Routine

But when to begin early Sleep Coaching?

In the first few weeks of a newborn’s life we start a routine and follow awake windows but also follow Baby’s cues and do whatever feels right. Letting your baby sleep on your chest, on your lap, by your side, in their sleeping pillow, in a basket, we are bonding with our babies (safety first) however we want to – for a lot of us it’s the only way to get everyone some sleep as we learn about our baby’s needs. Implement a routine as soon as you can; play, eat, play, sleep and repeat.

Start tracking

It’s important to make note of the times when your baby goes to sleep and wakes up. Once they start to sleep longer stretches in the night and wake up less they are ready for some sleep ‘coaching’. (Tracking sleeping times is important as you might otherwise miss the patterns in your sleep deprived state– use your phone, a piece of paper, whatever is convenient).

When your baby starts to sleep around 5 hours for the first part of the night – buckle up because they are ready! This sometimes corresponds to around 10 pounds of body weight.

Sleep Progression first steps:

Swaddle Baby in a natural position with arms preferably up. Bassinets or mini cribs work best for newborns to help them feel more enclosed and secure. White noise, a dark room, and temperature around 70F is ideal. Use a Baby Monitor which displays the temperature. The Sleep Progression method assumes that Baby has had all of his/her milk during the day. A double feeding at 5pm and 6.15pm is also key to getting all the calories in.

Do not pick up your baby immediately when they wake crying.

Follow Coaching Steps. Think about it this way: Babies cry at different times for different reasons including very often because they are tired. Running in and picking up a crying baby immediately can disturb their sleep cycle and just lead to more crying, Another reason to wait a minute is for you: it’s to get used to the cries and to recognize that it’s not a cry of pain – getting accustomed to Baby’s cry at this early age will steel your wits for more controlled crying if it is needed later on. Secondly we are teaching our babies the most important thing of all- Trust. Trust that we are there and we will always be there for them but it takes a minute. They will learn that YES we are coming and there’s no need for tears.

The magical result here is to have your baby eventually wake up with happy coo’ing while they peacefully wait for you to attend to them. Instead of waking crying because they are tired from being picked up every time they fussed all night.

At this early age our babies are still waking in the night because of hunger so we continue to feed them, burp them, and lay them back down to sleep and make a note of the times all of this is happening so we can see the patterns forming and be encouraged by longer and longer stretches being recorded.

Once the first stretch of sleep extends to 6 hours, provided that Baby is consuming enough ounces for their body weight during the day – it will be a very short time before it gets to 8 hours (or longer), often corresponding to when Baby weighs over 12 pounds.

Baby will be sleeping from 7pm until between 2–4am Congratulations! Once this continues for one week you MUST start a new routine of waking them up fully at 10.30pm for a feeding. (This may feel counterintuitive but you will thank me when your baby is sleeping through the night with no regressions!) It is important to turn on all the lights in the room and unswaddle Baby so they are fully awake and can finish their feeding. Change their diaper to help wake them more during this time. This forced waking works to push the next longer sleeping spell until 7am, now you can go to sleep with Baby after this feeding and get 8 hours of blissful sleep! Sleeping through the night is now OFFICIAL!

If Baby wakes before 5am they can be fed again – but if they wake up after 5am you will need to hold them and try to settle them or amuse them until their 7am breakfast. It is very important not to feed them between 5–7am (again: The Sleep Progression method assumes that Baby has had all of his/her milk during the day) as this will throw off the feedings for the rest of the day. Correcting this wake up time to 7am can be the hardest part of Sleep Coaching and may take more than one week – but is also one of the most rewarding! The payoff will be an end to early rising that will carry through for the years to come.