Sleep Strategies for the New Parent: Months 4-12
Let me guess: You spent nine months becoming an expert on pregnancy and childbirth but forgot to read up on how to care for your newborn? The adrenaline and pain killers have worn off and a few sleepless nights have made you realize that so much of parenting revolves around sleep? This series will guide you through the early days of motherhood using the lens of sleep. Grab some goals along the way so you can emerge unscathed from the fog of new parenthood.
MONTHS 4-12 Goal: Sleep Through the Night
Once solid food enters the picture and naps start to drop, baby will be ready to sleep through the night. Night feedings, once so essential for nutrition, shift to comfort feeds and eventually disappear altogether.
As the months pass, your baby will start to consolidate stretches of sleep, dropping a nap in the process. For instance, your newborn will sleep away most of the day, waking only to feed. But soon you’ll notice some sleep patterns emerge. Baby might nap early morning, mid day, and late afternoon. Then, he will want to stay awake for longer stretches, which means naps shift to mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and the third nap becomes sporadic or drops altogether.
When my kids dropped their late-afternoon nap, we filled that time with an evening stroll (so if they really needed sleep, they could cat-nap for 15 minutes in the stroller). An early dinner also kept the kids occupied when they would previously have been napping. By six months they had started to eat solid food. As I prepared the evening meal, the babies could hang out in their highchairs trying to grab Cheerios with their new pincher grips.
With solid food comes messy eating, so this is also a good stage to make bathtime a flexible time-filler in place of a late-afternoon nap. Bathtime can stretch into 30 minutes of water play, especially once baby learns to sit up. A bath can be a great sleep cue as well, signaling that the day is coming to a close. If you have a happy bather, use the bath splash time to burn off some energy before bed. If you have a tearful bather, those fussy tears will still serve a purpose, wearing baby out so she’ll be ready for the relief of the cozy towel, snuggly p.j.s and peaceful bedtime.
When baby is starting to get extra nutrients from solid food and naturally sleeping for longer stretches, it’s time to phase out night feedings. Your pediatrician can let you know when baby has gained enough weight and is consuming enough calories during the day to eliminate milk at night. After several months of drinking milk around the clock, this will at first seem crazy. Press on! Baby will adjust. You can either drop night feedings cold turkey, reduce their frequency, or reduce the amount of milk consumed in a session.
Baby may still wake up for a comfort feed even though he no longer needs a full meal of milk. You might find that a short, three-minute feed does the trick. If you are bottle feeding, cut back on the number of ounces you prepare. If you are nursing, release the latch as soon as baby calms down or starts to doze off. Then, set baby back in his crib.
Use your instinct to tell whether baby is actually hungry and should eat at all or whether he would be satisfied with another soothing method like a pacifier, a quick hug, or rub on the back. Seal the deal by quietly saying the phrase you employ at bedtime (such as “It’s time to sleep” or “Let’s get you tucked into your cozy bed”) or humming a few bars of your goodnight lullaby. Keep it short and unemotional so it just serves as a sleep cue rather than stimulation.
Unless you are intentionally co-sleeping, resist the urge to bring baby into the parents’ bed for comfort feedings. There’s a good chance one or both of you will fall asleep. In addition to this being unsafe for baby from a crushing or entangling perspective, it also reinforces a pattern of baby expecting a warm body next to him every time he falls asleep. While this might be sweet and precious for a season, the long-term implications spell out a lack of quality sleep. Everyone sleeps best in his own sleeping spot.
Before long and with any luck, your child will cease night wakings altogether. To move the process along–or if you are just plain fed up with night wakings that require your participation–enlist some techniques from bedtime sleep training to teach kids to fall back asleep on their own. While it might involve a few tears while baby “cries it out” or a seemingly endless stint of popping pacifiers back into mouths, you all will be more well-rested in the long run.
Read the rest of the sleep series here:
MONTHS 0-1: Recover and Recreate Womb
MONTHS 1-2: Correct Night vs. Day Confusion
MONTHS 2-3: Establish Structure and Habits
Comments
Post a Comment