#the benefit of being a new mom is being awake around the clock to feed the little parasite

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How To Start A Newborn Sleep Schedule: 9 Expert Hacks +Free Download

Starting a newborn sleep schedule can be daunting and confusing if you don't have the right plan. Learn these 9 hacks so your routine starts off smoothly. For even more help get my free guide "How To Start An Infant Sleep Schedule." Click here to download This is the sixth post in my "Newborn Sleep" Series. Be sure to check out the other posts in the series and stay tuned for new additions!

With Daddy on deployment, Mommy recovering from a c-section, and two silly-pants older sisters, my youngest daughter was born into a lot of chaos. Her sisters constantly tried to hold her, coo at her, and smother her with gooey kisses while I laid in bed, wincing from the pain of my incision and sleep-deprived from round-the-clock feedings. Amazingly, the baby slept through it all in a rock-n-play in the corner of our combo living/dining room, despite the Paw-Patrol shows blaring and the one-year-old shrieking with delight at her tower of blocks. I regularly had to keep said one-year-old from bonking and poking baby sis in the face when curiosity brought her toddling back around the room to baby's corner. Finding Our New Normal With A Newborn Sleep Schedule All the chaos meant our newborn sleep schedule started out even more gradually and gently as we found our new normal in a not-so-normal situation. She was also born almost three weeks early, so she was much sleepier than my other girls had been in the beginning. In fact, on the day she was born, she slept for 6 or 7 hours in a row and I kept asking the nurses if she was ok. They tell you to feed baby every two hours, so I got super worried about her missing 3+ meals. The nurses reassured me that she was fine. I could tell she was, but since my first two had done so well with a sleep routine, I was a bit over-excited to get started. I soon realized (and remembered) that everything is so crazy in the beginning that there really isn't a schedule, and that's totally ok for a few days. Baby girl was adjusting, I was getting to know her and also healing, and the older girls had adjustments of their own.

Parental Guidance Recommended For Newborns

I'm sure that every new mom feels a bit of that craziness. I felt it still after my third child, and it's just part of the deal with a newborn. But despite the chaos, it's important for parents to play a huge role in helping baby adjust to the world around them. Babies have no idea what's happening, after all. And though they have God-given natural instincts (so amazing to watch!), parents can help their babies get a handle on life as they now know it. From day time to night time, sleeping and eating, and all the other new experiences, using a routine helps babies adjust in a gentle, predictable way.

She was sooooo sleepy!

The Scientific Benefits Of Good Sleep

If you want to start a newborn sleep schedule, I'm excited for you! Using a gentle, consistent routine helped my kids sleep through the night (6-8 hours) by 8 weeks. They all slept from 10-12 hours starting at weeks 10- 16, depending on the child. Having spoken to many moms who've said they didn't get a full night's sleep in over a YEAR (ok that really freaked me out!), I am so grateful for the benefits of a sleep schedule. I'm sorry but when someone told me there's a way to actually get some sleep with a newborn, I opted in for that immediately. Especially because I know sleep is SO vital to babies' brain development and mom's healing (and sanity). According to Alice Callahan of Scienceofmom.com, “Sleep has been shown to be important for maturation of infants’ brains and consolidation of their memories. Several studies have shown that babies with more efficient nighttime sleep (greater percentage of time spent asleep during the night) had higher cognitive scores.”  All that to say, I put a lot of intentional time into creating and maintaining a gentle-- not rigid-- schedule that allowed my babies to learn to fall asleep independently, sleep for longer periods at night, and wake up happy and well-rested. And a newborn sleep schedule can work for you too.

9 Expert Hacks For Starting A Newborn Sleep Schedule

1- Get Mentally Ready And Have A Plan I've heard a lot of moms say they decided to start sleep training, so one night they just put their baby down in the crib to sleep and stepped outside the room. Of course, baby started wailing right away. Then the moms were confused, anxious and stuck wondering what to do next. It was so unsettling having no idea what they did wrong, and whether or not they should go in now... in 5 minutes... or try cry it out? Instead of getting stuck in that position, research your plan before starting a newborn sleep schedule. If you need help getting started on an easy, proven plan, grab my free guide "How To Start An Infant Sleep Schedule." Click here to download 2- Be Consistent Once you pick a plan, stick to it. You can be flexible, but if you flip back and forth between having a schedule and not having a schedule, you'll be like a pre-schooler picking out ice cream flavors. Strawberry. No, vanilla. Actually, I want blue bubble gum. Noooo, I wanted strawberryyyyyyyyy!!!! You're going to drive yourself and your baby nuts. Worse, you won't see many gains in the sleep department because your baby will be as confused as you are. It's ok to deviate from your plan at times as you adjust to your baby. Go with your mom gut if you have to feed and it's only been an hour, or if they sleep right through when you thought you'd try some tummy time. Just try to get back on track so the majority of the time, you're staying consistent. Babies thrive with consistency and routine. 3- Just Start If you're past the 3-week-old baby mark, it's not too late to start. Begin slowly and plan out your days to see where you might be able to shift things into a routine. It make take a few days, or a couple weeks in some cases, for baby to fully adjust, but you'll see the benefits of an infant sleep routine soon.

If you don't know where to start you can grab my free guide "How To Start An Infant Sleep Schedule" 4- Pay Attention To Your Baby's Cues Your baby has a voice. They will communicate with you the only ways they can, which is through crying and body language, called newborn sleep cues. It may come as a surprise that your baby's cries aren't all the same. If you pay attention, you will soon learn that one cry means "I'm starving," one means "I'm tired," and another means, "I'm hurt," to name a few. Babies are different. Your baby may show different signs of tiredness or hunger than your friends' children. For example, signals such as rubbing eyes or ears, yawning, or turning their face away are all sleep cues. Some babies may show many of these while others only show one. Learn as much as you can about your baby's unique voice and cues-- it will help you meet their needs SO much more quickly! RELATED: EVERY MOM WHOSE BABY NAPS WELL KNOWS THESE 15 NEWBORN SLEEP CUES 5- Lay Baby Down Awake It's important to help babies learn to fall asleep on their own. This is a gradual process and not a rigid demand. During the first few weeks baby is home, holding and snuggling them when they're asleep won't derail your routine. But after about three weeks, babies start to perk up and become more sensitive to their environments. That doesn't mean that if you allow your child to sleep on you after three weeks that you're "spoiling" them. They need lots of snuggles. But if you want them to be able to sleep through the night at an early age, you'll want to start helping them learn that they can fall asleep without being next to a warm body.

Welcome to the chaos!

Solving Newborn Sleep Schedule Issues:

6- Don’t Start At Night One huge mistake I see new moms making is to start a sleep schedule at night, before making any adjustments to their day. An easy bedtime experience starts by laying the groundwork throughout each day with a gentle, consistent routine. That way, when it comes to bedtime, your baby is already primed for another nap... except this time it's an elongated night of sleep. It takes time for baby to adjust to a routine, but as she does, you'll start to notice her night feeds getting further and further apart. For the exact routine you can use starting today, grab my free guide "How To Start An Infant Sleep Schedule. Click here to download 7- Discover Why Baby Is Unhappy Babies cry to communicate. If we feed them every time they cry, we may be missing what they are trying to say. Newborns typically eat every two hours or so, though they could be hungry earlier, or go a bit longer between meals if they've been napping. If you just fed them, go through this list to see what else could be bothering them before trying to feed them again: Check to see if baby is: Too hotToo coldWet diaperTummy ache or gasSomething stuck on them like a piece of mom's hair (this drove my oldest nuts once)Finger or toe stuck inside clothesNeeds to burpOvertiredSwaddle came looseNeeds pacifierHealth issues such as a temperature, cough or a runny nose. You may be able to solve your baby's issue without feeding them so soon after a previous feed. This will help you get them on a more regular eating routine. It will also give you a break from constantly nursing, whether day or night. Of course, if your baby is hungry, feed him or her! Trust your mom instincts, and if you feel there's a serious problem, don't hesitate to call their pediatrician or dial 9-1-1.

8- Capitalize On The Sucking Reflex And Use A Pacifier Many new moms wonder whether to introduce a pacifier when baby is first born because they don't want to confuse the baby. However, I found pacifiers to be super helpful and to not cause any confusion at all. Babies have a natural sucking reflex from 0-3 months, and many babies love the comfort of pacifier. It helps them drift off without having to be attached to mom. When it's time for bed or nap, I would swaddle my girls up, pop in a pacifier, and put them down awake (but drowsy). They usually went right to sleep, especially after we'd been on a routine for a few days/weeks. You might have to pop the paci back in a few times as they fall asleep, but it's worth a bit of effort up front to help them learn to nod off without a warm body next to them all the time. 9- Limit The Time Between Each Feed Sleeping too long during the day leads to shorter "naps" during the night. Be sure to wake baby before they've taken too long of a nap. This will really help to lengthen night sleep! Don't let your baby go more than about 3 hours between feeds during the day in the first month, or 4 hours after 4 weeks of age. This will help them lengthen out night sleep like nobody's business!

INFANT SLEEP SCHEDULE SUPPLIES LIST:

It's time to start feeling way more rested, don't you think? You don't need many supplies to get started. In fact, you probably already have everything on this list: Swaddle blanketPacifier Clock ( I used my phone timer) Notepad or app (I recommend the app BabyMama for tracking feeds) A Plan (You can download my free guide below!)

How To Start A Newborn Sleep Schedule- Free Guide

If you're ready to reap the benefits of a newborn sleep schedule, don't miss my free guide "How to Start An Infant Sleep Schedule" so you can start your baby's routine off in the best way possible! Click here to download

The "Newborn Sleep" Series

This is the sixth post in my "Newborn Sleep" Series. Be sure to check out the other posts in the series and stay tuned for new additions! When Is The Best Time To Start An Infant Sleep Schedule? How To Start A 3-Week-Old Baby Sleep Routine 7 Newborn Baby Schedule Mistakes To Avoid 17 Insanely Powerful Tips For Getting Newborn To Sleep At Night Baby Never Sleeps? You Might Be Missing These 15 Newborn Sleep Cues How To Start A Newborn Sleep Schedule: 9 Expert Hacks +Free Download (This Post) Read the full article

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The Agony and Ecstasy of Room Sharing for Siblings

The following post e0a9e1e9e6412908cf53cee25f32209b62d23d03e119cd2df63e6855e8fc22eee0a9e1e9e6412908cf53cee25f32209b62d23d03e119cd2df63e6855e8fc22eepostlinke0a9e1e9e6412908cf53cee25f32209b62d23d03e119cd2df63e6855e8fc22eee0a9e1e9e6412908cf53cee25f32209b62d23d03e119cd2df63e6855e8fc22ee is courtesy of The Marc Le Francois Sleep Health Blog

Room sharing for siblings presents special challenges for parents and families when it comes to getting a good night of sleep. I wrote an article in the New York Times on this topic which is coming out soon. To help me with this, I asked subscribers to my mailing list to tell me about their experiences.

I’m fortunate to have some of the smartest readers on the internet. I asked my readers about how room sharing affects their family’s routines at night— the good, the bad, and the ugly. This information informed the article I wrote.

Benefits and joys of room sharing

Several moms mother notes that room sharing helped quite a bit with her younger child’s sleep issues. Natasha says:

My daughter age 2.5 and son age 5 share a room. This began about 8 months ago after a sleep trainer recommended it might help with my daughter’s sleep challenges. She would scream at bedtime and wake up in the middle of the night for up to 3 hours. The room sharing worked like a charm!

Dr. Kara Garcia, a pediatrician in Pennsylvania, takes about how helpful this has been with her children, now ages 5 and 7.5 years old:

I put my kids in the same room once my younger one was in a bed, so at about 2 yo. They were in separate rooms before that.

My eldest has always been a “nervous” sleeper, had a tough time getting to bed alone, but ever since we put them together he has been great at bedtime. My youngest is very flexible and after she got over the fact that she didn’t “have her own special room,” she likes being able to sleep in a bunkbed with her older brother.

I talk to patients about this a lot – each kid has a different sleep style and you have more success if they have “complementary sleep styles,” so to speak.

WHAT’S GOOD: kids with separation anxiety thrive with someone else in the room, they are good buddies

My big worry now is when and how to separate them! They like having their own space, but want to sleep in the same room. I fear the regression my son will have when they are separated. But maybe they will sleep in the same room until he moves out

Children also tend to wake each other up less than you expect, although the mornings remain a challenge, as Dr. Garcia notes:

My kids go to bed at the same time, and usually wake up around the same time – 8:30 pm – about 7:30 am. I am lucky.

Middle of the night wakings rarely result in both being awake. Neither is a light sleeper, so maybe that’s why, but I feel like even with other families, this is an overblown concern.

Sometimes the first one awake will wake the other one in the am, and that can be a bummer. They usually will stop doing it if we ask them to stay quiet in the am and just come over to our room.

My big worry now is when and how to separate them! They like having their own space, but want to sleep in the same room. I fear the regression my son will have when they are separated. But maybe they will sleep in the same room until he moves out!

One father writes:

At night, it’s not a real issue. Even when one wakes up crying from a nightmare, the other one stays asleep. While we were night-potty training them and would bring take them to pee in the middle of the night, they didn’t wake each other up (or wake up themselves). Nap time, when sleep is lighter, is more of a challenge. It is much harder for one to get up without waking up the other.

Rachel notes that sharing a room is economically and environmentally sound:

The best thing about kids sharing a room is saving space. We had to give up our home office space to move the babies into a separate bedroom from their sister, which matters because we both work from home often. We don’t have enough bedrooms to give each child their own room. It also feels more environmentally friendly to share a smaller home as a family, rather than heating and cooling a 4-bedroom house.

It can even help on weekend mornings:

Our twins sometimes are content to babble at each other when they wake up in the morning, rather than immediately crying for us. This helps us doze in the mornings sometimes.

Another father writes:

If they both wake up early, they first turn to bothering each other instead of us. Also, it them being in the same space makes it easier to not have to confine activity or noise away from only one room instead of two while they sleep. It is also easier to not have to shuffle them around when we have visitors staying with us.

One thing that I’ve found helpful is having an OK-to-wake clock (a stoplight that is red during sleep hours and turns green at wake-up time). We have used this to establish the norm that if the light is red, they can’t make noise. There are books and stuffed animals in the room but no toys that make too much noise to keep them engaged and from waking each other up.

Room Sharing Challenges and How to Negotiate Them

Compatible schedules

It can be really challenging if children have an incompatible bedtime. Rachel writes more about this:

Our twins used to share with their 3-year-old sister, but it was a mess. We’d put the twins down at 7:30 in pack-n-plays in our home office so we could do bedtime with the 3-year-old in the kids’ bedroom, then we’d have to move the babies to their cribs after their big sister was asleep. She would then wake up in the middle of the night and come into our bed almost every night. The day we gave the babies their own bedroom, she started sleeping through the night in her own bed.

Natasha says:

We have a challenge that both kids need to go to bed at different times. My daughter still naps – at daycare they let kids nap for over 2 hours until past 3 pm which means my daughter won’t fall asleep until 9 pm. But my son needs to sleep at 8 pm. This is difficult. And i haven’t yet found a workable solution. If i put my daughter to bed too early she just screams so my son can’t fall asleep.

EV writes about the challenge when two children have different sensory preferences for falling asleep. Some children like music or sound; others require absolute silence.

One of my children falls asleep very easily (7) The other one (9) tosses and turns, wants to listen to a story on the radio etc. This makes it harder for the younger one to fall asleep and she complains.

Another mother writes:

My son, 7, shares a room with my daughter, 4. They both go to bed at 7:30pm though my son looks forward to going to bed (he’s always been very good about going to bed) and my daughter would rather stay up. My daughter will be disruptive by either coming out several times or doing silly things/trying to get a rise out of her brother. This creates a problem for my son who desperately wants to go to sleep and for us who want to start our evening sans kids. While the 4 yr old’s behavior has actually been better this past week, when she is disruptive we move my son into our room to go to sleep and later move him back into bed once they are both asleep. This lets him go to sleep and hope incentivizes her to stay in bed.

Sometimes, one child may be freaking out:

The challenge is if one is having a melt-down and the other one is ready to go to sleep. We have at times put one to bed and then let the other get through their melt-down outside the room before taking them in to bed, but it’s hard for this not to be disruptive to the one who is already in bed.

Bedtime compromises

Sometimes you need to make some compromises with bedtime. Sara, a mother of three writes about the challenges of having ten month old twins and a 3 yo boy in a two bedroom apartment.

The twins go to sleep around 7:45 or 8, and E has some play time with us then reads books in the living room and goes to bed around 8:45. (If he goes to bed earlier than that he’s up around 5 am.) His bedtime routine isn’t ideal – one of us has to lay down with him, though we try to leave before he’s all the way asleep

The one challenge now is that if one of us is alone with all three kids we definitely have to use screens to keep the older boy occupied and quiet during the twins’ bedtime routine.

Bedtime stories can be a sticking point:

I thought we’d be able to read them the same bedtime stories, but they are not really interested in the same stories anymore, so that’s not as streamlined as I’d like!

Pamela, who blogs at The Living Feed, is the mother of a 3.5 yo girl and 2 yo boy. She notes:

The bunk bed separation is a challenge for our story time routine. The first week or so we would lay down on the top bunk and read + fall asleep there. It was disruptive to then move my sleeping son to his bed. I tried standing next to the bed while both of them were on the top bunk but that was awkward. Last couple of days we’ve been doing story time on the bottom bunk – it helped the younger one get the comfort of being in his own bed + spend a few extra minutes laying next to his sister (which he actually loves to do, but which I cannot allow them to do because his sister’s movements throughout the night wakes him). This setup is lesser of an issue for the older one, who happily moves back up to her top bunk as soon as she gets the satisfaction of reading enough books.

Managing the transition:

If you introduce a baby into your older child’s room, doing so mindfully can be really helpful. Sara describes the way she handled this:

My 3-year-old son and 10-month-old twins have been sharing a large bedroom in our two-bedroom apartment since the twins were about six months, right around my son’s third birthday. It had been the adult bedroom, which we were sharing with the twins. We moved them from arm’s reach co-sleepers to cribs at around 5 months and did some night weaning and CIO sleep-training before we moved the toddler in with them. (They went to sleep relatively easily and had been sleeping through the night before 4 months, but both started waking up and eating at least once a night after that regression).

I’ve been surprised so far at how well it’s gone. We’re lucky that our older son, E, is very into being a big brother and not particularly jealous of the twins. We bought him a new twin bed (the IKEA kind that can turn into a low platform bed when he’s a little older) and made a big deal about him picking out new bedding for his special bed.

Sarah Christian, a mother and sleep consultant in Pennsylvania, talks about the difficulty with one of her children when the family took in a foster child. The youngest boy, who is 4, had to move in with his older siblings. She talks about how they negotiated this transition :

After trying in every way we could think of to reassure him that he was still just as loved and that sleeping still was important, we decided to look for ways to take the fight out of bedtime. For a few months, we ended up letting him sleep on a mat on the floor in our bedroom. It let him find a way to still be close to us, while still keeping the boundary of letting him know that he did need to go to sleep at bedtime. Sometimes he would start the night in his bed in the room he now shared with his big brother and sister, then in the middle of the night he would tiptoe into our room to sleep on the floor. As long as he was quiet and didn’t wake us, we let him do his thing.

After a time, he became more comfortable with the new routines of life with four kids, and he started staying in his bed all night again. We would offer some encouragement/praise in the mornings when he did, and remind him of how good it felt to sleep all night in his bed and wake up feeling well-rested.

Tell us about your experiences with room sharing

Thanks to everyone who wrote in— there were so many great responses that I could not include them all. If your children share a room, let me what works and what doesn’t.

The post The Agony and Ecstasy of Room Sharing for Siblings appeared first on Craig Canapari, MD.

from Craig Canapari, MD https://drcraigcanapari.com/agony-ecstasy-room-sharing-siblings/

from https://www.marclefrancois.net/2019/03/24/the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-room-sharing-for-siblings/