Eight Best Sleep Strategies: What Every Parent Needs to Know

Excerpt from Sleep Solutions for Your Baby, Toddler and Preschooler: The Ultimate No-Worry Approach for Each Age and Stage

By Ann Douglas

Sleep scientists have identified eight sleep strategies that are effective in encouraging healthy sleep habits in babies and young children:

1. Learn to spot and respond to your child’s sleep cues at each age and stage—during the baby, toddler, and preschool years. You want to ensure that your child is benefiting from adequate sleep.
2. Teach your baby to distinguish between night and day and expose your baby to sunlight to help reinforce your baby’s natural circadian rhythms (the body’s built in sleep/wake “clock”).
3. Establish a consistent, predictable, soothing bedtime routine during the newborn phase, and allow this routine to evolve as your child becomes an older baby, toddler, and a preschooler. You will find this easier to accomplish if you provide a sleep environment that is sleep-enhancing.
4. Let your newborn practise falling asleep on his own (instead of rocking him, patting him, or nursing him to sleep after each feeding).
5. Learn to differentiate between the normal noises your baby makes in his sleep and bonafide “pick me up” crying.
6. Treat daytime sleep as a priority as long as your child needs his naps. Children who nap well during the day sleep better at nighttime.
7. Recognize when your child no longer needs to be fed in the night and use non-food methods to soothe your baby back to sleep so that he’ll be more likely to sleep through the night.
8. Remain as calm and relaxed as possible when you’re dealing with your child’s sleep issues. If you become stressed, your child will pick up on how you’re feeling, and his own feelings of stress will escalate.

While it’s best to work on these strategies when your child is a baby it’s never too late to get with the sleep program. In other words, if your child is a toddler or a preschooler and has picked up some less-than-great sleep habits along the way, you can use this information in this section of the chapter to analyze your child’s sleep habits and come up with a plan for helping your child to develop healthier sleep habits. You’ll also find additional information on dealing with baby, toddler, and preschooler sleep problems in Chapters 6, 7, and 8 of Sleep Solutions for Your Baby, Toddler and Preschooler: The Ultimate No-Worry Approach for Each Age and Stage, Part of The Mother of All Solutions?