What Can I Do To Teach My Baby To Sleep Longer Periods At Night?
Although some babies can settle on their own, even as newborns, other need to be nurtured to sleep. For the first few months of life, you should help your infant to fall asleep by rocking, cuddling, nursing, and bottle-feeding, or any other soothing, nurturing technique. You cannot ‘spoil’ your baby by providing this comfort, despite what your well-intentioned relatives or friends may tell you. Your baby needs this contact while falling asleep. Babies cannot always soothe themselves independently.
As your child develops more mature sleep patterns by 3 to 4 months of age, you can start to put your baby to bed drowsy but awake. You can still stay with him while he is falling asleep, feeding, rocking, or patting him in his crib, but you can start to decrease the soothing activities that he needed for the first few months of life. As long as your baby is thriving, by the time he is 6 months of age, you can start to decrease his nighttime feeding if you want to encourage longer sleep periods at night, and he will gradually eat more during the day to make up for the changes.
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Younger Infant (4 to 6 Months) Sleep Routine
To establish and maintain good sleep habits for your young infant:
- Establish a routine, even if it is very short (5 minutes to start), that will help teach your baby that something special happens just before bedtime. This could be as simple as singing the same lullaby or reading the same simple story at bedtime.
- Keep the routine consistent, putting your baby to bed in the same room. For an infant, consistency would mean that, whenever possible, your baby is in his own crib at home or daycare for naps and bedtime. Depending on your family life, work, and household responsibilities, you may find yourself letting your baby sleep in the car or the stroller frequently. This is not a problem for all babies. However, when possible, you should allow your baby to start her nap at similar times during the day, have a similar bedtime, and sleep in her own crib.
- Stop feeding your baby when he is drowsy but full. Instead of nursing or feeding him until he is fast asleep, put him in the crib (on his back) drowsy and let him learn to fall asleep without drinking at the same time. If he is bottle-feeding, don’t give him his bottle when you place him in the crib as he falls asleep.
- Try using a transitional object, such as a blanket or stuffed animal, that lets your child know it is bedtime. For a young infant, this can be sleeping with the same blanket in the crib. For a toddler or older child, this may be a soft stuffed animal or blanket.
- Give your child cues or signs that lets him know there is a difference between night and day. You want to help your baby to learn that night is for sleeping and day is for being awake. Although he doesn’t know this intuitively, he will learn by recognizing that you interact with him differently at night than during the day. Babies enjoy all the positive attention and cuddling that you provide. If you start to decrease (not stop) this positive interaction at night when your baby wakes up, he will slowly adjust to waking for shorter times at night and anticipate being awake in the daytime for your concentrated attention.
- Slowly decrease the amount of stimulation (light, noise, cuddling) you give your baby when he wakes during the night and increase the playful times you
have with him during the day. - When you are feeding your infant or changing his diapers during night wakings, keep the room light dim (just enough light to care safely for your
baby) and speak quietly.
