What to Try Before You Hire a Sleep Coach

Baby sleep might be an ever changing and mysterious thing in the first 6 months, but before you hire a sleep coach, here are three things you can start today to set a solid foundation for more rest for your tiny baby.

1. Give your baby a dark, safe, boring place to sleep and then use it for every sleep.

Make it as dark as you can: get some blackout shades, add blackout curtains on top, or find a way to black out the windows. It doesn't matter so much in the first 6-8 weeks, but after that, your baby will start settling into a 24-hour day, and you will likely want to support the development of a healthy circadian rhythm that follows your family’s sleep and waking rhythms. So if you and your family go to sleep when it’s dark and wake up when it’s light, try to signal the same to your baby. Do what you can make your baby’s sleep space more dark and calm.

Make it safe: a firm, flat surface free of blankets, pillows, wedges, bumpers, or toys. Anything you add is one more little risk, and your baby can learn to sleep without these things, I promise.

Make it boring: use a white noise machine to block out household noises, don't play a light show, avoid a music maker that plays lullabies for half an hour and then stops, and don’t put rattles or squeaky toys in the bed. And did I mention to keep the room dark and boring?

Lastly, put the baby there to sleep for every sleep (or as close as you can manage it) to reinforce that this place has a very predictable purpose: it’s for sleep! If you’re still in the first 3 months with your baby, it’s more important to get just the first nap or two of the day in the same target sleep place. Later in the day, naps are often more of a challenge, and especially for that last nap of the day, do what it takes to get at least a cat nap in, whether it’s in the carrier, stroller, or during a drive around town.

2. Adjust awake times instead of nap times.

Usually, if your baby’s nap times are either really unpredictable, or really unpleasant, or really predictably short, tweaking the amount of time they are awake between sleeps can make a big difference. Most of the time, the baby is staying awake too long for their age so here is a quick refresher for how often your baby should nap for their age:

• For tiny newborns, up through 6 or 8 weeks, offer a nap just one hour after the baby wakes up. It's just barely enough time to get in a good feeding, diaper change, and some social time before it's nap time again. Start preparing for the next nap at around the 45 minute mark.

• From 8-12-ish weeks, you can stretch that awake time to about 75 minutes. Don’t push it too much longer in the hopes of getting a longer nap. It almost never works that way (so sad!)

• After 12 weeks or by about 3 months up through 6 months, you'll want to offer another nap within 90 minutes of the last wake time. 90 minutes up, 90 minutes down, in theory! By this stage, your baby will hopefully be settled into a rhythm that comes out to 3 naps per day, though with short naps, it might be 4, and that can be really inconvenient. But then, so is having a fussy overtired baby, right?

• After 6 or 7 months, you can start to aim for specific nap times, but before then, keep an eye on awake times for a better rested baby. There are plenty of apps that will track this for you, but my favorite is still the Huckleberry Care sleep app.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

3. Have a super consistent bedtime routine.

The last thing you can do to try and get everyone more sleep is to be super consistent in the 10-minute-routine you use right before the start of sleep time. Through your consistent repetition, you send a very clear message to your baby about what's happening next and that makes them feel safe. If your approach to sleep time or how you respond when your baby is struggling to fall asleep, wakes up from a very short nap, or wakes up often in the night is all over the map, well, then, your baby's reaction will likely be all over the place too. 

The exact details probably don’t matter too much, but if you are determined to do something, go ahead and pick one thing and stick to it with all the diligence and discipline you can muster! Change up the routine a little, or get the baby’s nursery finished so they can sleep in there, or just tweak the timing. Stick with it for at least 3 days, and see what happens. You can always adjust as you go.

But maybe you’re so tired, you just want someone to tell you what to do already?

Well, if you feel like you’ve tried all the things, if you’re being super consistent, but your baby is fighting sleep like crazy, if you’re trying to figure out the right awake times for your baby but are feeling lost, or if you’re not sure what else you can possibly do to get everyone more sleep, let’s talk. If you do decide to get a little help, you’ll feel so much better about how to move forward knowing a real person, and a professional, too, listened to what you most want to get out of this, has double checked your process, and will support you the whole way through.

Find out more about working together here, or else, contact me with any questions about what we’d do to get you and your baby more sleep.

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