Understanding how your baby sleeps can help you get your baby to sleep through the night, take better naps, thrive, and be happier! Part of understanding how babies sleep is understanding how their sleep cycles work. This post will explain baby sleep cycles by age and provide a chart for guidance based on my 10+ years as a sleep consultant. What is a Sleep Cycle? It might seem like we adults simply fall asleep and then wake up in the morning. But, in reality, we go through different
baby sleep patterns
How To Get My 14, 15, or 16 Week Old Baby To Sleep
Previous: How To Get My 11, 12 or 13 Week Old To Sleep Congratulations! You’ve just completed your “4th Trimester” otherwise known as your baby’s first 3 months ex utero and helped your 11, 12, or 13 week old sleep. What does this mean? For many babies it means they begin waking up more at night or have difficulty napping. Uh oh! So, it’s no wonder one of the most common questions we get here at The Baby Sleep Site® is "How do I get my 14, 15 or 16 week old to sleep?" While some babies can
Quick Tip: How To Tell If A Nap Transition Is Approaching
Picture this. You've just settled into a nice, predictable daytime sleep schedule, you're feeling good about life, and then, before you know it, your baby gets a little older and blows your perfectly-crafted routine to pieces. I’m positive a lot of you know exactly what I’m talking about (even those of you who've never been able to establish a nap schedule.) The first few years of a child’s life are full of changes, and those changes add up to mean ever-shifting sleep patterns and
Sleep Regression, Phase, or Habit – Which Is Causing Your Baby’s Sleep Problems?
We've written quite a bit about sleep regressions on this site (in fact, Nicole herself was instrumental in coining that term!), and with good reason: your child goes through FIVE sleep regressions in the first year of life alone! But how can you know for sure if something is a sleep regression? How do you distinguish a sleep regression from a growth spurt? What about a sleep regression vs. a funky phase that has no real explanation? And, for that matter, how do you distinguish
Why Downtime In The Crib MIGHT Be Bad For Sleep
Imagine when you put your baby to sleep, your baby doesn't cry. Your baby happily plays in his or her crib, looks at the mobile, or babbles, but isn't sleeping. Or, your toddler happily chats in his bed for an hour every night before going to sleep. You're lucky, right? This is the ideal baby sleep situation and you have nothing to worry about, right? Wrong. Turns out that downtime in your baby's crib - time in which she plays and entertains herself - might actually be detrimental to sleep.
THIS Is What Good Baby Sleep Looks Like, According To Science.
It's that time again: time for new sleep guidelines from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM). Every so often, the AASM releases recommendations for healthy child sleep; now, we have their 2016 recommendations. Let's take a look! How Much Sleep Do Babies and Toddlers Need? Our team looked at this area of the report first, and we were very pleased to learn that our sleep plan recommendations line up exactly with the recommended sleep totals from the AASM: Infants 4 months to 12
10 Must-Know Baby and Toddler Nap Facts. (#7 May Surprise You!)
We've written quite a bit about baby and toddler naps here on the blog, so if you've been following our site for a while, you've had the chance to read a lot of baby and toddler nap tips and tidbits. But, some of you are new moms or new to The Baby Sleep Site® and we strive to educate all of our parents on the importance of good sleep and how to achieve it! Today, we're presenting you with 10 must-know facts about your baby's or toddler's naps. Think of it as your nap "cheat sheet". ;)
Your Baby’s Changing Sleep Patterns: Birth – 12 Months
As a mom or dad, you already know that the first year of your baby's life is a year of incredible growth and development. The average baby triples his birthweight by age 1 and grows an incredible 10 inches in that first year. And that's not all -- between birth and 12 months, your baby will learn to roll over, sit up, creep and crawl, and perhaps even walk. Impressive, right? Your baby's sleep patterns will change pretty significantly in the first year, too. And that's what we're
Can You Teach Your Baby to Sleep Through Noise?
There is lots of conventional wisdom out there that says parents should teach their babies to sleep through noise, from day one. We hear this sometimes from our consultation clients - friends and family members blame them (the parents) for their babies' short naps and nighttime waking, saying that they (the parents) simply need to teach the baby to sleep through noise. Because then, the baby wouldn't wake up so much! Oh, if only it were that simple. ;) How Noise Affects Baby
