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Michelle Duggar’s Secret to Getting a Baby to Sleep Through the Night

When it comes to newborns andsleep there are a lot of different schools of thought. But when I have a newborn baby, number one, I'm nursing that baby, and that baby's been in my tummy for nine months, listening to my heartbeat and is used to hearing my voice. And so for me it would just be so unnatural for me to stick my baby way far away from me.

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I've kept my babies in my room because I want to hear my baby breathing. I want to feel my baby breathing. I may have my baby bundled in a bundling blanket, which is something I learned from the nurses in the NICU.

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I would nurse my baby, and then I would play with the baby a little while and burp the baby and talk to the baby. And then I would bundle the baby up. And at first, the baby might fuss just a little bit because they were like "Ugh, I don't want to be bundled."

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But then they would just kind of settle into it -- it was almost like they went "Ahh, this is wonderful." And they would sleep so good and so sound. And I found that when I would bundle them, they would really sleep to the point when it was time for them to nurse again.

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I would literally have to unbundle them and wake them up to feed them because it was time. So I found that bundling was good for me and the baby to get some sleep at night, and having the baby right beside the bed in a bassinette, or sometimes even beside me, allowed me to put my hand on their back and just make sure they were still breathing.

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At the beginning it ends up being a three-hour sleeping schedule, sometimes four when they get a little bigger and their tummies hold more. Getting your baby to sleep six hours or more through the night takes a little while. When my babies were older, around six and eight months, I would feed them a tablespoon or two of rice cereal before they nursed, and they would sleep really well through the night.

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