About Sleep
Concerns about their baby's sleep are experienced by many parents.
Over time you will come to see that your baby has a personality of her own and perhaps even a genetic predisposition to a sleep pattern that can vary widely from one day to the next, balancing out over time and across days. Just like yours does.
Your newborn baby may need only 10 hours of sleep a day and this is just as normal as it is for a baby who needs up to18 hours a day. THere is extensive diversity in the sleep needs of babies. Brief and irregular catnapping during the day for some infants is normal, as is having solid stretches of 1.5 – 3 hours. What is important to aim for, is synchrony between the sleep an infant needs and takes and that of the parents and rest of the family - and you can begin to influence this early in life, after the first few weeks.
The first couple of months can be tough on parents who are doing their very best to respond to the needs of their little one, while trying to cope with disrupted and deprived sleep themselves. Importantly too, this is the same period where a woman's lactation and milk supply are still establishing and research shows that babies may look to cluster feed in the evenings and feed more at night.
So, how do parents work with all this?
Have you heard about the
Possums is a gentle, evidence-based approach to achieving better sleep that harnesses the rhythms of your baby's natural biology with the powerful science of sleep.
Newborn Home Care offers the services of an accredited Possum practitioner to support you in managing your baby's sleep and cry/fuss behaviour in the newborn period and early months of life.
Alternatively, you can access great resources and participate in group online sessions, often with Dr Pam herself, right through to your baby's toddlerhood.
SPECIAL NOTE: Parents who engage the support of Newborn Home Care for any reason in their baby's life, recieve a 50% reduction when subscribing to the Sleep Program at possumsndc.com down the track, should they choose. (Just be back in touch for your code)
At Newborn Home Care we adopt the Possums approach to supporting sleep in babies, because we know and respect that sleep is not something that needs to be taught. It is a biological happening, that once you understand what shapes it, you can begin to work with its drivers for your baby's benefit.
The process of trying to teach a baby to self-settle and sleep longer against her will, dials her sympathetic nervous system up and this can be neurologically disruptive to her development. Her distress will dial up your nervous system too and can leave the two of you out of sync.
We can support you to make the days more enjoyable with your baby, in a way that suits your family, where baby will take the sleep she needs across the day as you move the family towards synchronised living and better night sleep.
The Possum'sMantra
Daytime is for Living
Nighttime is for Sleeping
What are some of the simple approaches to life with a baby that can help encourage sleep patterns at night that work for baby, you and your family?
Feeding your baby flexibly (whether breast or bottle fed), according to hunger cues, not the clock.
Positioning baby to feed at the breast in a stable way that research has shown maximises milk transfer.
Pacing baby's feed to enjoy his bottle.
Living each day doing the things you love and that interest you, getting out and about.
Trusting that your baby will take the sleep she needs as you get on about your day.
Immersing your baby in a richly changing sensory environment which nourishes their rapidly developing senses.
Dialling down baby's sympathetic nervous system - which dials down yours, and helps bubby's brain organise its blooming architecture in a co-ordinated fashion.
Tuning in and responding with intention to what your baby is cue-ing for and communicating to you.
Aligning the two sleep regulators that are the biological drivers of sleep, which serve to either keep us asleep or awake. These are 1) the sleep/wake homeostat which is an internal timer that regulates sleep pressure (or 'tiredness') by switching off and on wakeful alerting signals, and 2) some 50,000 cells buried deep in the brain that we know as the circadian clock.
Setting up the environmental cues that help your baby learn the difference between a day sleep and a night sleep.
Shoring up baby's sleep pressure to help compress her sleep needs better into the night hours.
A parent plays an important role in making it easy for their children to sleep by supporting them to synchronise their hard-wired biological drivers.
What are Environmental Sleep Cues & Sleep Regulators?
Having your baby sleep where you are, both night and during the day, provides important environmental clues to your baby for the synchronisation of their biological clock. Background conversations, running taps, footsteps, noisy play, kitchen noises, music and sound become recognised as part of sleep during the day. Conversely, hushed tones, dimmed lights and the sounds of your breathing become associated with night.
This practice also helps to protect your baby from SIDS.
melatonin
By around 2-3 months of age your baby’s melatonin production will begin to rise as the sun sets and peak in the early hours after midnight.
Breastfeeding your baby at night has the added bonus of transferring to baby some of your own melatonin as well to help their sleep. If you are using expressed breast milk in bottles at night, you might like to use milk that has been pumped in the evening or night to provide continued melatonin, albeit in quite small concentrations.
You may notice that your baby's body temperature starts to be slightly lower at night as she responds to the biology of her developing internal night/day rhythm.
This is all part of regulating sleep pressure and setting up a healthy functioning circadian clock.
circadian clock
Good nighttime sleeping habits are best worked towards by exposing your baby to lots of natural daylight, where light falling on the retina of the eye helps to calibrate a day/night cycle of sleep and wakefulness.
Basking bub in this natural light, as you go about your day doing things that interest you, she is exposed to a variety of interesting sensory input that nourishes her and is necessary to build an abundance of diverse neurological connections within her rapidly developing brain.
Absorbing rich and changing neural input during the day is working the brain and babies will sleep when they need.
This is an important step in setting up a healthy sleep wake cycle for the night-time.
The brain registering daylight, and the activities of the day, are the environmental cues to help set the circadian clock to night and day. That is why day sleep for babies, taken in darkened rooms, is not recommended, as it confuses and delays the synchronisation of the circadian clock.
sleep pressure
The science behind the Possums approach to sleep, encourages parents to turn their attention away from populist talk about sleep ‘training’ and adopt a more biological lens steeped in sleep science.
Get to know and understand your baby's individual need for sleep. Some babies have high day sleep needs, others quite low. Sleep pressure will build differently in each baby, and it will be in response to this that your baby will nap.
Being able to sleep for longer stretches at night relies on a few things.
Firstly, and most importantly, your baby must be neurologically and developmentally ready to do this. Asking it of them with any form of controlled crying can risk disorganising the formation of sensitive neurological mapping that is going on within the brain. Secondly, he will need to be taking the milk he wants across the day, which is helped greatly by adopting an approach of feeding frequently and flexibly whenever bub is cue-ing for it. Lastly, provide your baby with an array of stimulating sensory experiences to engage her brain, aiming to spend part of each day outside the house where possible.
Understanding Broken Sleep
What you read here about sleep is premised on the commonsense that to sleep well at night, a baby needs to be receiving enough milk to satisfy their needs and be gaining weight. Whether breast or bottle fed, a baby will wake at night if they are hungry. They will wake if they are cold or soiled - and they will wake sometimes just to be held by you and know that you are near.
If their appetitie for stimulating brain development has not been nourished in daylight hours, this can override the sleep regulators and cause them to wake to want to play. Babies will also wake if they are sick or teething, which can begin in some babies as early as 4 months.
Importantly, in the first 6 months of life, it is now well recognised by health professionals that feeding a baby that wakes at night is important.
If your baby is waking excessively at night, waking irritable after naps or unsettled after feeds, or you are feeling overwhelmed by your baby's sleep pattern, please contact Newborn Home Care for a chat and support.
As you approach your baby's sleep time, be mindful that being in a contented space to prepare for sleep, allows sleep regulators to do their job.
Developmental Sleep
Don’t lose sight that changes in the pattern of night waking are also developmental, for it is perfectly normal for a newborn baby to wake every 2-4 hours through the night in the initial weeks, before starting to have longer stretches of 4-6 hours.
This pattern often changes with developmental leaps, particularly around 4 - 5 months, when they again may wake more frequently.
As your baby grows older though, he may wake with sounds that are not urgent cries but baby whimpers and calling out noises, as he then transitions into more sleep. You can always wait in these moments before responding to see if bub is just exercising his maturing ability to self-settle, knowing you are not harming him.
Only you can decide when your baby is dialling up, and that you therefore should start to take steps to respond and go to him. You can try this type of responsive approach to settling in order to identify what your baby is actually communicating by their behaviour.
Excessive night waking however, in an infant baby, can often signal an underlying feeding problem, which a Possums Lactation Consultant and NDC practitioner can help with. Past this early stage in life, we explore harmonising the body clock to day &night, working with sleep pressure and ensuring sensory motor nourishment and food intake during the day is optimised to achieve good night sleep.
To explore the science and evidence behind the Possums Appraoch further please see
The Discontented Little Baby Book by Dr Pamela Douglas
and also browse possumssleepprogram.com
You can find an NDC practitioner near you through the NDC Institute website
or contact us at Newborn Home Care to arrange a personal consultation.