Maintaining good sleep habits

Even if your baby takes readily to drifting off to sleep on her own, your troubles may not be over. At some point between seven and nine months, she may suddenly begin to protest with anguished cries your departure from her room each night. Her panic is a sign of separation anxiety, which emerges at about this time in a child’s life. She has become strongly attached to you and does not yet understand that when someone disappears from view, that person continues to exist and will return. She is afraid you are going away forever.
Soon after this time, the baby’s drive to master body skills such as walking becomes so intense that she often finds it difficult to unwind for sleep. You may discover her in the middle of the night crawling around in her crib or pulling herself up to a standing position, as though her drive to practice her skills outweighed her heed for sleep.
Help your baby find her own methods for soothing herself to sleep, while reassuring her that you are not abandoning her. One way to accomplish this double purpose is to casually leave and reenter the room several times after she has been put to bed, making reassuring sounds but concerning yourself with some other bit of business rather than hovering over your protesting child. Presents sometimes interfere too much at bedtime, when their babies really just need a chance to complain a little before setting down to some humming or jabbering and then to sleep. Small gestures can help ease a baby’s resistance to sleep. Let your child have a favorite toy or blanket for comfort when you leave the room. A night light that allows her to see her familiar surroundings when she awakens at night might also help.

Maintaining good sleep habits

Some parents swear that the best way for everybody to get a good night’s sleep is for everybody, parents and baby to sleep in the same bed or the same room. Their reasoning is that the baby soon gets onto the same sleep cycle as the parents and thus never awakens them during the night. They also contend that the child develops a feeling of security that he simply cannot achieve when he sleeps by himself. Some authorities maintain, however, that this arrangement actually makes it harder for anyone to get a good night’s sleep. And they say that many parents who use it only do so because it is easier than compelling a child to get back in his own bed when he arrives in his parents room at four or so in the morning. Where you want our child to sleep is a purely personal matter, of course, but if you are considering this arrangement you should bear in mind that once your child stars sleeping with you, it may be extremely difficult to switch back to separate accommodations, because the child will be so un happy about being displaced.



Even if your baby takes readily to drifting off to sleep on her own. Your troubles may not be over. At some point between seven and nine months, she may suddenly begin to protest with anguished cries your departure from her room each night. Her panic is a sign of separation anxiety, which emerges at about this time in a child’s life. She has become strongly attached to you and does not yet understand that when someone disappears from view that person continues to exist and will return. She is afraid you are going away forever.

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.

Baby's different form of sleep

To understand a child’s sleep problem, you need to know something about the nature of a child’s sleep. A full term infant emerges from the womb already practiced in two distinct modes of sleeping known as active sleep and quiet sleep. The form called active sleep in newborn infants is also known as rapid eye movement sleep. It is distinguished by slight but frequent body movements, irregular breathing changes in facial expression and the easily visible rapid movements of the baby’s eyes beneath his closed eyelids. In older children, dreaming takes place during REM sleep. In the quiet sleep mode, the infant’s breathing is regular and deep, and most other body movement is markedly diminished. In the first month however you may see fast body twitches, called startles, and rhythmical sucking notions while the baby is sleeping in this state.

At birth a full term baby divides his sleeping time roughly in half between active and quiet sleep. Until the age of three months, the baby falls directly into active, REM sleep; after about three months, he falls directly into active, REM sleep; after about three months he falls first into non REM, or quiet sleep. During the first six months of life the quiet mode of sleep evolves into varying stages similar to that seen in older children and in adults. When the child is in the deeper stages of non REM sleep, he can be very difficult to awaken. It is this kind of sleep that enables you to dress him in his pajamas and tuck him into bed without waking him up when he falls asleep on the sofa or floor. By the time he is six months old his sleep moves through cycles of non REM and REM sleep in a way which will remain fairly constant throughout life. In his REM sleep he may awaken if only for a few seconds. He may open his eyes examine his surroundings and shift his position. He might do this as often as nine or 10 times a night.

Child’s sleep Duration

Before you can help your child develop successful sleeping routines, you need some idea of how much sleep she actually needs having a realistic understanding of what to expect helps keep down your level of frustration. While a new born will sleep about 16 ½ hours out of every 24 hours, the average six month old baby will need only slightly more than 14 hours. After that the number of hours the average child sleeps drops about an hour each year until the age of four. Preschoolers need average about 11 to 11 ½ of sleep a night.

The timing and length of sleep periods also change as children grow older. A newborn may spread her sleep over six or seven periods evenly distributed throughout the day and night. But by six months, she probably will be napping only twice during the daytime and if you have helped her form good sleep habits, will have settled into regular over night sleep, waking you only occasionally. Your child will most likely abandon her morning nap early in her second year. While her afternoon naps may continue until three years of age or even later.



Although such information can serve as a yardstick for roughly assessing your child’s sleep patterns, do not worry yourself by making close comparisons. The figures are averages, and each child is an individual. For example some perfectly normal, healthy two and a half year olds may need only nine hours of sleep at night, especially if they nap well during the day. Others, equally fit, may snooze for 13 hours at night and may even get another one to two hours during the day. But if your child’s total daily sleeping time differs by several hours from what is indicated for her age group on the chart and if she consistently seems tired, irritable or overactive during the day you should consider the possibility that she has a sleeping problem and take steps to eliminate it.

Toilet Training

Although some children achieve the goal in a month or so, it is far more likely to take several months, and to be marked by odd behavior and frustrating setbacks. Do not be surprised, for instance, if your child develops a keen interest in what she has deposited in her potty. Letting her satisfy her quite natural curiosity with a close inspection, perhaps even a touch, usually takes care of the matter.

If your child resists using the toilet or has many accidents, do not mistake it for deliberate contrariness on her part. A fear of the big, noisy toilet underlies much toileting anxiety. Some toddlers withhold bowel movements to the point of becoming constipated, with resulting discomfort that causes even more anxiety. You may also witness unusual displays of fussiness or defiance during bath time, mealtime or dressing. Children often act this way when they are feeling angry over the pressure to use the toilet, or when they secretly fear that they cannot measure up to their parents’ expectations.

Anything that temporarily creates tension can result in backsliding in training: a family illness, a big trip, a new baby sitting arrangement. Whatever the causes of such setbacks never belittle or shame a child for having accidents: this can only lead to further anxiety and greater loss of control. With patience and persistence you will see your youngster through these minor difficulties and soon leave the diaper era behind for good. What are more you increased your child’s confidence in facing other challenges in the years to come.