Sleep. When it comes to a newborn or infant, it can be both a valuable asset and a fond memory for a time long ago when you could go to sleep when you wanted and wake up when you felt like it. Cherish those memories. Hold them dear. Speaking of making your own bedtimes, it is important that you start figuring out your baby’s bedtime as well. In today’s blog, we wanted to tackle the age-old question of when a baby should start having a bedtime and how it can benefit both parent and child. If you have any tips or experiences with this, please let us know in the comments! We look forward to the discussion.
Defining Terms: What Do We Mean When We Say “Bedtime”?
For older kids, say from ages 3 to 17, it is relatively easy to determine a bedtime. It can be pretty much whatever you say it is as the parent. But, with a baby, especially one under a year old, it can be difficult to both determine a bedtime and to enforce one as well.
What we mean when we talk about bedtime for this article, we are referring to the beginning of the longer stretch of sleep that a baby enters into each evening, generally between the hours of 8pm and 11pm. This bedtime window is quite large, as you can see, but since every baby is different, it is difficult to give a more exact time for when they start this end of day sleep period.
What we can encourage you to do is to start tracking when your baby seems to be consistently getting sleepy and eventually going down during this window. Once you have maybe 7 to 10 night’s worth of tracking data available, then you can start to look for a pattern of when they naturally want to go down. Let’s say, 8pm. Once you have that, then you have your “bedtime” window. The perfect age for determining and setting a specific bedtime is not something that is necessarily set in stone, but we recommend starting to experiment with it around 6-8 weeks of age, because this is when your baby starts to recognize patterns as well as their day/night cycles have had some time to mature by then.
How To Capitalize On Your Baby’s Bedtime Window
Once you have the window identified, it’s time to leverage it! If you know when your baby’s natural nocturnal sleep cycle is going to start, then you can do a lot to prepare for it to help them sleep better, sleep longer, and wake more rested and in a better mood.
- Make sure to feed your baby a full meal just before or around 30 minutes before their determined “bedtime”. This will help them sleep longer and more contently!
- 1 hour before bedtime, it’s time to dim the lights, lower the sound levels and get your baby into their sleeping attire.
- Between 1 and 2 hours before bedtime: this is a great time for a nice relaxing bath, especially if you have some baby safe lavender soap or lotion which will naturally encourage them to get sleepy.
- 2 hours before bedtime, double check the temperature in the house. Night temperature in your baby’s sleep environment should be between 68-72 degrees. If it is not warm enough for them, then they will wake sooner and sleep less soundly.
Room temperature is really important to monitor for your baby’s safety and minimizing the risk of SIDS. If you don’t already, please get a baby monitor that has a temperature feature or an actual digital thermometer to keep in your baby’s room, that will send you alerts if the temperature goes higher or lower than the set ideal range.
Favorite Digital Thermometer – app to your mobile device for alerts
Before You Go
We hope you enjoyed learning about tips for determining your baby’s ideal bedtime. If you would like to know more about this, our sleep programs or any of our excellent newborn care services, we are happy to help. Just contact us and we can go over your options and help you find the best path for your little one. We hope these tips have helped you along your journey. If you have any questions about helping your baby to sleep better, or about your baby in general, please reach out to us HERE. We are experts in all things baby and sleep and would love to help!
If you have questions about your child, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We would love to help. Please reach out to us here! We always look forward to hearing from you.
