Learn the following to understand your newborn’s sleeping patterns better:
- Newborns and babies have a sleeping pattern that is different from the adult’s. Every 30-45 minutes, a baby will enter a lighter sleep when they might wake up. For an adult, entering the lighter sleep happens every 90 minutes.
Why is this important?
-> When you know this, you understand that it is natural for your baby to wake up often, even during the night. Focus on learning what helps your baby fall back into sleep.
- Sleeping well, has to do with several things. Depending on your baby’s age and development stage, you will need to be ready to learn new things. But there is one thing that is true from the very first day of a newborn’s life. And it is as true for older children. And that is the need of feeling safe.
Why is this important?
-> If you understand the importance of feeling safe for your baby, you understand a lot of the challenges you will encounter along the way when you try to get your baby to sleep and not wake up too often. If you let your baby fall asleep while breastfeeding, laying in your lap, and then you manage to put your baby in their crib and let them continue to sleep there. They will wake up (perhaps only 30-45 minutes later) and notice that they are not at the same place as where they fell asleep. This can create a feeling of unsafety, instincts deeply rooted in any child to keep it safe from harm, and it will call on it’s parents to make sure everything is ok. Understanding the importance of feeling safe, can help you create a habit of allowing your newborn to fall asleep and wake up at the same place to increase the feeling of safety.
- It is a important instinct to wake up if you are hungry when you are a newborn baby.
Why is this important?
-> The younger the baby, the smaller the tummy. This means that newborns will need to eat often and why WHO tells you to breastfeed your baby when they want. What you benefit from taking to heart is that if your baby to eat full meals during daytime (not letting it fall asleep in the middle of the feeding, waking it up by changing position or pretending to change diaper) you increase the likelihood of having a baby that has less need for food during the night, and can therefore sleep better or fall back to sleep easier.
- When a child is born the concept of sleeping at night and being awake during daytime is new to them. You might have noticed that your baby was kicking during the night when you were pregnant, which means your baby might be used to being awake at night.
Why is this important?
-> Night and day is something we have to teach our newborns. They might not be ready to learn routines until they are 3 months old, but it’s helpful to start teaching them at the very beginning that “if it is night, it will be dark and you will be wearing a pajamas.” This is something you show them by making sure they sleep in a light environment during daytime and that you keep the room where your baby sleeps during the night dark. And this is something you teach by dressing your baby in a pajamas in the evening, and changing to daytime-clothes in the morning.
- During the first year of your child’s life, the routines of how your baby sleeps will change many times.
Why is this important?
-> It is common for parents to learn a routine that really helps them at one point, but is later outdated and not as useful anymore. Be open to discussing with professionals, friends and family as well as reading about your baby’s development stages, to learn when you need to upgrade your strategies.
To learn more about babies and how to ensure both you and your child are well rested, download babybubble today:
