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Sleep Baby Sleep by Kathy Fray

Sleep Baby Sleep by Kathy Fray

By Kathy Fray

Kathy is a wife, mother of three, managing director of BabyOK™ Products, columnist for Littlies magazine, online expert at various websites, popular speaker, author of the critically acclaimed book OH BABY... Birth, Babies and Motherhood Uncensored, and she is currently completing a degree in midwifery.

When heavily pregnant with your first baby, you can often begin to feel rather swamped with peoples' remarks regarding the pending sleep deprivation which is going to beset you once your baby is born...

"You should appreciate your peaceful night sleeps while you can!" "You know babies are easier to look after 'in' than 'out'!" "You'll be falling asleep at 8 o'clock out of shear exhaustion, you know – no more late nights for you for a long while".

Oh, and isn't it foul! All that condescending, patronising advice – with the most awful part being that you know it's actually probably true. Unless of course you ordered your model to be a baby with the customised luxury accessory of being born a great sleeper – oh no, did you forget to tick that box?!

Let's face it, probably the most insidious part of being a new Parent (primarily a new Mummy), is the reality that it can be a jolly long time until you will be able to relish eight hours of uninterrupted sleep again. Certainly, Sleep Deprivation must rate as one of the most challenging difficulties for the majority of new mothers.

You see, when you are woken from an uncompleted 'sleep cycle', and then go back to sleep, the cycle begins all over again from the beginning. So it is very possible to be having say five 2-hour naps over a 24 hour period – but still be REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep-deprived. And depriving human-beings of REM-sleep is recognized as an effective form of torture. Your body goes completely out of equilibrium, heavily due to the homeostatic imbalance with your brain's neuro-transmitters. You can't think straight, you're unable to concentrate, you feel despondent, your body easily becomes unwell – in fact you can even be an unsafe driver!

It is no understatement to realise, that learning how to teach your new baby to be a good sleeper, can pay huge rewarding dividends to you and your household – and to your baby, as scientific correlations are being made between children's intelligence and their sleep patterns.

However, the subject of parents directing infant sleep habits is a topic rife with controversy and oozing with "expert" opinions. But a good first place to start is to have a clearish understanding of how much sleep is "Normal" (bearing in mind that the only one thing we can truly name as "Normal" is a cycle on a Washing Machine).

Here goes...

  • Expect a Newborn to sleep about 16-20 hours in every 24 (of say 6-8 sleeps of 2-3 hours); with the evening sleep increasing by about a month old (to due date) of one 5-6 hour sleep at night (say 10pm-4am).

  • Expect a 2-3 month old to sleep about 15-18 hours in every 24, with about half of that at night (eg 7-8 hours overnight by 7-9 weeks of age, and say 9-11 hours overnight by 3-4 months), and the rest of Bub's sleep as three day-sleeps of say 1½-3 hours each.

  • Expect a 4-6 month old to sleep about 15-17 hours in every 24, with about two-thirds of that at night (say 10-12 hours overnight by 16-24 weeks, eg 8pm-6am), and the rest as 2-3 day-sleeps of say 2-2½ hours each.

  • Expect a 6-8 month old to sleep about 15-16 hours in every 24, with about 10-12 hours of that overnight (say 8pm-6am), and the rest as a morning and afternoon day-sleep, each of say 1½-2½ hours each.

  • Expect a 9-12 month old to sleep about 14-15 hours in every 24, with about 11-12 hours of that overnight (say 7pm-6am), and the rest as two short day-sleeps (say 1½-2 hours), or one long day-sleep (say 3-4 hours).

  • Expect a 12-18 month old to sleep about 14-15 hours in every 24, including a 3-4 hour afternoon sleep, and say 10-12 hours overnight. (The day-sleep is usually finally dropped between the ages of 2-4 years.)

The topic of Infant Sleep philosophies is an area where you will need to make some Black & White decisions, based on information mostly in shades of Gray. And the bad news is, that you will be needing to repeat that process on hundreds or even thousands of parenting decisions as your wee sweet little darling grows. Our lives are so complicated these days by data asphyxiation, that parenting instincts can be left paralyzed by the overload of opposing information!

As your own baby grows, you are also likely to start noticing desperate and sleep-deprived parents saying something like “We’re doing the Sleep Programme this week”, which is a strategic system promoted by Plunket to help teach a toddler or pre-schooler to sleep through the night. By that stage, many of the accidentally applied wing-it parenting theories (otherwise termed “making it up as you go”) have already been applied, and become negative rituals. I once heard a Definition of Madness being “Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result” – and that could certainly be no more true than witnessing parents struggling to find the Holy Grail of solutions for their little wee darling’s sleep dysfunctions.

So my personal goal here, in conjunction with The Sleep Store, is to provide you with an overview of some middle-of-the-road guidelines on the generally accepted Golden Rules of Do’s & Don’ts regarding infant sleep. Yes, you will be able to find “experts” who categorically disagree with some of these points, and you will also be able to find many experts who fervently agree with all points. It simply is no longer possible to give guidance on infant sleep that every expert agrees on. Only You will be able to decide what is right for your child and your household.

So here we go…

  • Know that a brand new baby usually sleeps a lot in its first 2-3 days, which is partially a “shell shock” response to the process of birth. (As an aside, it is also normal for a Day-2 baby to suckle a lot stimulating the milk comes in.) Then, often around the time that your milk is coming in, and you are leaving the hospital, your Bub’s true personality may start to be revealed.

  • Realise that nearly all infants then need to be taught how to fall asleep outside the womb … and that means you need to have learnt about the topic of infant sleep, such as watching the Plunket infant sleep videos, and reading the sleep chapter in my book OH BABY…Birth, Babies & Motherhood Uncensored.

  • Be assured, babies love predictable routines. From the first week during the daytime, use the routine of Sleep-Time , Feed-Time, Play-Time, Sleep-Time. In other words, babies should wake-up because they are hungry, not go to sleep because they are full. (Note that each awake Feed & Play time may only take 1½-2 hours – and there is no “play time” during the night.)

  • Put Bubs to bed at the first on-set of any Tired Signs: Tensing body, jerky arms and legs, fists clenching, face grimacing, wide-eyed blinks, or grumpy grizzles. (Even 10 minutes later, a baby can be Over-Tired which will show as an alert stare, flailing limbs, wailing cries, or yawning … now you’ve got a baby that can struggle to fall asleep unaided.)

  • Use a Swaddling Wrap from The Sleep Store. After leaving the cramped quarters of the uterus, newborns enjoy the security and touch swaddling provides, especially as initially they have no muscle control over their arms or legs.

  • Always put Bubs down to sleep awake. If a baby is unable to fall asleep on its own unaided and without props during the daytime, it will certainly be unable to fall asleep on its own at 4am too!

  • Avoid Sleep Props – Such as carrying-to-sleep, feeding-to-sleep, driving-to-sleep, night-lights, cot vibrators, … no sleep inducements, as they can create habitual sleep insecurities that may go on for years!

  • Although fiercely opposed in some quarters, many experts continue to agree that a baby being allowed to cry itself to sleep is a natural infant stress-release behaviour to diffuse tension. And science can back that theory up with the knowledge that crying stimulates endorphin mood elevation hormones which is why we can all “feel much better after a good cry”, as well as the hormone oxytocin which improves contentment and aids digestion.

  • Know that a not-over-tired infant crying itself to sleep has a normal pattern of the cries getting shorter and the silences between cries getting longer. As a rough example: 5min cry, 30sec silence, 2min cry, 1min silence, 30 sec cry, 2min silence, Fidgeting, Plummet to sleep.

  • When you’re putting Bubs to sleep, don’t make the house quiet – instead turn on the humdrum noise – even say a radio playing outside the bedroom door. Newborns are able to sleep through loads of background sounds (heck, your uterus was very noisy), and this is something that you can strive to continue to instill, to enable you to get on with your household noise.

  • Start differentiating from Week-1 how you greet Bubs at the end of each day-sleep, in comparison to night-sleeps. During the daytime, use lots of energetic enthusiasm, such as “Hi Baby! How are you? Did you have a nice sleep? I bet you’re hungry!” But at nighttime, keep yourself and the atmosphere mellow and peaceful.

  • Cluster-feed Bubs in the late afternoon and evening with extra feeds, to provide Bubs with that “Christmas Turkey Dinner” sensation, ready for its longest sleep.

  • An abdominal sleep-wrap or infant sleep cushion can be very useful to support your newborn to lie alternating on its sides and back to avoid developing a “flat-head”.

  • Once the baby is a few months old and becoming more wriggly in its cot, our fifty-year-old wisdom of the BabyOK™ Babe-Sleeper is very useful for the following two years to allow the infant to roll from side-to-side and sit-up; but inhibit the infant from kicking its blankets off and moving all around the cot getting arms and legs stuck through cot-bars, and stopping the toddler standing to fall out of its cot.

At the end of the day, the journey of teaching your infant to sleep through the night may be a fairly smooth ride, or could end up one of the toughest and rockiest expeditions you will face in your lifetime.

So perhaps the most valuable advice we can give you, is not to try to travel this path without a “map”. Help is available and information is accessible, so use it – because extreme sleep deprivation is often a retrospectively preventable torture.

Buy The Book:
Read chapter-5 of Kathy Fray’s popular book OH BABY…Birth, Babies & Motherhood Uncensored, which clearly explains Kathy’s 12 Golden Rules and 12 Magical Secrets and 20 Do’s & Don’ts on successful infant sleep.