Tips To Help Your New Born 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 newborn right from day one. This is the stuff that nobody enlightens you, although every new mom should know.

Follow these tips to make your baby sleep uninterrupted in the night.

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 in the night. Swaddling the baby nice and tight stops them from startling themselves awake, promoting better and longer sleep patterns in newborns. Once the baby can get their arms out and roll over, this marks the end of swaddling.

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 for 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, a lot of parents delay their baby’s bedtime, in the belief that they would sleep for a more extended period in 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.

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

You May Also Read this : Why Is Sleep Important For Newborns & 8 Tips to Help

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  • PEM Confinement Nanny Agency

    We are a group of frontliners and support team members who are passionate about sharing our knowledge and experience in confinement care. Representing the largest confinement nanny agency in Singapore which has served over 250,000 mothers in over 30 years, we are all about sharing useful and insightful information based on our experience to help new parents navigate this exciting chapter of their life better.