For kids over 1 year, some sanity saving notes (I have more than 4 kids, was about to go crazy when I got my second and then learned the things below):<p>- everyone wakes halfway up multiple times each night to see if everything is OK. Make sure they don't fall asleep with anything that can't stay with them during the night: music, tv, light, food, drink or another person (you or others).<p>- to teach kids to sleep, make them feel safe about it. What I did was walking in at a fixed schedule, starting at exact 3 minutes between the first night (I used a digital kitchen timer back then, a smartphone later) and increasing by two minutes every night. Surprisingly fast, my kids learn that I didn't disappear, and he'll be around even if they don't cry. Once they realized this they started playing with the toy the were allowed to keep in the bed. But, keep in mind: don't stop coming back if they are silent. A major part of the idea is that they realize that they don't have to do anything to make sure we don't forget them. Oh: and keep a very close ear with them in the beginning so they don't wake up and think they are alone.<p>I never really could get myself to accept the idea that "they need to cry themselves to sleep" and every thing I tried before this didn't work on my oldest.<p>This worked on my oldest kid, she started sleeping through the night within a week and also became calmer and I got my sleep back. With the rest of them it took 2-3 days only since I started earlier (shortly after they was a year old).<p>Maybe other methods work too, but this was easy for us and we didn't have to let the kids cry to sleep or anything else I have seen recommended online that I didn't like.
My partner is a doctor mainly working in early childhood prevention. When she did some recent training on evidence based early childhood care (which is surprisingly rare, most early childhood care is not really evidence based), she learned a couple of things that she said she really would like to have known when we had our children were born.<p>One is that you get told a lot about averages. So commonly parents get told that babies (should) sleep around 12h a day. What nobody talks about is the variance. There are babies who sleep only 8h a day and others who sleep close to 20h. So you end up with parents who thing they need to get their child to sleep, even though the child is absolutely not tired.<p>Also a lot of people talk about not giving children too much impressions/stimulation. Which is also generally false, giving them stimulation will actually make them tired and sleep better, they also learn stuff. Obviously you don't do that just before or when going to bed.
There's so much snark here but I love this. I'd take reading papers like this over mommy blogs every day of the week, even if it's to state the ostensibly obvious.<p>Does anyone have any other interesting child-rearing resources in this style?
Just tried this on my newborn and it seemed to work! I know there are folks saying this isn’t a new finding but i find the timings really helpful. Previously I was walking the baby too long which was wearing me out but having research based timing advise helps a lot.
Some more important conditions from the method used:<p>> Experimental sessions started approximately 1 to 2 hours after the last feeding<p>> In most cases when mothers laid the infant down, mothers held the infant with one hand behind the neck and shoulders, and the other
hand under the buttocks or thighs. The mother laid the infant on its back in 18/19 samples of the 1-month-old and older infants, and
7/7 of the neonate samples, whereas one infant was laid with a sideways landing, later to be turned on its back.<p>>To examine the effect of sleep duration on the sleep/wake outcome, the interval between the initiations of infant sleep and laydown
was calculated. The timing of the infants’ sleep onset was defined as the initiation of the behavioral sleep state, satisfying both of eye
closure and no vocalization.
I try to recommend to new parents to get a big room air purifier to clean the air where the baby sleeps but also to add a nice low bass noise (from the motor) that you can’t get from a white noise generator. Our filtrete has been running non-stop for 11 years (kind of crazy).<p>Definitely helps keep them asleep and non sensitive to sudden noises in town/city.
As a parent of a 5mo old I had to discover this on my own. Luckily my daughter makes it abundantly clear that she does not like me to sit while I hold her. Our midwife even said that babies like to know you are up and ready to escape predators. Not sure how true that part is.
Ok this we figured out.<p>What I need to find out is what to do in the car. Our kid mostly calms down while walking, but unlike his older brother the car vibrations do not make him sleep at all. And so once he starts crying in the car, we have no way of calming him down, beside stopping the car and carrying him.<p>It seems like very bouncy driving (a sequence of high acceleration followed by sudden braking) helps, but it’s kind of wreckless, makes my wife sick and my older kid angry.<p>Help!
I wonder if the reason babies cry so often is because they are "supposed" to be carried by their mother constantly in a hunter-gatherer setting.
Oh man is it finally my time to shine?<p>I'm the CTO of a startup working on exactly this (pediatric sleeping):<p><a href="https://www.restfullysleep.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.restfullysleep.com/</a><p>Fun fact there are <i>3</i> total methods to naturally promote sleep.
Dad on my 3rd baby (2 months old now). I'm like a WWE ref, I lift up my son's arm to check if it drops without resistance, after walking/dancing for a few minutes. Then fast to his bed if so.
That's how I put my newborn to sleep initially, and it works, BUT there's a problem here -<p>If the baby falls asleep in your arms, when he lightly wakes up middle of the night he expects to be in your arms, instead he finds he's alone in bed, and wakes up fully, panics and starts crying.<p>It is usually recommended to place the baby in his crib while awake, for him to fall asleep there and wake up in the same place he fell asleep in.<p>This is according to "sleep training", and I can testify it absolutely works (after two difficult nights where baby needs to adjust to falling asleep alone)
> It should be noted that, unlike most behavioral interventions for infant sleep difficulties, 9,10 this protocol does not address any long-term improvement of sleep regulation.<p>I'd expect as much since this is the first thing a parent tries to do. Holding the baby when they wake crying several times a night will calm them, not exactly revelatory, but can come in handy even for more lasting solutions.<p>I find the lit/consultants have wildly varying degrees of severity for approaches, including for gradual extinction. The mistake I think we made prior to seeking intervention is feeding-to-sleep for too long, i.e. the baby would drink a bottle right before bed and get knocked out (mostly). They were always accustomed to being asleep in arms before being put down. I think if you feed slightly earlier in the routine-chain, with the lights on, you go a long ways to avoiding this issue, since you can rock them while they're awake for a time before putting them down. In some branded variants of graduated extinction, they suggest making sure your baby is super wakeful and basically dropping them in the crib right away after reading a book - this seems needlessly harsh when going from the opposite extreme, which is reflected in the baby's level of crying. We found that it went well to rock them until they were calm and drowsy (but still awake) before putting them down. The protest was mild and short-lived, but of course that's only our experience.
> Waiting 5 to 8 minutes before laydown prevents infant awakening<p>LOL. Definitely did not work on my (now 3 year old) daughter during the infant phase.
I found this out by just trial and error.<p>Hold and walk until they sleep, then keep walking for 5-10 minutes, or just sit down for 10 minutes before laying them on the bed.
Baby sling / baby carrier is just miraculous. First daughter with second wife was crying a lot and we had to carry her much. With the sling you can basically carry the baby, have the hands free and keep on with your stuff.<p>You also have to learn to recognize the stages of sleep. Hold the arm of the baby up and down. If the arm remains in the air, this is light sleep. If the arm feels heavier and goes down all the way, this is deep sleep. Only then put the baby into the cot. This is quite important to know.
I think most experienced child-carers could tell you this, but it's great to see it made explicit.<p>I personally favor a bounce->rock->walk->sit pipeline, but ymmv based on the temperament of the child.
Any sleep-training that doesn’t begin with teaching the baby to self-soothe is bound to be a lot of work for the parents. If you perform this task for your child then you will inevitably end up repeating it whenever they stir during their sleep time. Babies can learn structure and routine and follow predictable sleep/wake patterns if they’re taught to, and they are capable of soothing themselves. So long as you’ve taken care of all their other physical needs (fed, dry diaper, secure swaddle if they’re still in that stage) then any intrusion into their sleep time teaches your child that you will come in and be with them if they stir. Even infants will pick up on this very simple cause/effect relationship and abuse it to their advantage. I have adopted 4 special needs kids, and my wife (who knows much more than I do on the subject) has successfully managed to have them all sleeping soundly relatively early, often through the night after 3 months, and never in our bed.<p>This approach does require some patience and letting the child “cry it out”, but this is how they learn to be the master of their own sleep.
I see so many people mentioning letting infant children "cry it out" to make them go to sleep on their own. I am not qualified to talk about this subject, but something inside me just finds that method horrifying.<p>I've read about a lot of mental issues having roots in early-childhood abandonment - apparently, when kids are left alone to cry, their body releases hormones which stop the crying, but doesn't stop the anxiety. In a nutshell, the baby still feels like crying, but it just doesn't.<p>There are probably studies (and I will appreciate all info given in the replies, be it studies or personal experience), but something about me just can't accept "cry it out" as a healthy method of raising infants. Infants should be in proximity of their mother until they are old enough to detach on their own - that's how it works for the whole animal kingdom, no?
I have twins, they share a room. they are 19 months old. They have been sleeping through the night since 10 months old. My technique is I put them to bed fully awake at the same time every night. They each get a half full bottle, and I say good night. Before I goto bed, I put another half full bottle in their cribs, and they find it on their own when they wake up. And then I see them in the morning. I had to let them cry it out for a few weeks, but now they just goto bed with no crying. In the morning they talk to each other until I go into the room.<p>I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. too exhausting for everybody. Being able to goto sleep on your own is a skill! And it's a self taught thing.
Cutting edge research indeed. We need to spread the news, tell all the parents that carrying kids helps sooth them. There is no way that parents could have come up and tried this on their own.
Watch out for tongue tie: if the connective tissue that's right underneath the tongue goes too far forward, it can make it so the baby can't breath normally through their nose when on their back. If your baby sleeps with their mouth open, that's a sign. Our baby had this and couldn't sleep on her back until we got it fixed. I am not a doctor—talk to someone competent first!
I'm literally implementing seated portion as a I write this comment.<p>This is my third kid, and we definitely discovered this the hard way during our first baby. There are a few windows that you can soothe and successfully put a baby down to sleep. Despite all our kids being otherwise different, putting them down as babies worked exactly how this method describes.
I found that a SNOO was very effective in the first 6 months. It is expensive, but it was way better than being even more sleep deprived. It plays white noise and rocks the baby if it senses them stirring. <a href="https://www.happiestbaby.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.happiestbaby.com/</a>
They should teach this to new parents before they let them leave the hospital. My wife and I went to the hospital’s parenting class before the birth of our first child. They focused on a lot of skills for infant care but not much on new parent sanity.
As the parent of a 6.5 month old, this is very interesting.<p>We had figured out that once she falls asleep, we wait 8-10 minutes for her to get really deeply asleep before putting her down. But the transport to calm crying, that is really going to come in handy.
This works with our boy. We have a bedside digital clock, and I've found he requires 5-7 additional minutes after he closes his eyes and appears to be asleep before I can put him down. Any earlier and he'll wake up and cry.
No one’s mentioned the Ferber method yet, it’s what got my daughter to start falling asleep on her own and do full nights at 5 months old. Took about 4 nights.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferber_method" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferber_method</a>
Bleh. Has academia run out of topics of research? Every parent knows this. Next research try to establish that lullaby or singing to baby actualy works in making them asleep! Nonsense use of public money.<p>Moreover, this is more about feeding the baby than moving it. Feed the baby and walk it around a little and they sleep. Try this on a hungry baby and see fall apart! Useless research!