The Happy Sleeper: the science-backed guide to helping your baby get a good night’s sleep ― newborn to school age

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I keep a three hour interval, because I know that if she wakes up before three hours she's unlikely to actually be hungry. Even when she was tiny and I was home and we had zero schedule my brain suddenly turned into this nap calculating machine - how long has she been awake? Chapter 6 addresses special situations like bed sharing, traveling, and other arrangements and circumstances that can change the way your child sleeps. By the third night she understood that our bedtime song meant crib time, and she'd start getting agitated while we were singing to her, spitting out her pacifier and trying to climb out of our arms, crying before we'd even set her down. One experiment showed that adding just 30 minutes more sleep per night made a significant improvement (for kids without any history of behavioral issues) in how restless, impulsive, and moody children were.

As clinicians who follow science and new thinking on child development, we realized why sleep was stumping so many families'it's the same overhelping or 'helicopter parenting' dilemma that parents find themselves in elsewhere. He never cried for more than 20 minutes, and usually not at all or for a few minutes, and never half as hard as he had when he was in our arms. I could set her down in her crib at night awake and she'd quietly roll over and get into a comfy position and then just pass out. Children with sleep issues have a higher prevalence of hyperactivity and attention problems (and vice versa, kids with ADHD-like symptoms are at higher risk for sleep problems).

She and Julie Wright have a sleep consultation practice and class series based in Los Angeles and available to families all over the world. For example, when your child enters deep sleep, growth hormones are secreted that allow cells to divide and tissues to repair and regenerate. You might offer a word or two of encouragement, but if you swipe the circle and pop it through the designated hole, she’s sure to hand the next piece right to you and ask you to do it for her again. If it starts feeling frustrating or difficult, we'll figure out how to change it but right now we get so little time together that it's actually pretty sweet. But then it started gradually getting better and by day 8 she would lie down and settle herself with barely a protest and she no longer seemed agitated or upset at bedtime.

Think about the fact that your goal is not just a child who is functioning , but one who is optimally alert, creative, and balanced. But as soon as she started sleep training she cut it down to once per night naturally, which was amazing for me.As I said above, I don't think I could have gotten through the crying if we hadn't already gotten to a place where she was crying a whole lot in the middle of the night. That's exactly the combination studies suggest is the win-win-win of effective parenting: give your children the relationship security they need while also providing them the structure they require to sleep well and thrive. In this section we'll look at two important aspects of healthy sleep'consistency and attunement'and how they work together to produce great little sleepers. Once I knew baby needed 3 hours of wake time before bed, x amount before nap 1, x amount before nap 2, and x amount before nap 3, i started sleep training.