Adequate sleep is very important for babies. The importance of adequate sleep cannot be over emphasized. Many parents don’t realize the importance of adequate sleep. It is clearly and expressly recommended medically that babies less than a year old should have between 13 and 14 hours of sleep everyday. Here are a few tips on how to make your baby sleep better.
Tips on How to Make Your Baby Sleep Better are:
- Routinize his daily activities
- Give him an early bedtime
- Ensure he takes afternoon naps too
- Evening bath(Just before bedtime)
- Quick response to his cry in the middle of the night
Routinize his daily activities
It is very good to routinize your baby’s daily activities right from when he wake-up time to his bedtime. Fixing a time for all his activities indirectly fixes a time for his bedtime. You have to fix a time that is suitable for your own daily activities so that you would be consistent with your baby’s daily routine. Consistency of the laid down routine is much more important than the routine itself. Wake-up time, siesta time , evening bath time and bedtime should be a given a lot of consideration. Once your baby’s bedtime his fixed, his body would adjust and get used to it. When that happens, you’ll see that sometimes he may fall asleep on his own some minutes to his bedtime. When it gets to the time you intend to set as bed time for your baby, you start to cuddle him , rock him , sing him lullabies or tell him bedtime stories. You have to get to know which ones work for your baby. The most difficult part is making his body adjust to it in the first few days.
Give him an early bedtime
Give him an early bedtime. This is because he may wake up to eat or wake up for other reasons in the middle of the night and may not get back to sleep immediately. When his bedtime is early, no matter how long he stays awake in the night, his hours of sleep won’t be far from the medically recommend number.
Ensure he takes afternoon naps too
The 13 to 14 hours of sleep recommended for babies include afternoon naps. It could be his siesta. Afternoon naps are also very important because it refreshes and relaxes the baby. Make sure your baby takes afternoon naps. You should also be consistence about it.
Evening bath(Just before bedtime)
I also recommend an evening bath for your baby. Give him the bath some minutes to his bedtime. It cools, refreshes and relaxes him and it aids his bedtime. This is not compulsory if you get back home just a few minutes to your baby’s bedtime. Or better still, you can make your baby’s evening bath a once-in-a-while affair.
Quick response to his cry in the middle of the night
As a nursing mother, you are not advised to sleep deeply, so as to be able to respond to your baby’s cry quickly. When your baby cries for long before you wake up to attend to him, he is not likely to sleep back soon. Sometime it may require you to go through his bedtime activities again before he’ll sleep off. But if you didn’t allow him to cry for more than ten seconds before you start suckling him or attend to whatever woke him up, he is likely to sleep off almost immediately with little or no effort from you.
Finally, there’s an exception to every rule. I may not be certain that every tip will work for every baby, but I am certain that some or all of the tips will work for most babies.
