Developing Good Sleep Habits

• Help your baby to learn to distinguish between daytime and nighttime hours. This can be achieved by keeping your child's room dark and quiet at night, and refraining from involving the child in social activity at inappropriate hours.
  
• Create a ritual or permanent pattern of behavior before bedtime. This can include bathing, feeding, a story or music and other calming behaviors or ideas about "quality time."
  
• Try to end all social rituals, pampering and feeding before the baby is put into her crib to go to sleep. Encourage your child to fall asleep in his/her crib from a wakeful state even when it involves a brief "protest."
  
• Try to learn to identify your baby's symptoms of tiredness and respond appropriately to her sleepiness signs and rhythms. Changes in the timing of sleep or other considerations can be made gradually and at a very slow pace, and not during drastic and short interventions.
  
• Refrain from exaggerated and quick reactions to light crying or other forms of protest during the baby's falling asleep process. In many cases, briefly waiting will end in the baby's falling asleep without help.
  
• If you enjoy communal sleeping with the baby when she's young, do it happily and out of free choice. It is desirable to refrain from developing this pattern as a response to the baby's sleep problems if you don't want it to develop into a rigid pattern that will be hard to change later.
  
• It is very desirable to refrain from giving sweet food and drink during the night. There is no need for parents to purposely wake-up their babies for feedings if the babies are healthy and well-developing. Their sense of hunger will self-regulate their schedule.
  
• The baby's daytime naps do not usually influence her nighttime sleep (other than if they take place late in the evening), and therefore, try not to prevent their occurrence. In most cases, inappropriate prevention of naps would lead to more severe problems at night.

Source: Sleeping

I had a hard time to sleep when my daughter was 1 month old because she will sleep at 5pm then will wake up at 12 in the midnight. I want to cry because I want to sleep. I have no choice because I don't want my hubby to wake up in that time. He had to work tomorrow. What I do is I sleep with my baby in the morning. That's a MOM, you need to sacrifice for your child.

by: jil0504 at 13:23 | link | comments

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