As moms, we’re ALL trying our best. There are HUNDREDS of different ways to be a parent and no way is the “best way”. Yes, I know that everyone has an opinion about crying it out as a way to help your baby sleep through the night. And, it’s easy nowadays to just go on social media to add your two cents and to tell people that they’re doing it “wrong”.
When my youngest, London, was born, I created a series of blog posts about newborn sleep that walked through my experience with having her home the first 5 weeks.
As a sleep training consultant, I have helped so many mamas and babies get the sleep that they need, but every newborn is different! I had a lot of ups and downs with London.
Now, I have decided to clean up my previous posts and make them into one good blog post. I want to help other mamas with newborns who won’t sleep. So, here’s my comprehensive blog post on what newborn sleep training can look like from the beginning and how moms can help newborns sleep well from day one.
I want mamas out there to get a realistic look into how to establish healthy sleep patterns for newborn babies. Furthermore, I want to help mamas figure out how to deal with the millions of wrenches our babies throw into the mix.
First step in establishing good sleep for your newborn: If you haven’t already, download my FREE newborn sleep guide. It’ll give you a good rundown that you can print and keep with you!
When it comes to establishing healthy sleep patterns for a newborn, we have to prioritize. My two main priorities right out of the gate with London were orienting day/night and getting full feedings.
Firstly, we DO NOT want wakeful periods at night. Especially, when trying to maximize newborn sleep.
It’s hard enough that we have to get up so often to feed them. When it takes an hour or two for them to fall back to sleep it’s extra painful. Orienting day/night is going to be challenging.
I made the mistake with my first baby of wanting too much awake time during the day (so she’d sleep at night, right?). Well, I was inadvertently making her overtired! With London, I had trouble finding the right balance of day time wakefulness. You don’t want to make your baby overtired but you still want to get them to get nice and sleepy after being awake.
It’s hard to wake a sleeping baby and figure out what her natural routine is before you start intervening. But you want to start making the awake times during the day a little longer and trying to get baby to have nice, full feedings before bedtime. This will help them sleep through the night longer for that first stretch of sleep.
London had about 30-60 minutes of wakeful/stirring time before she fell back to sleep. This was probably due to gas, since newborns aren’t used to gas or tunny troubles.
Newborns sleep 16-20 hours a day so to keep trying to figure out how much awake time baby needs for optimal sleep.
As a general rule, newborns shouldn’t have wakeful stretches longer than 1 or 2 hours.
This is hard because the pressure they feel to sleep is STRONG.
It feels nearly impossible to keep them awake to continue eating, but we want them to nurse for as long as possible to promote milk production. Plus, it will help them get longer stretches of sleep.
In my experience, it takes 20+ minutes per side for a good, full feeding. This differs for each person.
Play detective. Figure out what her little nuances are and tune in (as much as possible) to what different things mean. But try not to let the second-guessing go overboard and stress you out.
It’s all too easy to neglect yourself when you have a baby. You have all this adrenaline from having a new baby and you don’t feel as exhausted as you really are. Here are a few concrete suggestions to boost your self-care:
I’ve heard way too many moms tell me they think they had postpartum depression but didn’t realize it until after the fact. Scary thoughts are normal. You do not have to feel shame about them. When they intrude and inhibit your life, take the time to talk with a professional who specializes in postpartum anxiety and depression.
Pay attention to yourself and your emotions. You matter, momma.
Medication is so helpful and it doesn’t mean you’re broken. Do what you need to feel happy and feel like yourself. Self-care is NOT selfish.
We’re still trying to orient day and night and getting a nice routine down. With London, most of the week was pretty consistent with:
She squirmed a lot at night and dropped her paci, and again that could be from gas.
Swaddling is so important for newborns. It helps with relaxing baby and imitates her environment while she was in the womb.
Here’s my swaddle tutorial blog to get that swaddle nice and tight!
If your baby is being fussy and you’ve tried the swaddle, swinging, and other soothing practices, the culprit may be gas. Check out my gas and reflux guide for newborns!
Have them fall asleep, propped on you, on their stomach. Don’t let baby fall asleep on their stomach in the crib, but if they are propped at an angle on you, it helps a lot to get rid of that reflux.
You can’t spoil a newborn, so if baby falls asleep in the swing, that’s OK. You want to make sure baby is getting all the sleep that they need. And, if your baby is having signs of acid reflux, talk to your doctor about your medicine options and how to move forward!
For London, this is when we got her on Zantac and it made the world of difference! Read more about how to spot reflux.
At this point, orienting baby to day and night should be getting better and better. Schedules should keep getting more predictable. If your baby is still going through tummy troubles or reflux, this might set things back a little. Just give it time, try different medications and see what’s working better with your baby.
Baby should also have more alert time after those feedings. Again, getting those nice, full feedings before bedtime will help baby sleep for longer.
If you haven’t introduced a bottle yet, do so this week. Even if you are planning to be a stay-at-home mom, it’s so worth it to get them used to a bottle as soon as possible.
There will be times that you’ll need to leave your baby for a doctor’s appointment, date night or a solo grocery trip and it will be a giant relief if you know they’ll take a bottle in your absence.
Give your baby an ounce or two of expressed breast milk once or twice a week, and they’ll be golden.
If you’re not planning to pump a ton, I am totally in love with this manual breast pump.
It feels so natural and I love how quick it is. In less than 30 seconds you can be set up and pumping.
For those mamas that pump a lot, this is my favorite double-electric breast pump. I’ve tried several, and the spectra is amazing. And this hands-free pumping bra is an absolute must.
At this point, things should be getting into a rhythm! London’s routine was this same(ish) pattern pretty regularly around this time:
Sleep at night should also be getting progressively longer and longer. Nighttime and daytime feedings should also be getting pretty solid as well.
Around 4 weeks, a lot of mamas start to feel like they’re finding a groove. If you’re not in a groove yet, don’t fret. You’ll get there.
If you’re still feeling super duper overwhelmed there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Motherhood is hard and hormones are a rollercoaster.
Lots of moms also start to get impatient that their postpartum body isn’t bouncing back as quickly as they’d like.
Your baby needs all those nutrients. Eat cleaner if you want to, sure, but don’t restrict your caloric intake.
You will be eating way more than you did when you were pregnant—you’re still nourishing a full human entirely from your body, and now she’s not on the inside anymore squishing your stomach capacity.
Be patient with yourself.
It took 9 months to make a baby and may take just as long to “bounce back” to your new normal.
You may find yourself with a discontented newborn. There are several reasons for this:
Your baby is probably more alert than she was a few weeks ago. This may mean that she needs more help going to sleep.
Remember: you can’t spoil a newborn so go ahead and rock her to sleep, use the swing, snuggle her, wear her in a backpack or wrap, etc.
And, don’t forget to swaddle that baby nice and tight! See my swaddle tutorial for in-depth instructions.
Lots of parents think their babies don’t like to be swaddled, but my experience shows that most often the swaddle is just too loose.
Our aim right now is to do whatever we can to make our babies as happy as possible. We’ll work on fostering good habits and self-soothing later.
Preventing over-tiredness now sets the stage for smooth sleep training in a few months.
Remember: tiny babies don’t like to be awake for more than an hour or so at a time.
Week 5 is where we saw London take a big step backward in her sleep at night. During week 4, we were getting 7.5-hour stretches of sleep. At the end of this week, we slept 2-4 hours at a time at night.
Sometimes, for no good reason, things fall apart. It’s hard not to lose hope when you have 2 or 3 bad nights, but this is just a temporary phase.
A 6-week sleep regression is VERY common. My guess is that we hit it a week early. Two major things happened this week that were worth noting.
Eating can become a battle. You might start to think that your baby is just eating faster that’s why they start fussing after 5-10 minutes. Try to keep feedings at 20 minutes and make sure you look for signs of reflux or gas.
At around 6 weeks, it’s common for babies to be more awake and alert and have a tougher time drifting into sleep with less effort. As a result, it’s REALLY easy to over-stimulate them.
Don’t panic that your baby is bored or feels neglected for not being able to see everything that is going on. It sounds silly as I write it, but as parents, we’re ALWAYS projecting our own thoughts and feelings onto our kids.
It’s important to pick up on their newborn sleep cues during this time because they’ll try and push through them when something exciting is going on.
I needed to use sleeping aids like pacifiers, swings and rocking her to sleep WAY more during week 5.
But remember, babies can’t self-soothe yet, and she won’t get into bad habits this early in life.
Objective #1 for good sleep throughout LIFE is preventing over-tiredness. So, do what you have to do to keep that baby calm and getting all the sleep she needs.
Have you heard of Dr. Harvey Karp’s 5 S’s for soothing a fussy baby? You’ll need all the tricks you can find to soothe madame fussy-pants when you hit this week too.
Do you feel better about sleep already? There is hope, momma. I sure packed a lot of information on this blog! There is so much more to learn about sleep training an infant, sleep regression, correcting sleep issues with a toddler and even improving adult sleep or chronic insomnia!
If you still have questions or want a more tailored sleep training guide, I have a sleep training book you can find on my education and sleep products page or you can purchase a sleep training consultation by yours truly, The Peaceful Sleeper!
xoxo,
Chrissy
In this post, I’ll cover attachment-based sleep training approaches. However, first, we need to go over the difference between healthy and unhealthy attachment. How can you get better discerning your child’s wants vs. their needs?
Toddlers are a whole different ball game when it comes to sleep training. They aren’t a little baby that is willing to follow a schedule anymore; they’re starting to be more independent and, more importantly, they’re starting to push boundaries. They’re starting to test, “what will mom do for me?” and seeing how far they can take it.
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With your newborn, it’s important to get them into a nice and snug swaddle.
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Hey Mama’s,
welcome to the “Sleep” blog posts page! Our aim for this page is to inform you on everything (drum roll please) sleep! I’ll mostly be sharing posts on newborn and toddler sleep and how to maximize their down time, but you will also see some blogs about adult sleep help as well! Having great sleep is so important to not only your child’s health, but yours as well and these blogs are here to help!
Xoxo,
Chrissy
Preventing over-tiredness is the key to blissful, tear-free sleeping
It seems counter-intuitive but the more baby sleeps, the more he will sleep. Sleep begets sleep. The biggest mistake parents make when it comes to sleep for their babies is underestimating how much they actually need. Starting the day off right is your biggest asset, and that means starting with the first nap. Read More
