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By: Deborah Nelson

Getting sleep becomes all the more precious when you have a newborn who wakes roughly every two to three hours to eat. Some newborns sleep longer stretches; parents of those babies are fortunate.

If you have a baby who doesn’t sleep a long time and you’d like to improve how much sleep you and your baby get, try these ideas:

Establish a Routine

Create a routine (for example, nursing, three books, warm bath, brush teeth, into dark room to get new diper and pjs and off to bed). You can change and modify this routine as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Establish a Set Bedtime

Babies sleep better when they go to sleep earlier. Often, people have the misconception that a baby will be more tired if you keep them up later. It works in reverse.

When a baby is extremely tired, she sleeps worse. Babies are designed to want to go to bed anywhere from about 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Experiment to see which time works best for your baby.

Keep a Chart of Your Success

When extremely tired, it’s easy to think you’re getting nowhere with sleep and the night routine. Keep plugging away, and you’ll get there. Create a chart on your computer or by hand that shows you the time the baby went to sleep, HOW baby went to sleep (in your arms, at the breast, alone in crib, etc), the time of the next waking, and how long it took to put him back down and HOW you put him back down (rocking, walking, in the crib alone, etc).

When you chart this way, you’ll learn how many times your baby wakes in the night, how long she sleeps in total, and how you are progressing. Keep a chart for 1-2 nights and then STOP. Wait 7-10 days before you chart again so you can see progress.

The success you’ll enjoy includes:

1. Reduced time to get baby to sleep.

2. Reduced length of nightwakings for an increase in total time slept.

3. Increased actual hours slept by 1 hour.

4. Increased length of longest stretch of sleep by 1-1.5 hours. At the end, the increase was 9 or so hours until baby slept routinely 12 hours in a row.

5. Having a lot of fun in the routine with your baby.

You’ll want to wait until your baby is at least four months old before you employ these techniques. While some newborns will sleep a long time right away, the majority need to eat at night since they are growing so much. It’s always a good idea to ask your pediatrician for advice on what age is best for encouraging longer stretches of sleep.

NOTE: It’s important to make sure you are ready for a new nighttime routine. Some parents desperately want sleep and then still find it hard when their baby no longer needs them at night. Change is usually challenging. With change comes a little sadness at leaving how things were (no sleep but lots of midnight snuggles) and also happiness (more sleep!).