Babies and Sleep

Notes from Babywise chapter 3.

Three basic activities: feeding, waketime and naptime, repeat themselves in rhythmic cycles. Routine leads to consistency, consistency leads to stabilization of each activity. As a result, the whole family is blessed by the order brought to the baby’s day.


For better or worse, parents are the greatest influence on a child’s ability to sleep. Expecting babies and young children to sleep through the night is very realistic.

Healthy, full-term babies typically are born with the capacity to achieve 7-8 hours of continuous nighttime sleep between seven to nine weeks.

In the early months, an infant spends most of his or her time sleeping.

While sleep ranges from relaxed state to fitful rest, the awake ranges from tiredness to optimal alertness.

Infants, pre-toddlers, and toddlers who suffer from the lack of healthy naps and continuous nighttime sleep may experience fatigue. Fatigue is primary the cause of fussiness, daytime irritability, crankiness, discontentment, hypertension, poor focusing skills and poor eating habits.

 In contrast, children who have healthy sleeping patterns are optimally alert to interact with their environment. These children are self assured and happy, less demanding and more sociable. They have longer attention spans and as a result become faster learners.

The typical infant has both the natural ability and the capacity to sleep through the night sometime with the first nine weeks of life. It is an acquired skill which is enhanced by routine.

Since sleep is a natural function of the body, the primary cue for infant sleep is sleepiness.

You should not use these three things to put your baby to sleep because baby will become dependent on it.

1. Intentionally nursing a baby to sleep

2. Rocking a baby to sleep or taking baby for a car ride

3. Sleeping with your baby (shared sleep)

Put your baby to sleep while you are both awake. This way baby will establish longer and stronger sleep cycles then if placed in the crib already asleep.

Feed your baby, rock her and love her, but put her down before she falls asleep.