Exhausted parents reach for advice from anyone who sounds convincing when it comes to helping their babies sleep more often and longer. The difference between common advice about infants sleeping and research about better sleep is stark. Parents need a way to sift through the advice to find what will really help their babies sleep better.
Getting to Sleep, Staying Asleep
The usual advice for getting babies to sleep more includes:
- teach the child no one will meet his needs when it's dark
- overfeed the baby late in the day
- restricting daytime sleeping
- enforce the expert's recommended schedule
Tips for Better Sleeping
Interestingly, the advice given to adults who have problems sleeping tends to be evidence-based. That is, the suggestions are related to research about sleep. This advice includes:
- follow a gentle routine, to calm and re-set circadian rhythms
- don't do stressful things in the "sleep" area
- refrain from eating heavy meals late in the day
- nap and rest periodically throughout the day
- adopt more effective stress-relieving behaviours throughout the day
What's Different for Babies?
Babies are, in almost all physiological ways, small humans. With regard to sleep, they have many things in common with bigger people. They benefit from calm evenings, predictable patterns, sleep areas that are associated with relaxation and safety, being physically comfortable and having days they can cope with in order to unwind enough to sleep.
Babies are different from adults in that they use almost as many calories through the night growing as they do during the day while awake and active. Also, if they are uncomfortable or terrified, in pain or lonely, they can't get up and get a snack, fix the blankets, turn on a light, turn on the tv or phone a night-owl friend.
What babies can do is wake up the people who can get them what they need.
Better Advice, Better Sleep
When evaluating new advice, websites, books or TV experts, it's a good idea to look at the information critically by asking a few questions about it:
- Does the advice match what is learned in sleep studies?
- Does the advice refer to sleep research?
- Does the advice match information from other fields, like healthy infant growth and feeding patterns, or the risks of stress hormones in developing brains?
- Does the advice respect or honour the person of the child that is, treat the child's fear, pain or hunger as real?
Even with regular repetition, the advice of "experts" that does not take into consideration the research in the field is unlikely to be sound. For up-to-date research, bookmark the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab site, and check advice against what is known about what helps people relax into sleep.
Helping babies get better sleep is an excellent goal, one that is made a lot easier for parents and a lot easier on children by following the advice taken from research.
See Linda Clement's: Babies Sleep so Parents can Sleep and Getting Babies to Sleep More by Sleeping More for more information on infants and sleeping.
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