How to Help Your Baby Sleep Through The Night
The sleep pattern of newborns is one of the most difficult issues that parents have to struggle with. As newborns’ sleep pattern is mixed up night and day, parents would be very tired of getting up from bed to feed or clean their baby during the night. However, good news awaits parents stated by KidsHealth:
Your baby is adapting to the sleep-wake cycle that her parents favor, and her stomach is growing and holding more breast milk or formula. That means she might even be sleeping up to seven or eight hours without waking up because of hunger. At about three months, if you feed your infant and put her to bed at 10:00 p.m., you may find yourself actually sleeping until dawn!
You can also find some important tips for helping your baby “sleep through the night”:
- Simply try to encourage more wakefulness during the day.
- Keeping her stimulated during this time may lengthen her night time stretch of sleep.
- Delay her actual bedtime until 10 or 11 p.m.
These methods were proven and worked for my children when they were small. When they were about two and half months old, they could sleep through the night from about 11pm to 5am, sometimes to 6am. Thus I could get very good nights sleep since then.
From my experience, some more important things have to be done before putting your baby to bed, though:
- The stomach of your baby must be full. Otherwise he/she will wake up in night because of hunger.
- Have a clean diaper on.
- Bed time routine is done, that might include a gentle talk to your baby, or reading, hug, kiss or prayer or the like. While your baby is drowsy, you can leave quietly.
- At times your baby would wake up during the night, don’t play with him/her. Change or feed some water (not milk) if necessary. It may be hard at first, but your baby will gradually learn to soothe himself/herself and go back to sleep.
Related post: