SETTING A BEDTIME RITUAL

Setting A Bedtime Ritual

Any casual glance at child rearing guides will reveal that particular attention is paid to baby
sleep habits. The reason is fairly obvious: one of the most difficult things for a new parent to get
used to is dealing with constantly being awoken in the night by a newborn. There are no hard
and fast rules to getting your baby to sleep well, as all newborns are different. There are,
however, some baby sleep tips you can employ that will help. The important thing is to
understand that your judgment as a parent is paramount: don't get stubborn with tips that don't
seem to work, and try a wide variety and things to find out what works best for you and your
baby.

A good place to start, in terms of baby sleep tips, is to establish a bedtime ritual for your baby.
The reason that your newborn doesn't sleep well through the night at first is because he is used
to falling asleep with his mother. When he awakes in the night he naturally cries for his mother -
the only way he knows how to go back to sleep. As your newborn grows older a slow transition
will occur whereby he learns to go to sleep on his own, and - more importantly - when he wakes
in the night he can learn to fall back asleep on his own. Your goal as a parent is to try and
speed up this transition as much as possible, the result will not only be a good night's rest for
you, but a development of better sleeping habits for your child in the long term.

To get your child to sleep well on his own, focus on a consistent bedtime routine. Babies are
very dependant on routines - their world is so narrow that they generally focus on only a few
things throughout the day - the way to create transitions in their day, therefore, is to change how
these things are presented to them.

For example, your bedtime routine may consist of a warm bath, a feeding and changing, and
some rocking before bed. If you repeat this every night your baby will slowly begin to associate
these things with sleep. Every night, then, your child will naturally start to fall into a "sleeping
mode" when you do these things. If you are inconsistent, however - if, say, you only bathe him
on odd nights, or change the order of bedtime events - you will confuse the child and he will be
unsure of what happens next: he won't know whether he's going to sleep after his bath, or being
read a story.

A bedtime routine should also employ spending a good amount of time with your baby. Even
from a very young age, babies will learn to manipulate their parents, and if you don't spend
enough time with your baby before he falls asleep, he will start to stretch out the bedtime ritual
in order to spend more time with you.

In establishing a bedtime ritual for your child, you primary concerns should be to make it
consistent. To ensure better sleeping habits for your baby, don't focus so much on what you do
before bed, rather, pay attention to doing the same things in the same order every night.