Good Vs Bad Parents
Learning how to get a baby to sleep at night is a challenge that almost every parent faces in their lifetime. We are not talking about any parents. We are talking about good parents.
Bad parents would simply plug their ears with their favorite ear plugs and let their baby cry it out without a second thought.
However, you are not a bad parent, because you are reading this right now. You want your baby to grow up healthy so you want to take care of all little details that can cause your baby harm.
However, just because you are willing to wake up and respond at light speed to your baby’s every cry doesn’t make your behaviors correct. Sure you are a parent with good intentions, but you are not a being a good parent. The reason is because you still haven’t trained your baby to have good habits. Waking up too often at night is actually damaging for your baby’s health.
In order to train your baby the right way, first teach her the difference between day and night.
Babies can’t tell apart night time and day time
Babies are new to this world so they are still learning the ropes. They have been in their mother’s womb for so long, and they are very sensitive to light stimulation. That’s why light should be strictly controlled in an environment where your baby is sleeping.
During the day time, you should keep your baby awake more often by simply letting more light into the house. This can be done by:
- Opening the blinds/or shades
- Turning on the lights
- Taking your baby out for a walk on the stroller/car ride
- Make the environment more active and exciting
At night,
- Close the blinds, shades
- Turn off or dim the lights (sometimes dimming the lights is more effective. Experiment to see which works for your baby)
- Don’t shake, swing or move your baby unless it’s for a diaper change.
- Lower the volume in the house, and put on some white noise (more on that later)
Use repetitions to develop your baby’s habits
I know your schedule is busy and you have plenty of things to figure out during the day, but one thing should be consistent and that is the time your baby should be sleeping. In order to develop that you have to put your baby to bed at roughly the same time every night.
This will have to follow a series of steps that you will have to follow every night. Give your baby a bath, feed her, tell her a story, and then let her sleep. Do this every single night so that her body automatically responds by putting herself into sleep mode.
Make the environment sleep friendly
Your baby can be very fussy about little things. It could be the room is too cold or too hot. It could be that she doesn’t feel comfortable with what she is wearing.
It could also be that your baby needs her mother’s scent. If your baby needs to feel safe around her mother’s scent then have her mother keep a handkerchief or tiny towel by her breasts to absorb her scent. Then leave it by your baby’s bed at night when she goes to sleep.
Let your baby learn to sleep without you
Sometimes you might feel your heart breaking just to hear your baby cry. You should let your baby learn to sleep on her own without you rocking her, and shaking her.
Put her to bed when her eyes are still open. Believe it or not, sleeping on your own is a skill and it’s up to her to learn it on her own.
Try to avoid shaking your baby to sleep then sneaking out of the room. That usually backfires on most parents because they are too reliant on your shaking. Put your baby down awake and let her put herself to sleep.
Respond to your baby’s crying in a relaxed way
What most parents do is that they rush their baby’s aid the moment start crying. That develops a horrible habit where your baby solves every problem with crying. No matter how horrible it sounds you have to help your baby learn better.
Every time she cries wait a couple of minutes before reaching out to her. In the beginning wait five minutes to see if she stops crying, then reach for her and find out what’s wrong. Every time she cries, extend the amount of time it takes for you to reach her.
Eventually you should take notice of her falling back asleep after fussing a little bit. With this, you know that have done a good job.
Have you ever heard of white noise?
One more thing you can add to your baby’s bed time routine is to add something called white noise. What is white noise? It is a bunch of sounds with different pitches mixed together to create a very harmonious sound.
A good example of this is the sound you can hear coming from your fan, air conditioner, or humidifier.
It is called white noise because it is an analogy to white light. White light itself is a actually a combination of different colors of the rainbow giving the illusion of a white light. White noise is the same thing. It’s a combination of different sound giving the illusion of white noise.
Start up your white noise every night around the same time, it will be part of the routine to put your baby to sleep. Where can you get white noise?
If you have a smart phone, you can get apps on the store and I am pretty sure there are plenty of free ones. If you don’t have a smart phone then use your computer to play the white noise. There are plenty of white noise samples on youtube that you can play to your baby.
Don’t feed your baby at night
As ironic as it sounds, babies aren’t supposed to eat at night. Why? That’s because babies are humans. I had a friend who got accused of being a horrible mother. The reason is because she wakes up to feed her baby at night. That accusation was extremely shocking, because she already felt like she sacrificed a lot just to stay up and feed her baby at night.
Little did she know that she is harming her baby. What’s more important to a baby isn’t food at night. It is sleep. Babies need a lot of sleep, so if they constantly wake up, then they are also damaging their own health.
Train your baby to have her formula or breast milk every five hours during the day, and don’t feed her at night. Eventually she will sleep through the night until morning.
What to do when your baby falls asleep while eating
Now that you understand that your baby shouldn’t eat at night, another problem might arise. What if your baby falls asleep while eating during the day? Very easy, simply take of all your baby’s clothes while leaving her diaper on.
You are probably concerned that your baby will get cold and sick if her clothes are stripped. Not exactly. When you hold your baby in your arms, your body warmth is actually warm enough. Taking her clothes off will actually prevent the extra heat from causing her drowsiness.
However, this technique only applies in a normal environment at room temperature where the air conditioner is not on. If the air conditioner is on, then do try this.
Hope this helps
I know you are probably very excited to try all the techniques you just learned. Take it slowly and one step at a time. If you have any comments then leave it in the comment section below. Good luck.
Very good article. Lots of information and detail. I especially liked the tip about the mother putting a cloth next to her breasts to absorb her scent and then leave it with the baby at night. I didn’t know about the not feeding at night either. Thank you for the tips.
I found your hints and tips for helping baby ‘help herself’ to sleep really useful. I especially liked the idea of leaving a small towel or handkerchief with mum’s scent on it near baby at sleep time. Positive sleep patterns established early can last throughout a person’s lifetime.
I agree that sleeping and eating are two main activities for a baby, both needed for healthy development. Although I have not come across the technique you describe to encourage a baby not to fall asleep when eating, I definitely agree that developing routines are an important part of daily life for both parent and child.
I hope you found this information helpful. I am just glad that it would help the parents out there have more peaceful nights.
Very interesting page, and lots of good advice.
Using routine and repetition is one of the best and most effective ways to create good habits for your child.
I don’t agree with the waiting five minutes before reacting to the baby crying.
It’s important that the child feels safe, and if there is no reaction to it’s crying it will feel abandoned.
We tried it with our first, with no good effect. With the other two we never waited for more than a minute, then went in and calmed the baby down. This was done 2-3 times a night for a week or so, after that the baby feel quickly and comfortably, assured that mom and dad were always close.
Apart from that, great advice, good job with the site.
I wish you all the best.
Øssur
Every parent has their own opinion as to what works for their child. I understand that it’s heartbreaking to “ignore” your child’s crying for five minutes. It’s also important to reassure your child that you are nearby and protecting her.
However, my point is that a lot of children are over reliant on their parents and end up developing horrible habits. Children have practically zero experience in our world and heavily relies on our behaviors and patterns to solve their problems. Something as simple a sleeping should be a skill that children learn and master as young as possible.
Helping your children develop that requires good habits (letting them realize that help doesn’t always come immediately, but eventually, which is why it’s five minutes wait while not completely ignoring them). This is done for your child’s sake who needs to learn to sleep on her own so that her body and immune system can be maintained normally and healthily.
It’s also done for parents’ sake because parents need the extra sleep in order function well and take care of their children well. A lot of parents are overly stressed from lack of sleep, and as an end result, take out part of their anger on their own children. You might believe you are beyond abusive parents but when you are emotional like most people, there’s guarantee that your children won’t get hurt in the process.
This is the reason I believe it’s important to think long term and help your child develop her sleeping skills rather than being overly protective and missing out on what’s most important.
Hello there!
Thank you a lot. This looks like a lot of great and useful info. My friends just had a baby and they are really not getting any sleep during the night. I hope you suggestions will help them with their problem.
Keep up the good work by writing more useful posts.
Thank you.
Warm regards!
Not sleeping is a very stressful thing for parents and for the baby. I hope your friends can get the most benefits out of this. Times with a baby is precious so it’s better not to view it pessimistically.
I have two preteen children, but we are trying to have another child now. So I am reading all my old books as well as doing a little research. That is how I stumbled across your site. You have some great tips in there and it really helped refresh my memory. Thanks