All too often we expect our babies to be able to sleep through the night when they simply aren’t ready.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

Most babies aren’t sleeping through by the first year.

However, making sure you have the correct foundation in place is going to give you a much higher chance of your baby sleeping for 12 uninterrupted hours of blissful sleep.

Sleeping through the night infant.

What do we need for 12 hours of sleep?

• A wind down routine, which isn’t reliant on you

• A safe, cool and silent environment for your baby to sleep in

• Sometimes a lot of patience! It can take up to two weeks or even longer

• The awareness that you are doing the right thing - this is a skill your baby needs

What is a wind down routine that isn’t reliant on you?

All too often as the caring mama or dadda you can unknowingly create a routine that relies on you for your baby to fall asleep.

These are called sleep crutches.

What are sleep crutches?

Crutches are anything that would disrupt your sleep in order to help your baby’s sleep.

For example:

• Rocking or patting your baby to sleep

• Feeding your baby to sleep

• And even a dummy (because you are needed to put the dummy back in if it falls out)

So what can we do?

In order to create the correct foundation for 12 hours of sleep we must replace all sleep crutches with sleep triggers.

Sleep triggers are things that do not rely on you for your baby to sleep.

They help your baby to fall asleep independently.

• Music (while you may need to control the speaker from outside of the room, it is easy to roll over and go back to sleep and this is only temporary as your baby will wake up less and less)

• A sleeping bag (this tells your baby it is time to sleep and prepares them)

• A darkened room (again this tells your baby it is sleep time)

• Reading a book

• Sucking their thumb (this is something they will always have and is an excellent sleep trigger!)

So, now you’re all clued up on object permeance, sleep crutches and sleep triggers you should be all set for 12 hours of sleep. Finally!

Get a free taster of the Abundant Baby Sleep Course today to get one step closer to 12 hours for sleep at night and 2 - 3 hours of sleep during the day!