Sleeping Babies

We’ve had prob­lems with get­ting the baby (now 10 months) to sleep prop­erly dur­ing the day, and when she also star­ted wak­ing more often dur­ing the night I decided I had to fig­ure out an answer. Our first child slept read­ily, took sched­ule vari­ations in his stride, and so it was a big shock when our second child was com­pletely dif­fer­ent. We tried put­ting her on vari­ous routines, but could­n’t find one that worked until recently (yay! sleep!). Giv­en that lots of searches on my blog are about how to get babies to sleep, and the vast num­ber of books out there on the sub­ject, I fig­ure some oth­er people might be inter­ested in the sub­ject. The rest of you will undoubtedly have already tuned out by now.

I got heaps of books out of the lib­rary, but can only recom­mend two. Some of the books seemed to be writ­ten along the lines of “this worked for me, I don’t know why, maybe it will work for you too” and per­son­ally I prefer an approach that has a little more research to it. I’m not going to talk about the books I read and did­n’t like since oth­er people may find them use­ful; I’m just going to review the two books I liked best.

If your baby is young, you could try The Hap­pi­est Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Cry­ing and Help Your Baby Sleep Longer, which looked like it had some use­ful tips. I would­n’t both­er with it if your baby is more than about 6 months old though.

The book I liked a lot, and even bought, is Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, which con­tains a lot of inform­a­tion, includ­ing some research into how long chil­dren sleep at vari­ous ages, a strict routine (which really suits our baby but would­n’t have been neces­sary for our first child), and dis­cus­sions about what to do as the child gets older in terms of chan­ging the sleep and nap routine. A lot of people may find the advice to let the baby cry harsh — you do have to be able to recog­nise the vari­ous types of cry your baby makes so you can respond to fear or dis­com­fort while ignor­ing the baby when she’s annoyed. It worked very well for us (at least so far and we’ve been on the sched­ule for a week) and we not only have our happy baby back, I’m also catch­ing up on sleep. Get­ting up at 6:30 am every morn­ing is a bit of a change, but not being woken up at 11 pm, 2 am, and 5 am more than makes up for it.