If you’ve been following the series (yes, all ONE other post of it), you’ll remember that this post was going to be something along the lines of “Why sleep training is bullshit”.
But the fact is that sleep training itself isn’t bullshit, it’s the way people go about it that is.
Fact: Sleep is a skill that has to be learnt. No matter how tired you are, you need to have the necessary skill to lie down. relax your body and put yourself into a state of sleep. Now, this doesn’t apply to when you’ve been drinking, out shaking your booty all night, watching five-day test cricket or just after an orgasm, but you get the point.
Sleep training is essential to teaching your child to go to sleep when you put him or her in their respective beds, cribs, dog houses…whatever. The problem is that people tend to leave sleep training far too late in their child’s life.
Sleep training starts the moment you are back from hospital and those first few relentless weeks of 2-hourly feeding, burping, changing, sleeping starts.
My wife and I did a very good parenting course before our son made his premature appearance in the world. In fact, we were only about half way through the course when my wife’s doctor said: “Not a chance…this baby is coming out TODAY.”
What we did manage to learn rom this course is that the sooner you get your baby into a routine, the better, and the more likely he or she will be to start sleeping through earlier. (Sidenote: Sleeping through is not as much of a myth as people make it out to be…I’ll cover that some other time).
The course we went on taught us a simple and effective formula that instilled sleeping skills into our little oke from the very beginning. The result is that he now goes down when we put him down, and he can sleep – quite literally – anywhere, regardless of any distractions.
Remember this formula: Wake, feed, burp, change, wake time, sleep. The order is key. By feeding the baby and keeping him or her awake for a period of time…and then putting them down AWAKE, is how we got our little dude sleep trained in just a few weeks.
The period of time that you keep your baby awake varies, depending on how old they are. Start with wake time of about 30 minutes and over the next few weeks, gradually increase it to about an hour and a half to two hours when your little screamer is about six months old.
This not only instils a nice routine for the baby, but makes your time a little more predictable (it’ll never be entirely though) and you’ll be a lot less stressed.
Some things to remember: Shit happens, and not only in the nappy. You can’t predict things like gas, colic, reflux etc., which can and will throw a spanner in the sleep training works.
Also, try and avoid using sleep props. While it’s easier to associate a toy, a dummy or a trip in the car, rocking your baby etc. with sleepy time, it will become a crutch for your baby and when they’re older you’ll have a tough time getting them to let go of the prop when it’s bed time.
Be prepared:
The parenting course we went on also gave us great advice on dealing with crying and identifying the types of cry. You know how they say that there is not book out there that has everything in it about raising a baby? our course textbook did. Well, not everything, but it had enough to give us enough confidence to handle any situation. (**I’ll cover the parenting course we did in a later post**).
The long and the short of it is that sleep will become a rare and valued commodity in your life form the last weeks of your partner’s pregnancy and well into the first year of your spawn’s life. Prepare yourself and remember, it’s just temporary. Unless you plan to have another one… but I’m told it’s easier the second time around.…
Tags: advice, sleep, sleep training
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