The Pick Up Put Down Method

You put her down awake; when she cries you lift her, hold her until she is calm rather than asleep, and put her straight back down — and you repeat that, sometimes twenty or thirty times on the first night. It is one method among several, it is the most physically demanding one here, and it is the only one on this site with no trial behind it at all. No randomised study has tested it, it is not among the categories named in the task force review of 52 treatment studies, and neither the NHS nor the AAP publishes anything about it.

That gap is the reason this page exists, and it is not a verdict. An untested method is untested rather than disproved, and plenty of families settle a baby with this and never think about it again. But you should know which of the six you are being handed when somebody recommends it, so the methods compared page sets out what stands behind each one, and this page describes this one fairly and says where it stops.

What you are actually doing, cycle by cycle

The bedtime routine happens as usual. She goes into the cot awake. If she settles, you have finished. If she cries, you pick her up.

Then the part everything turns on: you hold her only until the crying stops and her body loosens, and you put her down while she is plainly still awake. If she cries again, you lift her again. A first night commonly runs an hour with dozens of cycles in it, and it usually shortens over one to two weeks.

The reasoning is that she is never left crying alone and never falls asleep in your arms, so what she practises is going to sleep in the cot with comfort available whenever she asks for it. Whether that reasoning is right is precisely what nobody has measured. It is a plausible mechanism, not a finding, and every success rate you will read for this method is somebody's estimate.

Two practical points that make the difference on the night. Keep the lifting undramatic — no talking, no lights, no eye contact you would not offer at three in the morning, which is the NHS's general advice about keeping night different from day. And agree the rule before bedtime if two of you are sharing the nights, because two adults running two slightly different methods on alternate evenings is the commonest reason a fortnight teaches nothing.

The commonest error, and it is a small one

Holding until she is nearly asleep. That is rocking to sleep with extra steps, and it teaches exactly the association the method was built to avoid: she goes off in your arms, surfaces at the end of a sleep cycle to find herself somewhere else, and calls you back to redo it.

The correction is uncomfortable and simple. Put her down at the moment she stops crying, not at the moment she looks sleepy. Those are usually thirty seconds and one decision apart, and every night you delay it is a night spent practising the wrong thing. Aim for settled but clearly awake, and accept that this makes the first hour longer rather than shorter.

The second error is scale. If she screams the instant her back touches the mattress on every single cycle for three nights, the method is not landing — that is information about the fit rather than about your consistency, and it is a fair point to stop.

The age it works in, and the mechanical reason it stops

Families report most success under about six months, and the reason is physical rather than psychological.

Once a baby can sit up, roll and push herself around, being lifted and lowered becomes the most interesting event in a dark room. The cycle stops being a comfort and starts being a game, with an increasingly tired adult in it. Around six or seven months, that is what most parents who abandon this method describe. Nobody has measured that either; it is the mechanism families report and the reason the advice generally moves on, and this page would rather name it as an observation than dress it up as a finding.

What changes after that is not that she needs less comfort. It is that methods keeping her in the cot — presence beside it, timed check-ins, or moving the bedtime itself — stop handing her a reason to get out of it. The chair method is the nearest relative if you want to stay in the room, and bedtime fading is the option that changes the clock rather than the settling.

At the young end there is a different limit. A baby does not have regular sleep cycles until about four months, and from four months the AAP suggests putting a baby down drowsy rather than asleep — that is the earliest published remark about settling anywhere on this site, and it is not a method. Under four months the honest tools are a rhythm, daylight, a dull night and as much help as you can find. Crying itself follows its own arc: the NHS puts the peak at around two weeks old, gradually reducing at around three months, which is worth knowing before you decide a six-week-old needs a technique.

Honest stopping rules, decided in daylight

Because there is no trial, there is no published point at which to stop, so write your own down before you begin. Three that families find workable:

• A length. An hour of cycles, or whatever number you choose while calm at seven in the evening rather than desperate at two in the morning. Reaching it means the night is over and you settle her however you normally would.
• A count. Some parents cap the cycles instead — twenty, thirty — for the same reason.
• A fortnight. If two weeks of consistent nights have produced nothing you can see in your own notes, this is not the method for your baby. Trying harder at that point is how households end up exhausted and no further forward.

Notes are what make the fortnight legible, and the printed night sheet exists because memory at four in the morning is not evidence. Write the time she went down, the number of cycles and the time she slept; a week of that shows you a direction that no single night can.

The day underneath the night

Half the failed attempts at this method are not settling problems at all. If the last awake stretch has run far too long, she arrives at the cot past the point of settling, and lifting and lowering an overtired baby thirty times makes it worse rather than better. If it has been too short, there is not enough pressure to sleep and no method will supply it.

So look at the shape of the day before you judge the night. The wake window calculator puts the by-age bands on your clock — bands rather than numbers, because no health body publishes a wake-window table — and the wake windows by age guide explains where they come from. One change at a time, and three or four nights before you decide it did not work.

None of this changes how the sleep starts. Babies go down on their back for every sleep, day and night, on a firm flat mattress, in a cot clear of blankets, pillows, bumpers and soft toys, in your room for at least the first six months. Nothing weighted goes on or over a sleeping baby, and a baby who falls asleep on you gets moved to that cot rather than left on a sofa — the safe sleep basics page has the full version.

When this is not a settling problem

Waking in the night is ordinary at every age on this page — the AAP's own account has it as normal for a six-month-old to wake in the night and go back to sleep after a few minutes. Nothing here implies that a baby who wakes needs a method.

But a baby who cannot be settled at all, who is unusually sleepy, feeding poorly, not gaining weight, or whose cry does not sound like her usual one is not a technique question, and neither is a worry that will not go away. That is a conversation with your pediatrician or health visitor. This page is general information, not medical advice, and it cannot see your baby.