Setting A Bedtime Ritual
Any casual glance at child rearing guides will reveal that
particular attention is paid to baby sleep habits. The reason is
fairly obvious: one of the most difficult things for a new
parent to get used to is dealing with constantly being awoken in
the night by a newborn. There are no hard and fast rules to
getting your baby to sleep well, as all newborns are different.
There are, however, some baby sleep tips you can employ that
will help. The important thing is to understand that your
judgment as a parent is paramount: don't get stubborn with tips
that don't seem to work, and try a wide variety and things to
find out what works best for you and your baby.
A good place to start, in terms of baby sleep tips, is to
establish a bedtime ritual for your baby. The reason that your
newborn doesn't sleep well through the night at first is because
he is used to falling asleep with his mother. When he awakes in
the night he naturally cries for his mother - the only way he
knows how to go back to sleep. As your newborn grows older a
slow transition will occur whereby he learns to go to sleep on
his own, and - more importantly - when he wakes in the night he
can learn to fall back asleep on his own. Your goal as a parent
is to try and speed up this transition as much as possible, the
result will not only be a good night's rest for you, but a
development of better sleeping habits for your child in the long
term.
To get your child to sleep well on his own, focus on a
consistent bedtime routine. Babies are very dependant on
routines - their world is so narrow that they generally focus on
only a few things throughout the day - the way to create
transitions in their day, therefore, is to change how these
things are presented to them.
For example, your bedtime routine may consist of a warm bath, a
feeding and changing, and some rocking before bed. If you repeat
this every night your baby will slowly begin to associate these
things with sleep. Every night, then, your child will naturally
start to fall into a "sleeping mode" when you do these things.
If you are inconsistent, however - if, say, you only bathe him
on odd nights, or change the order of bedtime events - you will
confuse the child and he will be unsure of what happens next: he
won't know whether he's going to sleep after his bath, or being
read a story.
A bedtime routine should also employ spending a good amount of
time with your baby. Even from a very young age, babies will
learn to manipulate their parents, and if you don't spend enough
time with your baby before he falls asleep, he will start to
stretch out the bedtime ritual in order to spend more time with
you.
In establishing a bedtime ritual for your child, you primary
concerns should be to make it consistent. To ensure better
sleeping habits for your baby, don't focus so much on what you
do before bed, rather, pay attention to doing the same things in
the same order every night.