sleep between REM and non-REM stages. By six months, most infants can sleep for approximately eight hours without needing to feed. Helping your child learn how to self-soothe before separation anxiety kicks in (usually around eight-nine months) will enable them to have a better chance of a good night’s sleep.

Create a Safe Sleeping Environment

Always follow the below steps to ensure your baby has a safe sleeping environment. First Candle suggests the safest place for a baby to sleep is on a separate sleep surface designed for infants close to the parents bed. Ideally for at least the first 6 months.

Always remove toys, blankets, and other choking hazards from the baby’s bassinet/crib before sleep.
Keep the crib/bassinet away from hanging cords such as blinds, curtains, and electrical appliances.
Always put your child to sleep on their back with the face uncovered.
Ensure the mattress is clean, flat, dry, and the correct size for the crib.
Never use electric blankets, hot water bottles or wheat bags.
Never co-sleep with your child.

Establish a Bedtime Routine

A calming routine will help your little one to recognize that it’s time to sleep. Close the curtains/blinds, speak in hushed tones, and try to stick to the same bedtime each night. Your bedtime routine might look like a bath, reading a book, singing a lullaby, baby massage, or white noise. Find what works for you and your family.

Choose a Bedtime (and Stick to It)

It’s important to stick to a set bedtime each night to help your child recognize when it’s time to sleep. Keep the room dark or dimly lit, stay calm and quiet when your baby wakes, and avoid playtime in the evening.

Avoid Overtiredness

An overtired child will struggle to regulate their emotions and will find it difficult to fall asleep. Below, find common signs your little one is overtired.

Yawning.
Crying or fussing.
Arching their back.
Frowning.
Difficult to soothe.
Catnapping often.
Falling asleep at unusual times i.e., before feeding.

Self-Settling Techniques for Babies

Once you have created a safe sleeping environment, established a routine, and decided on a bedtime, you can begin to introduce self-settling techniques. Find what works for you and your family. Common settling techniques include the ‘pick-up, put-down settling method’ and the ‘shush-pat settling method’.

Keep Your Child in Their Crib When They Wake

If your baby wakes up in the middle of the night and is struggling to self-soothe, try to avoid taking them out of their crib/bassinet. Instead, quietly comfort them with gentle words, singing, or light pats whilst they remain in their crib/bassinet. Every child is different and will need learn to self-settle in their own time.

Gentle Sleep Methods and Swaddling

To encourage self-settling, it’s important to establish a consistent bedtime routine, avoid overtiredness, and keep your child in their cot/bassinet when they wake up. Gentle sleep methods and swaddling will encourage your little one to self-soothe. For example, the ‘pick-up, put-down settling method’ and the ‘shush-pat settling method’ are useful techniques that parents/caregivers can try.

Addressing Challenges in Learning to Self-Soothe

There are several reasons why your baby might be struggling to learn how to self-soothe. It’s a matter of trial and error. Always ensure your child has a safe sleep environment, consistent bedtime routine, and avoid overtiredness where possible. Self-soothing might take longer for some children to master than others. Every child is different, and some may take longer than others to learn how to self-soothe. It’s a matter of trial and error. Try moving their bedtime earlier/later or see if your child responds better to different activities at bedtime (for example, massage, bath, reading a book).

Practical Self-Soothing Techniques for Parents

Every parent has stories about sleepless nights trying to soothe a crying baby. You pace around the house with your baby on your shoulder. You read aloud and sing nursery rhymes. You put them in the car and drive around the block until the sun comes up, and yet nothing seems to work. Self soothing baby techniques can be a game-changer for parents struggling with sleepless nights. It’s the process of teaching your baby to manage their own emotions and feel comfortable enough to fall asleep and stay asleep. Teaching your baby calming strategies can help them fall asleep on their own and learn to fall back asleep if they wake up in the middle of the night without your help.

Understanding Your Baby’s Cries

At birth, crying is the only way your baby communicates with you. Often, those tears are a sign of a legitimate grievance. Tears might mean your baby is hungry, overtired, bored, frustrated, scared, soiled, sick, or in pain. Before you even consider babies self soothing, make sure all of your baby’s needs are met. It’s not about ignoring your baby’s cries or letting them cry themselves to sleep; it’s about taking a beat to understand what those cries could mean and responding appropriately. Rather than jumping to the rescue every time your baby makes a peep, allow them the opportunity to self soothe baby with minimal help.

When to Start Teaching Self-Soothing

You don’t need to worry about self-soothing until your baby is at least three months old. Just like their physical muscles, newborns don’t yet have control over their emotional state. When your baby is three months old or older, you can start trying self-soothing techniques, but you should temper your expectations. Learning to regulate is a lifelong process, and your baby is just beginning. You can help them by keeping to a schedule as much as possible.

Step-by-Step Approach to Help Babies Calm Down

If your baby is crying and you’ve eliminated the usual suspects (hunger, dirty diaper, noise, etc.), try these tactics to help them calm down. It may seem difficult, especially if your baby won’t stop crying, but start with the least disruptive strategy and work your way up. Parents looking for how to teach infant to self soothe should follow a step-by-step approach.

Look at your baby: Approach your baby’s crib and look at them.
Talk: Talk gently to your baby while making eye contact.
Change body position: Gently pull arms or legs toward the torso. Roll them onto their side or stomach for a few minutes, but only while awake.
Pick up: If your baby is still upset, pick them up and hold them.
Rock: Keep holding your baby and rock them gently back and forth.
Try a pacifier: Offer a binky or another soothing object.
Feed: Even if your baby wasn’t hungry when you started, they may have become hungry.

Patience and Consistency

When your baby is crying in the middle of the night, you want to do anything to make them feel better. Trying everything simultaneously to make them happy might be tempting, but do your best to resist that urge. Parents often ask about the right age for self soothing, and while some babies may start early, others take longer. Remain calm, quiet, and gentle. Move slowly, speak quietly, and avoid extreme expressions or animated movements. And give yourself a break if you fall short. Don’t give up if it doesn’t seem to work at first. Your baby is experiencing everything for the very first time, and they need time to adapt. If you keep it up, your baby may start to find comfort in the routine.

Adapting to Your Baby's Changing Needs

Later, if you notice that a particular strategy works for your baby, you can jump straight to that the next time. There’s no need to start at the beginning each time. That said, babies are constantly changing, and baby self-soothing at 2 months may look very different from self-soothing at six months or beyond. What works today may not work tomorrow, and vice versa. Keep paying attention to what your baby is telling you and adjust your tactics along with them. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution; the right system is the one that works for your family. If you’re still struggling, talk with your pediatric provider.

Research Insights into Infant Self-Soothing

For infants who sleep independently, the ability to self-soothe when falling asleep at the beginning of the night and following nighttime awakenings appears to be a key ingredient for the development of healthy sleep-wake patterns. Although a number of studies have described the development of sleep-wake patterns during infancy, relatively few have examined factors related to the emergence of self-soothing behavior. Theoretically, self-soothing refers to an infant’s ability to regulate states of arousal; for example, calming from crying to quiet wakefulness without parental assistance. In research contexts, self-soothing often refers to an infant’s ability to settle to sleep at the beginning of the night and to put herself back to sleep upon awakening during the night.

Developmental Changes in Sleep-Wake Patterns

The development of sleep-wake patterns follows a somewhat prescribed path during infancy. First, the 24-hour distribution of sleep changes across the first year. Newborns tend to sleep for 16-17 hours in 3-4 hour increments dispersed throughout the 24-hour day. By 1 year of age, the bulk of sleep shifts to the nighttime hours and sleep periods lengthen (consolidate), but the total amount of sleep per 24 hours decreases relatively little. Second, the proportions of sleep states change with age, such that rapid eye movement (REM) or active sleep decreases and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) or quiet sleep increases over the first year.

Patterns of Falling Asleep and Self-Soothing

The few investigations that have examined falling asleep and self-soothing after nighttime awakenings during the first year of life have shown that this ability develops in some infants, but not others, by the end of the first year. During the first months of life, infants most often fall asleep during or immediately after a feeding both at the beginning and during the middle of the night; self-soothing is observed only occasionally. Infants who self-soothe are generally considered by parents to be better sleepers than infants who consistently need assistance to make the wake-sleep transition.

Defining Sleep Disturbance

Infant sleep disturbances are often brought to the attention of pediatricians during well-child visits due to the sleep disruption imposed on families. Indeed, a sleep-disturbed infant is defined as ‘one who is unable to settle back to sleep without the parents being aware of the awakening’. More precisely, awakenings are most disturbing to parents when the child cannot return to sleep on her own and requires parental intervention. For the purposes of research, these infants are often considered ‘non-self-soothers’.

A Transactional Model of Self-Soothing

A simple linear model that describes the emergence of self-soothing is not sufficient. A transactional model embraces the complexities of interacting systems or domains across a developmental time span. A transactional perspective to self-soothing might include infant characteristics, parental characteristics, and interactions between infants and parents.

Domains Associated with Self-Soothing

Variables in the four domains are thought to relate to each other and, ultimately, to whether the child is or is not able to self-soothe to sleep from the waking state. The model reflects the notion that self-regulation of wake to sleep transitions results from a dynamic, interactive process between the infant and a number of proximal and distal influences, mediated mostly through interactions with caregivers. More research is required to assess its predictive validityWithin the infant domain, the variable receiving most research attention in relation to infant sleep has been temperament.

Temperament and Self-Soothing

Infant temperament has been consistently, albeit moderately, related to the quality of nighttime sleep. An association between temperament and middle-of-the-night self-soothing also has been reported. Fathers were found to rate non-self-soothing infants as more temperamentally difficult than self-soothing infants; however, a similar relationship did not hold for mothers’ ratings of temperament. An association between difficult temperament and problem sleep has also been noted.

Parental Factors and Sleep Disruption

Parental factors also have been associated with infant sleep disruption. An association between both higher levels of maternal mental illness and lower levels of overall family functioning and bedtime problems in toddlers has been reported. Some studies have found that all of the sleep-disturbed toddlers in their sample had mothers with insecure attachment styles. However, another study failed to find a relation between maternal psychological well-being and infants’ tendency to self-soothe during the night.

Sleep Context and Self-Soothing

Associations between the sleep context and sleep-wake domains and self-soothing have been illustrated most clearly to date. Infants who are placed into their cribs awake at the beginning of the night and who use a sleep aid are more likely to self-soothe than their counterparts. In addition, self-soothing infants have longer continuous sleep periods and longer total sleep times at night. There is clearly some evidence in support of the relationships between each of the model domains and nighttime self-soothing.

Promoting Self-Soothing in Babies and Children

Self-soothing is a social-emotional tool that babies and children learn to use throughout their lives. There is no better feeling than being able to relax and let your troubles melt away. Self-soothing is an important, lifelong skill that can help with sleeping, managing emotions, building healthy relationships, and so much more. Learning to calm and control one’s emotions is a constantly changing process, and self-soothing skills may come and go as children age and have new experiences. For babies and children, self-soothing is being able to calm themselves without the help of another person (usually a parent or other caregiver). In order to learn how to self-soothe, babies and children first need to know how it feels to be soothed, either by their caregivers, by fun and relaxing activities, or by their needs being met.

Self-Soothing Techniques for Babies

For babies, self-soothing is usually referring to falling asleep on their own or going back to sleep when they wake up in the middle of the night. Babies cry a lot because it is a method of communication for them. When baby first begins to stay asleep throughout the night, it is because they are learning to self-soothe. Babies typically learn to self-soothe around 6 months. There is no age-related milestone for self-soothing. Rather, learning how to self-soothe is a process (for babies and parents!). Around 6 months, babies typically begin to show signs of sleeping through the night and falling asleep on their own after waking, but every baby is different. What works at one point for baby may not work at another, and that’s ok!

To promote self-soothing for baby, try:

Meeting baby’s basic needs: This is the first and most important step in helping baby self-soothe. Basic needs are the actions that make up the foundation of baby’s care, and include feeding, bathing, diapering, being comforted when crying, and all of the other steps parents take to help their baby feel loved and safe.
Swaddling: This early sleeping technique helps baby to feel safe and comforted. The more they associate this feeling with falling asleep, then the easier it will be for them to master self-soothing. Please note: The AAP recommends that baby is transitioned out of swaddling as soon baby begins to show signs of trying to roll over. This can happen as early as 2 months of age.
Try calming baby while they’re still in their crib: Baby will associate being in their crib with soothing, and soon be able to calm themselves in the same place.
Keep baby active while awake: Some babies have trouble with self-soothing because they didn’t use up enough energy during their time outside of their crib. Keep baby engaged and active by playing baby games.

Self-Soothing Techniques for Children

For children, self-soothing (also called self-regulation) usually refers to emotional regulation. This doesn’t mean they won’t have emotions-children who are learning how to self-soothe will still cry and get upset. But when they self-soothe, they learn how to recover from strong emotions (anything from sadness, to anxiety, to excitement), or are able to stay calm for long periods of time. As with babies, self-regulation takes time to develop, and their skills may change as they have new experiences or face new challenges.

To promote self-soothing in children, try:

Practicing mindfulness: This form of meditation can help children think before they act, and to be more in touch with how they are feeling.
Engaging in fun activities: Burn off some energy and keep your child moving to help with their emotional regulation.
Independent play: Not only does play keep them active and engaged, but independent play can help them to learn how to problem solve on their own, an essential self-soothing skill.
Modeling positive behaviors: Children learn by example. Sometimes the best way to show children how to self-soothe is by staying calm and collected yourself. For example, if your child is nervous because it is storming outside, try to show them how you are staying calm and reassure them everything will be okay.
Taking naps: Some children get upset because they are tired and do not have enough energy throughout the day. Try incorporating short naps into your child’s daily routine.
Making a routine: Routines can help reduce feelings of anxiety or tension. Try making a routine with your family and sticking to it to help children know what to expect each day.

Addressing Self-Soothing Issues

If you suspect your child has a self-soothing issue or is struggling with their social-emotional skills, speak to a healthcare provider.

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