5 Baby Sleep Rules to Follow

When we first became parents we read a lot of supposed sleep “rules” like we’re sure you’ve all read. “Don’t let baby fall asleep eating”, “put baby down drowsy but awake”, “don’t do too much for your baby or you’ll create bad habits”, and “never ever let your baby in your bed or they’ll be there until college”. We embellished on that last one, but we’re sure you’ve felt and heard all these same “warnings”. Today, we want to look beyond the obvious sleep rules and take you through the sleep rules we used the second time around. Our hope is that these will be helpful to you, especially if you’re feeling pressure or like you’re getting it all wrong.

1. Get to know your unique baby. This is one of the biggest things we stress, but we’ll keep saying it. All babies are different and have unique needs! There is a lot of information on the internet about what babies need by age in terms of sleep needs, sleep environment, and sleep associations, but what works well for one baby may not work for another, so it is critical to read your baby’s cues more than the information you find on the internet. Let’s take a deeper look.

Sleep needs: there are so many charts and blogs that tell you what the author believes all babies of a certain age need for sleep. In fact there are apps that tell you exactly what time to put your baby to sleep, with little other information other than their age. Every single time you follow a chart, you’re following an average (and often the high side of average), which means there will be babies who need more sleep than the chart suggests and also babies who need less sleep than the chart suggests. Tuning into your unique baby is the best way to make sure they get the sleep they need to thrive, while also avoiding pesky scheduling challenges that tend to arise from trying to make them fit into a chart. If you’re having trouble figuring out how much sleep they need, check out our blog here.

Sleep environment: so many books on infant or toddler sleep will prescribe an “ideal sleep environment” for all babies and toddlers. The truth is that this ideal sleep environment is great and can work really well for some little ones, but there are many babies or toddlers who can sleep well in a variety of sleep environments. There are some babies who are much more sensitive to their environment than their easy going counterparts. For these babies, they may thrive in a low stimulation environment like the ones described in your traditional sleep books. For many, they’re happy to nap wherever, as long as they’re close to an attachment figure.

Sleep associations: this is the final topic we see a lot of “shoulds” around. We often see sleep associations judged as “positive” or “negative”. Generally speaking from the sleep training world, if it involves you a sleep association is negative, whereas if a baby can do something on their own, it’s a positive association. We wholeheartedly think this is nonsense. There’s nothing about you that makes your responsive and soothing relationship with your child negative, so first take the judgment out of the equation. Next, spend time learning what soothes your unique baby. We’ve had 5 babies between the two of us and we can tell you that they all had their own preferences in how we supported them to sleep. Some loved nursing to sleep, some would just stay awake, some enjoyed deep pressure and cuddles, others enjoyed holding hands. There’s no right or wrong way to support your baby or toddler to sleep as long as it’s safe and responsive, so find what works best for your whole family.

2. Don’t make sleep a battle. This is the only thing we’ll warn you not to do when it comes to baby or toddler sleep. Sleep is a really tricky thing in the early years and it’s so easy to fall into a pattern of stress or anxiety around sleep, or to really feel like every nap time is a battle, so our simple solution is to not let it be. Now, we know what some of you are thinking, “if I don’t stay on top of sleep it’s going to be so much worse!” Now for some sensitive babies that may be true, but for those same babies we find that they’re so attuned to our emotions that taking the stress out of sleep is actually what helps them to move to calm and become able to fall asleep. So let’s take a deeper dive into how to avoid making sleep a battle:

Take a look at your feelings around sleep: How do you feel about your baby or toddler’s sleep? Many families struggle with feeling really stressed about sleep and they can feel that stress response elevate when they go to support their little one to sleep. The anxiety and alarm we feel when we’re worried they won’t go to sleep or that it’s going to take forever for them to fall asleep is such a natural response when we feel like we’re struggling with sleep. The challenge is that it can perpetuate the difficulties with sleep. We want to focus on regulating our emotions when it comes to sleep. Can you put on some music you find soothing? Can you take the nap on the go so you can spend time in nature? Can you listen to a podcast? Can you have a nutritious snack before sitting down to support your little one to sleep?

Take a break if it’s not working: this is one of the most powerful tools when you have a tricky time around sleep. If your little one is showing no sign of falling asleep and you’ve been trying for 10-20 minutes, give yourself permission to take a break and try again in 20 minutes. There’s no quicker way to make sleep a battle than by feeling like you spend literally hours a day trying to get your baby to sleep. Take a break, reconnect through play, and try again later!

Build up sleep associations: we’ll never ever tell you that any sleep association is “bad”, but it can be really helpful to have more than one sleep association in case your go-to fails to induce sleep in the moment. We always recommend a menu of sleep associations so that you can use whatever feels right for you and your little one.

Bring in back up: we love extending sleep responsibilities to more than one person in a child’s village of attachment. Supporting a baby to sleep for 3+ naps, plus bedtime and all their night wakings is a LOT of work for one person, so don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you have a partner, involve them and let them take the lead on some naps and bedtimes (and yes it’s possible to do even if your baby is breastfed). You can also ask one of baby’s grandparents, or aunts/uncles to step in and support baby to sleep. The more support your baby has with sleep, the more flexibility it gives you when you just feel touched out.

3. Rule out red flags. One of the biggest trends we’ve seen lately is that there are a lot of babies waking hourly or have real clear signs of discomfort. We think this is something every family should rule out in the first few months because it can make a huge difference to sleep for the family in the months and years to come. If your baby is always waking hourly, spills milk out the side of their mouths or makes a clicking noise when feeding, has trouble sleeping laying flat at night, mouth breathes or snores, or seems in a lot of pain or discomfort, spend some time ruling out red flags with our red flag blog here!

4. The two week rule. Sleep is such a fundamental need of all of ours that it only makes sense that we want to make sense of what’s going on for our little ones night to night. You might have a great night and think back to the exact conditions to try to replicate it, but we also hit this pattern when sleep is particularly tricky at night. We often jump right into “fix it” mode when our babies start waking a bit more at night or their normal sleep patterns feel disrupted. One of Elli’s core rules is not to try to figure out or “fix” a problem unless it’s been going on for more than 2 weeks.

The reason for the two weeks rule is that sleep is never going to be linear, and with how much brain development is going on in the early years, it’s very normal for sleep to get disrupted for a few days at a time for no other reason than the development. When we try to analyze every single shift in a pattern, we can make ourselves a little batty and sleep obsessed when the reality is that this is likely a little blip that will resolve itself soon and make the reason for the difficulties known. We usually find soon after these sleep disruptions occur that a new skill or tooth emerges and those disrupted nights make a lot more sense.

If a sleep challenge lasts longer than the two weeks, then it may mean that it’s more than a phase and something that you then want to take steps to sort out and that’s totally fine! We just find making these changes to established challenges is a lot easier than making changes to the daily ebbs and flow of sleep.

5. Remember things won’t be like this forever. Our final “rule” is a reminder that things won’t be like this forever. It’s so easy to feel like things will never get better or this will always be like this when you’re in the thick of things with sleep. The truth is that just like we can trust our babies to learn to walk, without fear of carrying them, we can count on them to start sleeping in longer and longer stretches over time. We want to really encourage you to keep doing all the things you love with the knowledge that you can always make a change down the road if it stops working for you.

We often hear families warned that it will be “harder” to make a change when babies grow into toddlers, and we actually find the opposite to be true. You have so many more tools at your disposal when they’re verbal, can understand what you’re telling them, and can actively participate in some play in preparation for changes you’re asking them to make. That’s not to say you should hold off on making changes if you’re really needing to make a change sooner, we just don’t want you to feel pressured to change something that is working today out of fear of the future.

So there you have it, 5 baby sleep rules we followed the second time around! We hope that you are able to work these into your approach to sleep and that you find sleep is a lot less stressful as a result!