Learn to read your baby’s sleep signals

Congratulations on the birth of your new baby! This is a wonderful time in your life. Whether it’s your first or fifth child, you’ll find this a time to recover, to adjust, sometimes from confusion and frustration, but – amazingly – to fall in love.

Babies under four months of age have very different sleep needs than older babies. This article will help you understand your newborn baby’s sleep patterns, and help you develop reasonable expectations for your baby and when it comes to sleep.

• Co-Sleeping – It Works
• Improve night sleep

Read the bad advice and learn and definitely be wary
everyone has an opinion on how to deal with sleeping problems with your new baby. The danger to the new parent is that these misleading advice (no matter how well-meaning) can actually have a negative impact on our children’s parenting skills and development.

If we are not aware of the facts. The more you know, the less likely others are to make you question your parenting decisions.

When your facts are correct, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to people who are well-intentioned but give opposite or wrong advice. So, your first step is to be smart! Know what you’re doing, and know why you’re doing it. Read books and magazines, attend classes or support groups – it all helps.

The swaddle helps her sleep on her back

Newborn sleep biology
During the first months of your baby’s life, he sleeps when he is tired; It’s really that easy. There is not much you can do to force a new baby to sleep when he does not want to sleep, and conversely, there is not much you can do to wake him up when he is asleep.

One very important point to understand about newborns is that they have very, very small tumors. Newborns grow quickly, their diet consists of liquids, and it is quickly digested. The formula is fast-digesting and breast milk is digested faster. While it would be fine to put your little bundle of joy in a predetermined bedroom and not even hear a glimpse of it until morning, even the gullible among us knows that this is not a realistic goal for a toddler. Newborns need to be breastfed every two to four hours – sometimes more.

During those early months, your baby will experience a massive growth spurt, which affects not only the time of day, but also feeding time at night, sometimes shifting a schedule from two to four hours to one to two hours around the clock. Enter the program.

Sleeping ‘all night’
You may have heard that babies should start sleeping ‘all night’ at two to four months. What you need to understand is that for a newborn, a five-hour stretch is an entire night. Many (but not close to) children of this age can sleep uninterruptedly from midnight to 5 a.m. (they don’t always do this.) What you might think of as “sleep all night” means far from “!

Furthermore, while the scientific definition of “sleep through the night” is five hours, most of us don’t think of it anywhere near a full night’s sleep. In addition, some of those who sleep through the night will suddenly start waking up more frequently, often an entire year or even two until your little one develops a mature all-night sleep pattern.

Sleeping on the breast or bottle
It is very normal for a newborn to sleep while feeding from the breast, bottle or pacifier. When the baby always sleeps in this way, he learns to breastfeed while he sleeps; Over time, he may not sleep any other way. I’ve seen what many sleep experts refer to as a “negative association with sleep.” I definitely do not agree, and neither does my child. This is probably the most positive, natural, and enjoyable bond of sleep a baby can have. However, a significant proportion of parents with older children who cannot fall asleep or stay asleep resist this natural and strong association between sucking and falling asleep.

Therefore, if you want your baby to sleep without your help, it is essential that you breastfeed your newborn baby occasionally until he is sleepy, but not completely asleep. When you can, remove the breast, bottle, or pacifier from her mouth and let her sleep without anything in her mouth. In doing so, your baby may resist, root, and fuss to retrieve the nipple. It’s perfectly fine to put it back in the breast, bottle, or pacifier and start over after a few minutes. If you do this often, he will eventually learn how to fall asleep without sucking.

Get up at night
Many pediatricians recommend not allowing newborns to sleep more than three or four hours without a feed, and to wake up more often than most babies. (There are some exceptional children who can survive a long time.) Never mind, your baby will be up during the night. The key is knowing when to wake him up to feed him one night and when to let him go back to sleep.

This is the time when you need to focus on your instincts and intuition. This is the time when you should try hard to learn how to read your baby’s signals. Here is a tip that is important to know. Babies make a lot of sleeping sounds, from grunts to moans to frank cries, and these sounds don’t always indicate wakefulness. These are what I call sleep noise, and your baby is almost or completely asleep during these episodes. I remember when my first child, Angela, was a newborn. Her screams woke me a few times, but she was still asleep in my arms before I made her move from the cradle to the rocking chair. She was making sleepy sounds. In wanting to respond to my baby’s every cry, I already taught him to wake up a lot!

You need to listen and observe your child carefully. Learn to distinguish these sounds of sleep from those of wakefulness and hunger. If she is awake and hungry, you want to feed her as quickly as possible. If you react quickly when you feel hungry, you are more likely to fall asleep quickly. But if you let her cry, she will wake up fully, it will be more difficult and it will take longer to get back to sleep. Not to mention you’ll be fully awake after that!

Help your child separate between day and night A
newborn sleeps about sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and this sleep is evenly distributed over six to seven short sleep periods. You can help your child differentiate between nighttime sleep and daytime sleep, thus helping him sleep longer at night.
Begin by moving your child to a lighted room where he can hear the noise of the day, perhaps a crib or cot located in the main area of ​​your home. Make the night dark and quiet. You can help your child distinguish between daytime sleepiness by using a nighttime bath and changing into pajamas to explain the difference between the two.

Pay attention to signs of tiredness
One way to encourage good sleep is to recognize your child’s sleep cues and tell him to sleep as soon as he feels tired. The baby can’t sleep, and he can’t understand his sleep signals. However, a child whose body yearns to be encouraged to stay awake is usually a distressed child. Over time, this pattern develops into sleep deprivation, further complicating the maturation of your child’s sleep as he or she grows. Learn to read your baby’s sleep cues — such as falling asleep, losing interest in people and games and worrying — and putting him to bed when an opportunity presents itself.

Rest easy
I still haven’t heard a parent get up all night to attend to the baby’s needs. While we adore our little bundles, it’s tough when you’re up all night. Since your baby will already wake you up, you can make yourself as comfortable as possible. The first step now is to learn to relax when it comes to getting up at night. Feeling stressed or frustrated won’t change it. The situation will improve day by day. And before you know it, your newborn won’t be much — he’ll walk, talk, and see everything during the day and sleep peacefully all night.