Health Care for Children

Your newborn may snooze a lot — but not for long stretches.
 That’s because her internal clock isn’t up and running yet. “There is no rhyme or reason to sleep until about 6 to 10 weeks,” says sleep expert Jodi Mindell, PhD, author of Sleep Deprived No More. But even newborns can benefit from a bedtime ritual: “Parents don’t realize how aware babies are, but when you nurse her, zip up her pjs, and put on music, it sends a signal,” says Mindell.

Put him down sleepy but awake.
 
That way, if he rouses in the night, he can put himself back to sleep. Erika Riley, of Minneapolis, learned this the hard way with her second son, Max, who is now 2. She would lie with him in her bed until he fell asleep. But 30 minutes later, he’d wake and need her next to him to drift off. Another common blunder: giving baby the breast or bottle right before he goes down. “Make this the first part of the bedtime routine,” Mindell says. “If baby falls asleep sucking on a bottle, he’ll need that to fall asleep again if he wakes in the night.” Just ask Kristen Fox, of Florham Park, New Jersey. Her oldest, Keira, now 3, nodded off with her bottle. When she no longer needed it at 9 months, Fox said, “Now what do I do?”

Exposing baby to bright light in the morning helps set her internal clock. Pull up the shades in the nursery or take her for an a.m. walk.

Good sleep habits are all about routine.
 
By 6 to 8 weeks, baby can benefit from a sleep schedule linked to feedings, with an “official” bedtime, even though he isn’t sleeping through the night. By 3 to 4 months, baby should snooze about six hours (yay!), so you can drop a middle-of-the-night bottle, says pediatrician Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD, of New York City. As baby sleeps longer, bedtime shifts earlier, to between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m.

Baby’s cries hurt you more.
 
The experts agree: for the first three months, feed baby on demand and cater to her every need. But eventually, you need to take a new tack. Kate Clow, of Chatham, New Jersey, let all three of her kids cry it out: “It was horrible, but it lasted only a few days,” she says. Consistency is key. “If you decide to let them cry it out for two nights and then go in on the third, you’re back at square one.” Erika Riley let Max cry it out at 10 months. “He was eating table food, so I knew he wasn’t hungry. I have a video monitor, so I knew he was okay. He wanted my attention, and he soon enough learned he wasn’t going to get it in the middle of the night,” she says. “I knew I had to let him cry so he could learn to sleep on his own.”