Tips To Help Your Newborn Sleep through the Night

Your heart can swell with affection when you observe your newborn sleeping. However, your heart can race when you’re unable to get to her to remain asleep through the entire night. It’s even worse when she’s awake all night and wants to be held. It finally dawns on you that staying up all night and the disrupted sleep is taking a massive toll on you. You’re tired, your nerves are utterly frayed, and your partner and the rest of the family become targets of your emotional turmoil.

The problem is that new moms are usually not privy to making a baby stay asleep all night. Of course, there are secrets to achieving this. Often, it’s assumed that the baby will start sleeping throughout the night on her own. The truth is that moms can cultivate the right sleeping habits in their newborns from day one. This is the stuff that nobody enlightens you, although every new mom should know.

Follow these 5 tips to make your baby sleep uninterrupted at night and understand the importance of sleep for your newborn!

• Swaddle

From day one to about five months, newborns naturally acquire a startle reflex, where they experience a falling sensation, which results in jerking motions, and the infant will wake up at night. Swaddling the baby nice and tight stops them from startling themselves awake, promoting better and more extended sleep patterns in newborns. Once the baby can get their arms out and roll over, this marks the end of swaddling. But it is also okay to cuddle and rock your baby to sleep. You could also learn to do some baby massages to help them relax.

• Dreamfeed

This is the feeding the baby is given before they go to sleep, and it helps avoid the scenario of the child waking in the middle of the night when moms have finally drifted off to sleep. This is what moms hate the most. Just when you’ve fallen asleep, and the infant wakes up crying. Feeding your baby before bedtime can make her sleep longer, which also affords you enough sleep time.

Shorten the length of naps in the day.

Allowing your baby to sleep for longer during the day may translate into long stretches of wakefulness during the night. Ideally, your baby shouldn’t exceed 2 hours when taking a nap. If you use the help of a confinement nanny during your postpartum period, you can inform her to break up the length of naps during the day to allow your baby more nighttime sleep.

• Early bedtime

While this sounds self-explanatory, many parents delay their baby’s bedtime, believing they would sleep for a more extended period the following morning. By pushing back the bedtime, the chances are that your baby will be exhausted by the time you put her down and are likely to resist going to sleep. The ideal bedtime is between 8 and 9 p.m. Besides that, the bedroom environment is also important, so having dim lights could set the sleepy mood for babies. MumChecked is a one-stop mum and baby products shopping site that offers a variety of nursery products to help your baby sleep better.

• Consistent bedtime routines

A well-known fact is that babies love routine and predictability. As such, creating a regular bedtime routine for your infant is crucial for better and longer sleep times. A pre-nap routine can include taking the newborn to her room, closing the curtains, putting the baby in her colt, turning on the white noise, singing a lullaby or giving a cuddle. On the other hand, a bedtime routine is usually a little longer and includes a bath, body rubdown, reading a book, offering a dream feed, swaddling the baby, and a few cuddles. Adhering to the same bedtime routine conveys a message to the baby that it is time for sleep.

• Wait before responding

If your infant happens to wake up at night, wait for a little bit before answering her cry. Parents usually respond as soon as possible following their baby’s cry. At times, babies need to fuss and whimper a little bit as part of learning how to get back to sleep without your intervention. If you respond promptly, your baby won’t know how to self-settle. Thus, allow her to fuss and whine a little. Soon, she’ll go back to sleep by herself.

Getting your infant to sleep uninterrupted at night isn’t as hard as previously thought. With a couple of small adjustments, your baby will in no time learn to sleep peacefully during night-time.

Importance of Sleep For Newborns

• Growth

A normal baby’s weight doubles by around five months and doubles by around twelve months. This is a lot of growth in such a short period, and good sleep plays an important role in supporting the babies’ growth. Generally, an infant’s sleep can be divided into two phases: REM sleep and non-REM sleep.

As babies sleep, they will cycle through non-REM and REM sleep, which determines how light or how deep they sleep. Both of these sleep stages are beneficial for your baby’s growth. For instance, REM sleep is critical to an infant’s development as it consolidates memories.

On the other hand, “somatotropin” is a growth hormone which is released throughout the day, but “approximately 80% of it is only released soon after a child or adolescent is in the Non-Rem stage of sleep.” Other than that, not having enough sleep could also affect a baby’s physical development. 

Newborns usually sleep for around 16 hours every 24 hours. However, all babies are relatively different, and their sleep patterns can vary a lot. Newborns tend to have day/night confusion due to their immature circadian rhythm, which may cause them to nap longer during the daytime and be fully awake by night. This can be particularly exhausting for parents to get used to in the first few months.

Like a Singapore confinement centre, PEM’s in-home confinement nannies can help new parents with day and night baby care and night feedings so that the parents are able to get a restful sleep and feel recharged the next day.

• Weight Gain

Some studies suggested that babies with short sleep duration could lead to childhood obesity. The ideal hours for babies to sleep would be 16 hours; hence, less than 12 hours during infancy appears to be a risk factor for overweight and adiposity in preschool-aged children. Thus, not only does sufficient sleep help babies grow, but it also helps set a good foundation for their healthy weight gain.

• Mental Development & Learning

Your baby’s brain roughly doubles in size in their first year, and most babies’ brain development happens during sleep. When babies sleep, it allows the connections between the left and right hemispheres of their brains to form. Furthermore, your baby’s brain synapses are also formed when they sleep. Synapses are something like the pathway for information to travel from one part of your brain to the other. When your baby sleeps in their first 3 years, over 1,000,000 million neural connections are formed per second. Not only that, your baby’s brain stores what they’ve learned in a day during their sleep. Hence, having sufficient sleep is crucial for your baby’s cognitive development.

• Immune System

Sleep is important for babies’ immune systems as they are still immature and not as strong as adults. It usually takes time for immunity to develop, and sleep plays a role in this. If your baby is sleep deprived, they will be more prone to disease and infection, and it can affect their recovery time. Being ill could also negatively impact their sleep, disrupting their sleep cycle and giving them less quality sleep overall. 

Things can seem overwhelming, especially for new mummies who need the same extra care and sleep just as much as their newborns. PEM Confinement Nanny service offers new baby confinement care services which help ensure both the mother and the newborn get the best care and sufficient rest during the first month. Learn more on our website now!