Losing out on your sleep is one of the hardest parts of having a newborn baby. It is important that you get your baby into a routine as soon as possible so that they can learn to sleep longer at night than in the day. These are the main steps for trying to get your baby to sleep through the night:
- Feed mostly during the day. Babies need to do most of their feeding during the day so that they don't wake up hungry at night. A three hour feeding cycle works well, but whatever routine you follow, you need to make sure that the last feed before you go to bed is a big one, so as to try and get them through the night.
- Take daytime naps. Contrary to what one might expect, it is essential that a baby sleeps at some point during the day. Otherwise, they will be so tired when they go to bed at night that they may well become fractious and it will likely be extremely difficult to get them to sleep. Where this nap takes place and for how long, is not important. Follow the babies lead to a large degree, although try to avoid allowing them to sleep too late in the afternoon, as this is more likely to interfere with their night-time routine.
- Have a bedtime routine. Having a wind down routine before they go to bed enables babies to understand that they are now getting ready for their big night-time sleep. This is likely to be nothing more than having a bath, followed by a cuddle and some milk before being put, still awake, into their own cot to go to sleep.
- Use care in deciding how to put the baby to bed. NEVER give a baby a dummy or bottle to suck on as they drop off to sleep. Rock the baby to sleep in your arms; take them for a drive in the car and all the other so called "tricks" that parents sometimes resort to in order to get their baby to sleep. Like adults, babies naturally wake in the night. In order to go back to sleep again they will have a set routine that they follow before they can go back to sleep. It is essential that they are able to manage this routine by themselves and that it doesn't necessitate intervention from an adult, so unless you want to get up in the middle of the night and take your car and your baby out for a drive, or duplicate whichever of the other means you used to get your baby to sleep, it is probably best to avoid ever going down this road in the first place.
- Set a comfortable bedroom temperature. Making sure that your baby's room temperature is right is very important. The ideal room temperature is 16-20 degrees centigrade.
- Select the right kind of nightwear. Getting cold in the night is a common cause of babies waking up. I would recommend the use of baby sleeping bags, as this will stop the baby kicking off its blankets and then getting cold in the night. Or, if you are going to use blankets, swaddle the baby in them so that they are unlikely to come off during the night.
- Set up the appropriate bedroom environment. To make it easier for your baby to understand that they are preparing for a long night-time sleep, and also to avoid being woken up early by the light in the summer, it is important that your baby gets used to sleeping in a dark room from the outset. The use of blackout curtains and blinds is ideal for helping babies make this association.[1]
- Familiarize your baby with the cot. Babies need to get used to sleeping in their own cots. When the babies are very little I would recommend putting the baby into something like a Moses basket and placing this inside the cot itself so that the cot becomes a familiar environment for them. Avoid bringing babies into your own bed to sleep, as this is a very difficult habit to break once it becomes established and neither you, nor your baby, will sleep as well.
[1] Current advice is that babies should sleep on their backs in a cot in their parents' room for the first six months.
Click here to visit HowToDoThings.com