How to handle daylight savings time in relation to your little one’s sleep.

Why ‘drowsy but awake’ doesn’t work

What is a sleep regression?

During their first 2 years of life children develop at a very fast rate. There are some ages where they go through a leap in their development. These can cause a shift in sleep patterns and this can result in new issues with sleep, such as protesting, shorter naps and more night wakes.

Kids, as with all people, have a natural rhythm when it comes to sleep. Our bodies secrete hormones to keep us up and running during the day, and different ones to help us rest at night. They’re dependant on a variety of factors, but timing is the most prevalent. So what happens when your little one stays awake past the time when these natural cues to sleep are activated?

That’s right, I said it. Your baby will never sleep straight through the night. And neither will you, for that matter. We’re all familiar with the various stages of sleep from our own experience. You might not be able to put a name to them, but you’ve certainly felt the difference between waking from a light sleep and a deep one. Simply put, when we fall asleep, we spend a little while in a light stage of sleep and gradually progress into a deeper one.

A baby’s vital needs essentially break down into eating, sleeping, and pooping, and their only real form of communicating an issue with any of those things is through crying. But as any parent knows, identifying the fact that there is a problem is far, far easier than solving the problem, and as parents, that’s what we want to do. Now, if you’re the parent of a baby who’s learning to crawl, or who’s teething, or just figured out how to roll over, this may come as the least surprising scientific discovery imaginable, but developmental milestones are likely to cause disruptions in a baby’s sleep.

So no matter what might have happened over the summer, all is forgiven. The mission now is to get your child back on track so that they can get back to sleep at a reasonable hour the day before they head back to school. Let’s see how.

Sleep, like food, is one of those elements where baby has got the final say on whether or not they’re going to cooperate, so there’s no sense trying to force the issue. If they are not sleeping, just leaving them in their room usually won’t fix things. So here’s what’s going on, and how to fix it.

As a sleep consultant, the topic I get asked about the most is the 4 month regression. Parents can find it incredibly tough as baby starts to have more night wakes and do shorter naps. Many of us just think of sleep as an on-or-off situation. You’re either asleep or you’re not. But sleep actually has a number of different stages, and they make up the “sleep cycle,” which we go through several times a night. So in order to understand what’s happening to your baby during this stage, first you need to know a few things about sleep in general.

So what is a wake window and why is it important? A wake window is the amount of time that your baby can cope with being awake. This time gradually increases as the baby gets older. So if your little one is fighting their naps or is overtired at bedtime, then try following their appropriate wake window. Going to sleep at the right time for their age might just make it a bit easier for them (and you!).

Your kids are on your mind 24/7, no matter what else might be going on, so we tend to do a lot of research, and with access to unlimited data via the internet, books and magazines it is inevitable that we get some conflicting information. Although when it comes to kids, I think the discussion even eclipses politics for the sheer divisiveness and claiming opinion as fact. So in this blog post I want to focus on my area of expertise, that being sleep, and try to dispel some of the more popular myths I’ve seen in parenting forums, heard from Mama groups I’ve been to or just general chat I have overheard.

That right there might be the single most common question new parents ask. Is it a developmental milestone? A regression? Are they getting too much sleep during the day, or not enough? Maybe they’re just hungry. Maybe they’re too hot, or too cold. Let’s try to figure it out.