Today I'm going talk to you
about Sleeping Through the Night.
So, this is like the holy grail of baby sleep
but sleeping through the night
is really really age dependent and it's also dependent
on a whole lot of other factors lining up
to give your baby the best chance of being able
to sleep through the night.
Now, I'm not talking about sleep training your baby
or I'm not talking about expecting your newborn baby
to sleep all night long without waking for feeds
because it's just not realistic,
what I want to share with you today is our best tips
to make sure you can get all of the factors lined up right
so that when your baby is ready to they have the best chance
of being able to sleep for longer stretches overnight.
So the first thing we would start looking at is
what's happening in your baby's day
because the day time affects the night time
and you're going to start looking at your baby's naps
and your baby's awake windows because these need
to be really really age-appropriate.
If your baby is having too many naps in the day
or too much cumulative daytime sleep
They're just not going to be tired enough to sleep better
overnight. If they're not having enough daytime sleep,
they're actually going into bedtime at night
all really really overtired and that's going to mean that
their nighttime sleeps not as restorative,
so they're not going to sleep well at night
because they're overtired.
Linked into that is your baby's awake windows,
so if your baby isn't having enough
awake time during the day or enough awake time
towards the end of the day before bedtime then,
again they're going into the nighttime
under tired. So a baby in this situation might stay awake
for and an extended period of time, during the night
and that's just because they genuinely need some awake time
in that 24-hour period.
So awake times and nap length are really really important
to help to set your baby up for good nighttime sleep.
When we're talking about naps as well
getting the next structure around the right way
for your baby's age is important too so,
this would mean making sure that
a six-month-old babies late afternoon nap
isn't happening too close to bedtime,
that it's not happening for too long because any amount
of sleep at that age at that time of the day
is going to impact their nighttime sleep.
So it's making sure that they're napping at the right times
but also for the right lengths
to positively influence their nights.
Once we've got that out of the way, we can look at
your baby's calorie intake.
So, it is perfectly normal for babies
to still need milk feeds in the night
until they're well established on solids,
but again some babies might and some babies
might not need milk feeds in the night,
however, you do need to look at their calorie intake
over a whole 24 hours because if you think your baby
is taking more milk in the night
than they're taking during the day,
we obviously want to reverse this pattern
and try and encourage your baby to have more milk feeds
or more solid feeds during the day and therefore
take less overnight because if they're taking
a lot of milk overnight, they're just not going
be hungry enough to take it during the day,
so we want the opposite to happen.
If your baby is ready to start solids
that's another good way to help their nighttime sleep,
but you need to make sure that you're giving them
the right solids at the right times because the timing
and the type of solids that you're giving
can negatively impact your baby's night.
For example, babies under the age of 10 months
aren't very effectively able to digest
and break down protein overnight because
their digestive system has slowed down at night,
they're lying down and their digestive system
just isn't mature enough yet
to really effectively digest protein.
So if your babies under 10 months and is having protein
at their dinnertime solids, that could be a reason
for their nighttime waking.
We would recommend giving protein at the lunchtime meal
until your babies over 10 months old
and if they're on dinner solids, give them starchy carbs,
so vegetables, pumpkin, potato, carrots, sweet potato
and foods like that, hold off the protein
until they're over 10 months.
Another factor that will impact your baby's nighttime sleep
is the environment that they are sleeping in,
and it doesn't matter if this is your room
or their own room, we would always still recommend that
your baby's room is nice and dark
because the dark is obviously a very very primal cue
to your baby better than it is nighttime.
So, we would advise holding off even using night lights
your baby doesn't need a nightlight
until they're around two years old.
Having a dark room, using white noise
has been proven time and time again to help babies settle
to sleep, to help them link their sleep cycles,
to help them and sleep more soundly over night
and also can block out other noises that might wake
a sleeping baby if you have older children
or if someone in the household is getting up early
to start work, white noise is a really easy way
to help your baby sleep better at night.
For younger babies, keeping them swaddled all night long
is another good way to help your baby settle and sleep well
this is because swaddling helps reduce their startle reflex
which can wake them up towards
the end of every sleep cycle overnight.
For an older baby, we would recommend using
a baby sleeping bag or a sleep sack,
so that they can't kick their blankets off and get cold
or get tangled in their blankets and frustrated,
so a swaddle and a sleeping bag are really really good tools
to use in your baby's sleep environment.
The other key factor in your baby's ability to sleep well
at night, is their settling skills.
So younger babies, three months younger
they're not as affected by sleep associations
as older babies are, so the way that these babies go
to sleep isn't necessarily going to create settling issues
during the night for them, however, once your baby goes
through the four month sleep regression
and their sleep cycles have matured,
they might start waking every two hours overnight especially
after midnight, simply to have you settle them back to sleep
and a clue for this would be that they're waking
and you only need to do something like rock them
or they'll feed for like ten seconds
and then they fall back asleep.
So they're not waking because they need that milk
for nutrients, they're waking because
they need to suck to go back to sleep.
If this is happening and it's causing your baby
to have really fragmented night sleep,
it is likely that they've also been cat napping in the day
or sleeping for 45 minutes chunks in the day.
So at that point you might want to take a step back
and have a look at your babies settling dependency,
are they relying on you, actively doing something
to put them sleep at the start of naps and at bedtime
and then again when they wake during the night?
and if the answer is yes, then we have a wide range
of very gradual methods that you can use to guide
your baby away from that dependency.
So you would be easing them off it, weaning them off,
needing your help to get to sleep,
so you're giving them back the skill of falling asleep
they're born with. In this way your baby's going to be able
to wake between those sleep cycles in the night,
roll over and go back to sleep on their own.
We would not recommend any training around the self-settling
unless you've got all the other factors lined up first,
so that we could confidently rule out
that your baby's waking isn't just caused
by needing some changes to their naps
or needing a bit more food in the day
or simply making their room darker.