How to put your baby to sleep

Unless you enjoy rocking your baby so much that you want to do it several times a night, you may wish, by the time your child is five or six months old, to alter the way you put him to bed in the first place. You need not deny yourself the joy of rocking him, but rock him when he is wakeful. That way your baby gets a bonus: he is fully aware of the pleasure of snuggling in your arms. When it is bedtime, put him into his crib in his favourite sleeping position, tuck him in, and kiss him good night and turn off the lights, perhaps leaving a night light on. Leave the room so he will get used to falling asleep alone. If he protests, you can pick him up and cuddle him, or do some quiet chore such as sorting his laundry.

Or you can leave the door open and give evidence of your presence just outside his room by talking and making soft other soft noises as you move about. In some cases a few evenings of this routine is sufficient for your baby to learn how to go to sleep on his own and he will apply that experience whenever he awakens in the middle of the night but if your child reaches the age of five or six months and is still demanding your attention throughout the night, you may wish to try the special sleep training program devised by some pediatrician specializing in sleep problems.

Routine for bed time!

It is not wise, however, to try to achieve this ideal state by ignoring the nighttime cries of your babies. In the first few months of your baby’s life, you should be more concerned with responding to her needs than worried about establishing a correct sleep pattern. If she is crying at night, it is probably because she is wet or cold or hungry or uncomfortable, and you can solve those problems for her. The quicker you answer her call for help the easier she will be to soothe. If good sleep patterns do not develop on their own you can take remedial steps later.

What you can do, during these early months is establish a bedtime routine that will help your baby build a good sleeping habits. It is perfectly natural for a mother or father to want to rock a new baby to sleep every night. That is after all one of the supreme pleasure of being a parent. But by the age of three months, many babies are ready to start sleeping through the night. That is they no longer need a middle of the night feeding and are far enough along in their sleep development that they pass the night moving through various stages of sleep broken intermittently by brief arousals. If your baby has learned that the only way to fall asleep is to be rocked. He will not get back to sleep when he awakens alone in his crib. He may not be cold or hungry and his diaper may even cuddling arms?
Where is the rocking motion? He has no choice but to summon your assistance in the only way he know: he takes a lungful of air and stars howling.