The post Baby sleep myths busted! appeared first on All4Baby.
]]>This is definitely a myth. Keeping your baby up longer at night or between naps will result in an overtired child. An overtired child will be fussy, cranky, have trouble feeding and take much longer to settle into sleep.
They will also be more likely to wake during the night and earlier in the mornings, and will only have very short naps the following day.
It is possible, but only if you have set the foundations for healthy sleep skills early and your child is developing good self-soothing strategies.
In this instance, you can usually expect babies to start sleeping through the night between three and six months of age (providing they are healthy and developing well).
However children that still rely on “props” to fall asleep, such as feeding/rocking/patting, etc. will more than likely continue to wake through the night. This is because they have never learned the ability to put themselves to sleep so they are unable to consolidate sleep cycles through the night.
They will often rouse after a sleep cycle and instead of using their own skills to return quickly to sleep they will cry out for their “prop” before they are able to go back to sleep.
It is very difficult to always put your baby in their cot/bassinet while awake and allow them to use their own skills to fall asleep when they are newborns, as they need to sleep often.
Parents will sometimes be out and about and need to put their baby to sleep in the pram, car seat or carrier. However it is important to be respectful of your child’s sleep needs and whenever possible give them the opportunity to attempt to fall asleep in their cot or bassinet. This is the place where they are going to get the best quality sleep.
Remember how challenging and disturbed your own sleep is if you have to sleep in the car, or even when staying in a hotel room as opposed to your own bed at home. If you always let your baby fall asleep in your arms they are never going to develop their own self-soothing skills.
Just remember that as your child grows, they get heavier and while you may find it easy to rock a newborn to sleep in your arms, it will not be as easy to do this with your one, two or even three year old.
It is never enjoyable to have to wake a sleeping baby, and the only reason I would suggest doing this would be to preserve a bedtime. As children get older their sleep needs change and sometimes too much daytime sleep (for an older baby or child) can have a negative effect on bedtime and sleeping through the night. However, the opposite is also true and over tiredness will also negatively impact night time sleep so it’s best to err on the side of more sleep as opposed to less.
Most children will usually drop their daytime nap around three or four years of age (providing they are getting their 11-12hrs of night time sleep). However, it is possible that children as young as two and a half years of age to drop their daytime naps. Before this age, a daytime nap or naps are very important to prevent over tiredness and recharge their little bodies for the remainder of the day.
This is a myth. For very young babies, the length of time for which they are able to sleep is largely determined by how quickly their little bellies empty after a feed. However, as your baby reaches the three to six month age, it is healthy sleep habits and good self-soothing skills (that can be introduced gently from birth) that will help your baby sleep for longer periods. It is always very important to ensure your baby is well fed and developing properly, but the addition of good nutrition throughout the entire day is more important than adding infant cereal to their bedtime bottle.
About the Author: Good Night is a child and baby sleep consultancy that specialises in helping parents with children who struggle to sleep soundly. For more information, visit: www.goodnightbaby.co.za
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]]>The post Use these tips to sleep train your baby! appeared first on All4Baby.
]]>It is important to communicate confidence and calm to your baby when you begin. He needs to see an emotion that makes him feel secure that you are comfortable with what you are doing.
It is no good to start with sleep training at bedtime only to relent later out of desperation and give your baby his ‘crutch’ (such as feeding to sleep). The message that your baby receives in this case is that he must cry long and hard to have the old method reintroduced. Any inconsistencies will simply prolong the process of sleep training.
Sleep training is an act of teamwork between you, your partner and your baby. It is completely essential that you all work together and do not undermine the process for each other.
If your child has developed a habit whereby he is dependent on you for sleep, he will protest within minutes (probably even seconds!) of you leaving the room: This is where the hard bit comes in. Accept that your baby is going to cry, however, you are going to control how long he is going to cry for and you are going to be there for him every step of the way. T
here are two methods of handling this – neither one is better than the other – do what feels right for you at the time. One thing though, remember to be consistent and stick to one method for at least a week.
If you are anxious about separating from your baby, and if you feel uneasy about leaving your baby on his own whilst he is learning to put himself to sleep, you may want to stay with him for the process. All sleep coaching is hard work and may be very emotionally draining, so if you feel angry and frustrated when your baby cries and feel that you might physically harm your baby out of tiredness and frustration, then this is not the sleep coaching method for you.
This method allows you to pick up your baby when he is crying and comfort him until he is calm, but it differs from the first method in that you actually leave the room for short periods of time from the beginning, before returning to pick him up to calm him once more. If you feel that you could possibly harm your baby physically (out of sheer exhaustion and frustration) this may the method of choice for you as you are able to step away from the situation for very short periods of time in order to catch your breath and re-focus on the goal in sight.
Changing unhealthy sleep habits is exhausting and the key to its success is to focus on the goal at the end of it all. Accept that you will be tired and frustrated at times, but try not to get bogged down in the immediate drama of the moment, and rather look at your long term goal.
The process of falling asleep unassisted is a skill that needs practice, so bear in mind that success comes only after a period of practice, so don’t give up!
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]]>The post Letting your baby cry it out appeared first on All4Baby.
]]>The 20th century was the time when “men of science” were assumed to know better than mothers, grandmothers and families about how to raise a child. Too much kindness to a baby would result in a whiney, dependent, failed human being.
Instead there is evidence all around (then and now) showing the opposite to be true.
According to a behaviorist view (completely ignorant of human development), the child ‘has to be taught to be independent’.
But, it can be proven that forcing “independence” on a baby leads to greater dependence while giving babies what they need leads to greater independence later.
Richard Ferber, author of Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, is the best-known advocate of this. The fact is that caregivers who habitually respond to the needs of the baby before the baby gets distressed are more likely to have children who are independent than the opposite. Soothing care is best from the outset. Once patterns are established, it’s much harder to change them.
Proponents of the cry-it-out method know that by six months, babies are wise to the fact that crying often results in being picked up, rocked, or fed — pretty good motivation to keep on crying. But once they realise no one is responding every time they cry, most will give up the crying game, usually within three or four nights.
Sometimes it’s just about setting limits that you will not nurse all night or replace a pacifier 10 times per night or rock your baby in the rocking chair for three hours and then every two hours after that. Those are all sleep associations that sometimes need to be broken (and not replaced with a new one).
The act of crying does nothing to teach baby to sleep and it won’t change his personality. Cry “it” out is simply letting baby find his own way to fall asleep and allowing him to cry out his frustration about not being able to get that pacifier replaced for the tenth time. None of us get better at something without practice.
There are conflicting opinions about the cry-it-out method as many think that there are only two methods to sleep training;
One study found that babies who were at least seven months old and were left for short periods to cry it out experienced no marked long-lasting effects. This may help to reassure you that short spells of crying it out won’t harm your baby.
1. Penelope Leach: author of Your Baby and Child.
Approach: Compassionate crying it out. If you leave your baby crying, he’ll feel abandoned and fear that your departure at bedtime, and any other time, isn’t safe.
When: Start at nine months. Babies can’t really learn that night-time is for sleeping until then.
What to do: Since the goal is to help your baby feel that bedtime is safe and happy, and that he can go to sleep on his own, don’t abandon him outright. Instead, keep to your enjoyable bedtime rituals and when your baby cries go into his room as often as you need to, reassure him, and leave. Leach writes: “You may have to repeat this over and over again, but it is the only sure way, eventually, to convince him both that you will come and that you will not get him up.”
2. Benjamin Spock, author of Baby and Child Care.
Approach: Cry it out.
When: Three months.
What to do: Say goodnight and don’t look back. Usually, after three nights of unchecked crying, your baby will start going to sleep by himself. Spock says that most babies will cry for up to 30 minutes on the first night, realise they’re not getting anywhere, and fall asleep. He writes: “I’m convinced that they are only crying from anger at this age…[Checking on her] only enrages her and keeps her crying much longer.”
3. William Sears, author of The Baby Book.
Approach: Sleeping with your baby or other responsive tactics. He writes: “The result of [crying it out] is usually the same: a strung-out mother and an angry baby, who will eventually exhaust himself to sleep – but at what price? We wish to put the cry-it-out approach to sleep, forever.”
When: From infancy until the child is ready for his own bed.
What to do: Consider sharing your bed with your baby for the first few months or more of his life. According to Sears, mother and baby sleep better and longer side-by-side, baby gets warmth, nurturing and a readily available breast if he’s breastfeeding, and babies thrive when they sleep near their parents. Plus, if the mother has returned to work, sleeping with her baby may help restore and build connections that can be frayed during the working day.
About the Author: Good Night is a child and baby sleep consultancy that specialises in helping parents with children who struggle to sleep soundly. For more information, visit: www.goodnightbaby.co.za
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