Sleep baby sleep

Does your baby often wake up crying in the night? As it turns out, reworking his sleep routine can solve the issue. It is said that there’s no such thing as a bad sleeper, just bad sleep habits, and they’re usually reversible. Take back the night with these helpful tips and you’ll enjoy
your baby a lot more when you’re well-rested.

1. Start a routine
One of the ways a baby learns it’s time to go to sleep is by what is going on around him. About 30 minutes before bedtime, turn the noise down and dim the lights. The right lighting is essential because it helps set a baby’s internal clock. Our

brains associate light and dark with being awake or asleep. Turning the lights low at night, and exposing your baby to bright light in the morning, will help this process along.

Once you minimise the stimuli you can introduce other calming rituals, like a warm bath, lullabies, or softly spoken stories. Try and have the nighttime ritual in place as soon as possible, ideally by about 6 to 8 weeks. Be consistent—do
the activities in the same order every night—so your baby learns what to expect.

2. Don’t rely on soothing methods
If you put your baby in his bed when he’s already asleep and he wakes up in the night, which all humans do, he won’t recognise his surroundings and will need your help getting back to sleep. Try to put your baby down before he falls asleep. This will help him learn to self-soothe and fall asleep, and also fall back to sleep, on his own.

Hands up those of us who began driving our babies around at night to get them to fall asleep. The problem with that is it becomes a bad habit which we can’t shake as they get older. Automatically repeating soothing habits to the point that the baby is hooked just makes our lives more difficult later on when we need to change the routine. Newborns benefit from rocking, bouncing and soothing to sleep, but babies develop quickly and don’t need those things forever.

If something works, why would you stop? But we’ve got to give babies the chance to learn this stuff themselves. By about 5 months, most babies have the capability of falling asleep on their own, and if we’re still doing it for them, we’re getting in their way. Start practicing in the early months to put baby down awake, at least once a day and gradually stop the patting and rocking to sleep.

5. Sleep and nutrition
Sleep and nutrition go hand in hand. For the first 8 weeks a baby should be feeding on demand every 2 to 2.5 hours, but take note of how much or how long he’s eating to be sure
it’s an efficient feed. If he wants to feed every hour or so, he may not be consuming enough at each session.

If your baby is eating well during the day, by around 2.5 to 3 months of age he should be able to sleep a four- to six-hour stretch at night. To help your baby feed more efficiently, work toward spacing out his meals (distract him with a dummy or some entertainment) so he’s actually hungry each time. Be careful not to neglect burping.

Sometimes we mistake coming off the breast or bottle as being finished, when really the baby needs to be burped. Bright lights or noise can also be distracting. Try feeding baby in a darker, quiet room, especially when he becomes more interested in his surroundings.

6. Take naps seriously
A well-rested child will sleep better than an over-tired one. It sounds contradictory, but skipping a nap (or keeping a baby up late) in the hope that he’ll sleep longer at night just doesn’t work. When babies and small children get over-tired their stress hormones rise.

Then, once they finally fall asleep, there’s a good chance it won’t be for long, because those stress hormones wake them when they’re in a lighter sleep stage.

This is why regular naps are so essential. At the age of 2 months, a baby’s optimal span of awake time is only about 90 minutes between sleeps. They don’t have the tolerance to be awake more than that until 4 to 5 months. Watch the clock to make sure you don’t miss your baby’s cues that he needs to sleep.

7. Set napping guidelines
As tempting as it is to let your little one snooze in his car seat while you’re on the go, or lie on your chest while you catch up on Netflix shows, you should try early on for at least one nap a day in his cot or bed, so he gets the quality rest he needs. The first nap is mentally restorative for an infant and will dictate how the entire day goes, so ideally you want him to have that one in his own bed at home. The second is physically restorative, so once your baby’s old enough to be moving around a lot, he really needs that one to be a quality nap too.

By 3 to 4 months your little one will have longer awake periods, and you can work toward a nap schedule: one in the morning, one in the early afternoon, and a short late-afternoon nap if needed.

Naps are a great time for you to practice putting baby down while he is drowsy but not yet sleeping. It’s not the middle of the night, so you can think more clearly, pick up on cues, and follow through.