The first few days, weeks, and even months after your child is born can be chaotic and stressful to say the least. Sleep is so important to both parents and children at this stage, even the smallest amount of sleep deprivation can be tough for everyone in the house! Normal everyday tasks like cooking and cleaning, doing infant laundry or running errands becomes challenging. In this tired state, it can be easy to overlook common signs of poor sleep behavior in your infant let alone what you can do to help your baby. If your baby is having trouble sleeping for more than 30-45 minutes at a time, then one of the following issues may be at play. Read on to see if these tips can help you and your baby sleep better at night.
Break Out The Pacifier
If your newborn is having trouble sleeping or staying asleep, you may want to consider using a pacifier. Pacifiers can be really excellent tools, but remember this one tip. If you have to use it for all sleep, it becomes a dependency, which is just a sleep prop. Use the pacifier as a tool only. Also, as long as the pacifier is being used infrequently and as a tool, you should not have to worry about it interfering with latch or breastfeeding. This is quite rare.
Use with care! Pacifiers can be excellent tools to help extend sleep.
Swaddle Them Well
To most adults, it would seem a strange thing to tightly wrap your baby in a light fabric, reminiscent of a straight jacket from an insane asylum. BUT, to a baby, it can be just the thing to help them sleep! Babies are in every sense of the word newcomers to this world. They just spent the entirety of their little lives tightly constricted in the womb, which was all they knew until now. Swaddling them can help them go back to that known or happy place that they knew before being born. It really helps!
If your infant is having trouble getting to sleep or sleeping long stretches, then they may be in need of a good swaddle. Please remember, your baby needs to be swaddled snuggly. If a swaddle is loose, it is an asphyxiation risk and is unsafe!
Dim The Lights
It’s important to train your infant to know the difference between more active daytime and less active nighttime. Be sure to keep all bright overhead lights off as well as any TV or computer screens as well. These things can interfere with their natural circadian rhythm. Keep lights to a bare minimum at night time whenever possible. Purchase a few small, portable, adjustable lamps for your bedroom and changing room. There are a few battery powered ones that work excellently. Set these little lamps around the areas you most frequently use at night so that you can just easily reach over and turn them on and off as needed when changing or feeding your infant. This will help you reduce the need to ever turn on the overhead lights at night and will go a long way to helping your infant sleep better.
Crank Up The White Noise
It can be as simple as a box fan in the corner of the room or as elaborate as a specialized machine purpose built to generate it, but white noise can be a game changer. To help your infant sleep better, try setting up a white noise station in your room or the room in which they tend to sleep the most. Start up the white noise about 10 minutes before putting them down and keep it on all night until you are ready to start your day in the morning. This routine will help them to associate the white noise with night time and hopefully deep sleep. \
Keep in mind that an appropriate decibel level for white noise machines should be between 50-60 decibels. You can download apps to help you read the noise level.
Two of our favorite white noise machines:
Hatch (app enabled): https://amzn.to/3AsjXbs
Lectrofan: https://amzn.to/3NyIbUt
For The Road
Thank you for taking the time to read today’s post about getting your baby to sleep longer at night. Getting your baby to sleep can definitely be a process with varying challenges. If you have any questions about getting your baby to sleep, or your baby in general, please reach out to us HERE. We are experts in all things baby (we LOVE them) 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 look forward to hearing from you.
