Are you a new parent and your baby won't sleep and now it’s the 5th time you're woken up in the middle of the night due to your crying baby.
We’ve all been there when its 3.45 AM in the morning and your partner is kicking you out of the bed to help your crying child or you trying to kick your partner out that it’s their turn. Things can get heated, because we’re already lacking in sleep and it’s been 3 months.
One little mistake during their sleep training and your baby’s development will be affected in the later years. It can progress through to their high school years, which can result in developing mood swings, depression and anxiety. As adults, we value how important our sleep is by ensuring we get a minimum of 6-8 hours of sleep (new parents you can kiss this goodbye for at least 3-5 months).
Even with sleep experts that offer their services around your local area will all provide different methods and advice on how to sleep train your baby because baby won’t sleep. So who are you to believe because everyone is giving all this advice on how to sleep train your baby at 4 months or 15 months, what one should you follow?
So what do you do about it? Well after doing huge amounts of research across the internet and also testing a lot of different strategies on our son here are our 6 points for sleep training your baby or tips when baby won’t sleep. This blog post is going to hopefully separate all the fiction and show you some of the sleep facts we found with sleep training our 4-month old baby. It’s helped his sleeping habits and will continue with his sleep development. But please, every baby is different and you’ve just got to trial and error on which baby sleep strategy works for you.
Strategy 1
Baby won't Sleep Cues
Similar to adults, babies have a period of for sleeping longer due to being tired but not overtired. So, by identifying that tiredness, there is a window of opportunity that you can tuck your baby or child to sleep. Their bodies are telling them that to not sleep and will release chemicals inside their bodies to stay up. That window will then begin to close up. So, how do you tell baby wants to sleep and not saying baby won't sleep. The cues are as follows:
If your baby is young i.e. less than 5 months then hopefully you've found a sleep routine, it is very important that this is initiated as it will teach baby that it's about sleep time in an hour. If you miss these cues, then overtiredness will kick in. For example, baby will become more fussy, irritable and always rubbing their eyes. From experience, around the 6-7 week mark our son began crying a lot more, around this age they are extra fussy as they are going through another growth spurt. If your baby is around this age then there is nothing wrong with them or you aren't doing anything bad.
So, it's very important for parents to read these over tiredness cues.
Babies won't sleep is because of the stimulus hormones that the brain has created within them. They now want to be comforted and in some cases, they'll look for the breast or just want to stick to the parent's body with their head resting on your shoulder. To ensure you don't get to this point is very important you notice and understand your baby sleep cues. good news is if your baby is a newborn, you've got plenty of practice. As they wake up and sleep more often.
Strategy 2
Baby circadian rhythm
Have you ever heard of a circadian rhythm? Well, it's our bodies internal clock and operates on a 10 or 20 min cycle. Obviously everyone's body clock is different just as our individual personalities. When baby won't sleep is because they haven't learnt what day and night is. I wrote another great article on 5 ways teaching your baby to develop their circadian rhythm.
When the sun rises, the sun rays hit our skin and reacts to our body which regulates our body hormones. Therefore, for babies it's important to put them in a bright room during the day and a dark room at night. This will teach baby their circadian rhythm and be awake longer during the day and baby will sleep longer at night.
The sun is setting in for the evening, begin closing his curtains or blinds in his room to let him adjust to the time. Baby will begin to produce the hormone melatonin which will start let baby know it's sleep time. I've personally found that by letting baby be awake after his afternoon nap till his last sleep of the day actually has a really good long nights sleep.
Strategy 3
Let Baby Practise Falling Asleep on His Own
I've read god knows how many pages on google, baby books, parenting books. One thing for sure is that there seems to be a recurring pattern is rather than putting baby asleep into their cots/beds, have them just tired enough to sleep but just awake enough for them to self soothe to sleep. Personally, I've found that to be the case, so avoid having to put baby to sleep or rock baby to sleep first then place them in their beds. Baby won't sleep for long by doing so because they went to sleep with security around them and then suddenly you're not there.
If you have a newborn then that would be hard, but after the initial few months, you should find ways to let baby sleep on their own. This will help baby to learn their skill of self soothing.
Experts say that babies will have found their circadian rhythm around the 6 week mark. From that point onward, baby will know their surroundings and environment that it is time to sleep not to play. If you've always held baby to sleep then it will be hard for them to learn that bed is for sleeping. Because by sleep association he knows it sleep time in your arms, but it does take time for baby to self soothe themselves to sleep.
We wanted to our son to learn the skill of self soothing so we slept trained him early around 4 months and so he knew the habits of when it's time to sleep. But some parents we know that they didn't want to sleep train their children, but it's very important that parents get their sleep. Having our own sleep priorities will let US stay in CONTROL not letting baby CONTROL sleep. So it's an important discussion with your partner how you want to tackle baby sleep when baby won't sleep for longer periods which can affect relationships.
Below is a list of sleep associations that babies fall into the habit of
So the above list is a typical everyday parenting household to get baby to sleep longer at night or their naps. I want to stress at no point those are bad, I'm just indicating that these are the sleep associations and baby behaviors. What can you do if you want to slowly wean baby off those habits. You can slowly remove each association from baby, and not just go cold turkey on them.
For example, if your baby won't sleep because of the above, you can remove each element of it, like instead of rocking baby to sleep you just skip that step and give them a pacifier. You can usually do this around the 3 month mark. Our son's only sleep association was during nursing and wanting to hold our hand to sleep. So it wasn't too hard to get him to sleep on his own from 4 months old.
Strategy 4
Make Daytime Sleep a Priority
I cannot stress this enough!! Ensuring baby has sufficient amount of naps during the day will help them have a much better sleep at night. There has been proven research the above and from personal experience it has! Avoid skipping a nap, baby won't sleep well at night once skip you can expect a battle to come, because they will be overtired.
I'll also avoid putting baby to sleep early because they've missed a nap, by doing so they will wake up much earlier during their night sleep. Trust me I've done it, put him to sleep at 5 pm, he woke up at 5 AM and baby won't sleep after that! Let's just say it wasn't a happy household for a couple hours.
Before 6 months, our son had 3 naps during the day after that it's down to 2 naps a day.
The key is to keep to the routine and baby will fall inline with it and they like routine. There have also been scientific research showing that babies who take naps are in a much better mood and develop faster compared to babies who don't nap.
Strategy 5
Know When Your Baby No Longer Needs Night Feeds
This is just motherly intuition, you need to decide when to stop their night time feed. I stopped mine at 9 months, some mothers stop at 6 months. But whenever you decide to stop, your baby may continue to wake up during the night out of habit wanting their night time feed.
So how do you know? When you pick up baby for their feed, do they fall asleep and not generally sucking or drinking much? If that is the case then it may be time to stop nighttime feed for baby.
When you have stopped, it's important that you teach him ways for self soothing him to sleep, for example give him a pacifier to suck on, because they like the sucking motion, then as time goes on you can remove the pacifier. Every baby is different so it can happen earlier or later when you do decide, there is never a 'correct' time to stop feeding your baby at night.
Strategy 6
Stay Calm & Relaxed about the Sleep Issue
Parents stay calm! Stay Calm! It can be hard when baby has been crying for 30-40 mins and trust me it can get frustrating when they are crying that long. If you're starting to feel angry when dealing with baby. Please just walk away and just take a couple deep breathes and let your partner take over for a bit before walking back in.
Babies are smart and can read the surroundings well, so if they can pick up mom or dad being angry then they will feel uneasy and just escalate the situation.
Just accept the fact that babies can only communicate through their cry's and it's important to remain relax and clam because by doing so baby will too and it'll make everyone's life a little easier.
Once you believe in your objective of making your baby to sleep longer then just look at the bigger picture and stay relax and clam in front of baby.
End
There you have it, my 6 simple baby sleep strategies when baby won't sleep, I hope you enjoyed it and I'd love to have some feedback, if you want to learn how I put my 4 month old baby to sleep, click the link.
Good Luck!
