Ensuring Sweet Dreams: Top Tips For Helping Your Baby Sleep Soundly
If there’s one stressful commonality between parents, it’s bedtime. The daily fast-paced practice of looking after a newborn is one of the most rewarding experiences a person can go through, but all would agree that it’s also one of the most tiresome!
And when you’re tired, you need sleep – but more often than not, that isn’t happening. While sleepless nights are, of course, part and parcel of preparing to become a young parent, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things you can do to mitigate the effects.
In this article, we’ll explore a few tips to make bedtime a little bit easier, so that both you, your partner, and your baby, can up your percentage of restful nights and sweet dreams.
Getting the Timing Right
When it comes to maintaining as stress-free a bedtime as possible, consistency is absolutely crucial. While the actual time itself doesn’t matter much (schedule for when best fits your own routine), making sure you put your baby to bed at the same time every night will do you all the world of good.
Once you’ve chosen a time, you can focus on winding your baby down an hour or so beforehand: you could do so by scheduling bathtime close to sleep, by gently rocking them to first, or even by playing a lullaby or singing to them. Experiment and find what works best for you both.
Bedding and Environment
We all know just how much a good bed can improve how you sleep, and even though they can’t vocalise their preferences yet, this is no different for your baby. Selecting the right bedding for your baby’s bassinet is essential to ensuring their comfort and safety.
Bassinet sheets come in a wide variety of materials to ensure both softness and breathability, so take some time to investigate different options such as cotton, bamboo, flannel, and more. Once you’ve chosen the sheets, make sure that they’re fitted firmly and snuggly to the mattress, and pay attention to the positions your baby usually sleeps in so that you can arrange pillows accordingly. Also, keep the room at a cool temperature: 68-72°F (20-22°C) is considered ideal.
Milk and Feeding
You’ll have undoubtedly noticed how much hunger can affect the baby’s mood, so it’s no wonder the timing here can have a significant impact on how soundly they sleep.
Once again, consistency in feeding patterns is important, but as a general rule, ensuring your baby is fed reasonably close to bedtime (within an hour) increases your chances of having them be satisfied enough to sleep through most of the night. Of course, you also have to be careful not to overfeed or feed too close to bedtime, as this can have the opposite effect!
There’s only so much standardised advice that can be offered when it comes to navigating the complexities of sleep when you’re caring for a new baby; every situation is different. That said, the tips above represent the core tenets of what has been established to help things go as smoothly as possible. Try to have patience, and with some effort to cover your basics, you’ll have the best chance at a good night's sleep!