Tips On How To Get Your Baby To Sleep

Here's the bad news: Nobody can make a child go to sleep. But there's also good news: Sleep is a very natural process, and the average baby will sleep from fifteen to seventeen hours a day. The problem is, these hours will be broken up into very uneven chunks. Many babies will sleep during the day and be fussy at night. Over time??and we're talking weeks, not days here??you can gradually help your child shift the greater proportion of her sleeping hours to nighttime. But for the first two months, five hours of uninterrupted sleep will seem like heaven. Go ahead and wake baby up if her late-afternoon nap is running too long, but don't cut out the late-afternoon nap altogether. Your child's tummy will need food every three to four hours, so there's little chance of you getting a complete night's sleep anyway.

First-time parents have a tendency to make these natural sleep rhythms more difficult than they need to be. I've talked to many moms who have developed elaborate rituals to lull their child to sleep; they may start an hour-long ritual, such as rocking babies in a rocking chair. But I caution you not to start a habit that you don't want to continue forever. Once your child gets used to a routine, it's important to maintain it, so the simpler, the better.

Getting the child to sleep is only half the battle, of course. Many times a greater concern is keeping your child asleep through the night.

Every baby is different, of course, but as a rule, they sleep a lot and they wake up a lot. The challenge is that for many babies, the sleep schedule they choose won't be ideal for either Mom or Dad. Your baby doesn't really understand the meaning of Dad or Mom needing to get six or seven hours of sleep before they go to work, and it's the rare baby who sleeps six or seven hours at a stretch shortly after coming home from the hospital. In fact, your pediatrician will probably tell you to wake your baby up for at least one night feeding during the first two weeks that you're home.

That's one of the many reasons, I'm convinced, God's design for the family is to have both a mommy and a daddy. I'm not saying you can't make it as a single parent, but it's definitely tougher. If you have a husband, you can tag team, even if husbands do have the innate ability to play possum in the middle of the night. Though we men have, over the centuries, carefully developed and honed the skill of not flinching even one muscle when our wives glance to see if we're awake. It's only fair that if we daddies were there for the launching, we're there for the landing as well. And that goes for those who help to conceive children biologically as well as those who conceive children through choosing them in the process of adoption. A husband is very capable of giving great paternal love to his son or daughter, which has the added benefit of giving a wife a chance to catch up on the sleep she so desperately needs.

Some husbands may try the ruse, "I have to work tomorrow while you get to stay home and sleep," but they say this only because they've never stayed home all day and so probably don't realize how little sleep you get. I realize it's a difficult time of life. Both of you are going to be tired and neither of you will get as much sleep as you think you need. But what you're going through and what you're asking your husband to go through is a normal passage of life that women and men have been going through for centuries. It won't last forever.

That doesn't mean it won't occasionally feel like forever, of course! When the baby is sick and has a cold, you probably won't sleep well because the baby isn't sleeping. There's something about moms that seems to connect their ability to sleep with their infant's. You might have the steamer going to help baby breathe, but I bet you're still waking up at every cough.

Colic will severely test the patience of the most devout saint who has ever walked on this fair earth. Your baby doesn't sleep well so she's constantly fussy; you're not sleeping well, so you're constantly irritable; your spouse isn't sleeping well, so the two of you tend to bicker with each other. ... It goes on and on. You may find yourself asking, "Why did I ever decide to do this? What were we thinking? It's nothing but hard work."