Let Your Sleeping Baby Sleep!

By Elizabeth Pantley, author of Gentle Baby Care and The No-Cry Sleep Solution

As with the writing of this book, learning how to break the association was a gradual, thoughtful process that required self-examination. I discovered that I was responding to Coleton so quickly and intuitively that I’d put him to the breast before he even made a real noise — he would just fidget, gurgle, or “sniff” and I would put him to the breast. I began to realize that, on so many of these occasions, he would have gone back to sleep without me.

I am a follower of the “never let your baby cry” rule, and I took it very seriously. What I didn’t understand, though, is that babies make sounds in their sleep. And these sounds do not mean that baby needs you. Babies moan, grunt, snuffle, whimper, and even cry in their sleep. Babies can even nurse in their sleep.

The first step to helping your baby sleep longer is to determine the difference between sleeping noises and awake noises. When she makes a noise: Stop. Listen. Wait. Peek. As you listen attentively to her noises, and watch her, you will learn the difference between sleeping snorts and "I'm waking up and I need you now" noises.

When I learned this eye-opening piece of information, I started “playing asleep” when Coleton made a nighttime noise. I would just listen and watch — not moving a single muscle — until he began to make actual wakeful noises. Some of the time, he never did; he just went back to sleep!

The idea, then, is to learn when you should pick your baby up for a night feeding and when you can let her go back to sleep on her own.

This is a time when you need to really focus your instincts and intuition. This is when you should try very hard to learn how to read your baby’s signals.

You need to listen and watch your baby carefully. Learn to differentiate between these sleeping sounds and awake and hungry sounds. If she is really awake and hungry, you’ll want to feed her as quickly as possible. If you do respond immediately when she is hungry, she will most likely go back to sleep quickly.

 

So, the key here is to listen carefully when your baby makes night noises: If she is making “sleeping noises”— let her sleep. If she really is waking up – tend to her quickly.

0
No votes yet
 
Read more: ,

0 comments

Most recent

Sign in to leave a comment!

Today on JustMommies

Pilgrims Unit Study

In this unit study you will learn about the Pilgrims' voyage from England to America on the Mayflower.

Cloth Diapering Basics: Beginner’s Guide to Cloth Diapering

If you are thinking about starting your baby off with cloth diapers, you may have lots of questions on how to get started.

Fertility Boosting Herbs

Long before modern medicine developed the drugs and high-tech procedures we’re all familiar with today, practitioners treated many ailments with herbal remedies, including infertility.

Castor Oil to Induce labor

So you've reached 40 weeks of pregnancy and baby has not arrived. You had hoped to go in labor on your own and the idea of a medical induction does not appeal to you.

Article Tools

Print this article

Email this article

RSS

Bookmark and Share