The New Parent's Guide to Getting a Good Night's Sleep

Let’s face the facts, sleeping like a baby can be exhausting. Local experts offer tips to help you and your child catch some much-needed Z’s.

“I’m New at This” is Be Well Philly’s biweekly series for new and soon-to-be parents. This educational resource covers the ins and outs of prepping for the arrival of a little one and taking care of them — and yourself — with insight and advice from local experts. Tips featured in “I’m New at This” are recommendations, and we believe in pursuing methods and approaches that work best for your unique family. Have a question you’d like to see answered? Email Be Well editor Laura Brzyski at [email protected]

Within an hour of our “I’m New at This” intro post publishing, a Be Well Philly reader (who is a mom of an eight-month-old), emailed us this request: “The material I find [about napping] hasn’t been super helpful because it’ll say ‘Maybe your baby isn’t tired enough or maybe your baby is too tired! Is your baby’s room to hot? Maybe it’s too cold? Are they eating too much? Are they eating too much? Are they going to bed early? Maybe too late?’ It sounds like ANYTHING could be the reason my baby wakes up too early or naps for only 30 minutes. So, is there truly a method to get your baby to nap the perfect sleep schedule?”

Sleep is essential to health — to survival — and yet, it’s one of the first areas that gets disrupted (and lost) with a newborn or little one. Because sleep is essential to our functioning And It is often what parents need most. We reached out to three local sleep experts for advice on everything slumber related. Here’s to catching more Z’s.

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Sleep Training

“Sleep training” can be a controversial term, but our experts attribute that bad reputation to a misunderstanding of the term. “It is a common thought that sleep training always involves weaning nighttime feeds and demanding that an infant sleeps through the night,” says Maria Lopez, a pediatric sleep specialist, mom of three, and founder of Fishtown-based Not a Peep. “There is also a misconception that to teach your baby to sleep, you should ignore your baby’s needs and stop responding. Understandably so, these ideas have scared parents unnecessarily, normalizing sleep deprivation as something they simply must come to terms with, as an unavoidable fact of being a parent.”

Erica Desper, founder of Confident Parenting on the Main Line, eschews the term in favor of “sleep learning” or “sleep shaping,” explaining that this shift “allows us to shift our perception of the process, rather than training our baby to do something we are supporting them through a learning process.”

Where do you start?

“It is never too early to start teaching your child healthy sleep habits,” Lopez says, who has helped parents with newborns and older work on a long-term plan to teach healthy sleep habits over time, emphasizing sleep hygiene and appropriate routines throughout the day and before bedtime.

Courtney Zentz — West Chester resident, certified pediatric sleep professional, postpartum doula, certified lactation consultant, and founder of Tiny Transitions — also advocates starting early: “When parents choose to wait until after three months, it moves from sleep shaping to sleep training because inevitably, [babies] have developed a habit and preference for something to support them to sleep (rocking, nursing, bouncing, feeding, holding …. which becomes how babies perceive they go “to sleep”). To keep it simple, before three months, you are building good habits; after three months, you are breaking bad ones.”

Just note that around four to six months, a baby’s ability to self-soothe emerges. Desper says that’s a great time “to start evaluating the sleep scenario and making changes” if necessary, as this sleep journey is a gradual learning process — both “for parents about how sleep works (and why it isn’t working now) and how to create an ideal sleep schedule, routine and environment,” and “for the baby in discovering ways to drift off with less help and, eventually, no help from whatever or whomever they were reliant on up to that point.”

Essentially, it’s not reasonable to expect a newborn to “sleep through the night,” but you should start taking steps to build a healthy sleep foundation as soon as possible.

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Various methods

New parents are inundated with all of these sleep methods: Cry it Out, Ferberizing, Extinction … the list goes on and on. It can be hard to find the right place to begin.

Below, Zentz describes four popular sleep-training methods:

Bedtime Fading. The parents choose a consistent time to wake up, then monitor when their baby goes to sleep based on their behavior. They gradually increase their bedtime by 15 minutes each day, keeping an eye on how easy the baby falls asleep.
The Chair Method. Also called “shuffling,” “camping out,” or “staying in the room”, the Chair Method sees parents sitting near their baby as they drift off to sleep. Small physical and verbal interactions — stroking the child’s head, providing words of encouragement — are acceptable, but you’ll want to avoid picking up your little one. Every few days, you can move further away so your child can lie down without you.
The Ferber Method (a.k.a. Interval Check-Ins or “Graduated Extinction”) includes aspects of the Cry It Out approach (below), but features parental involvement. As Zentz writes in her blog: “Parents put their child to bed sleepy but awake, and then wait outside the door for set, increasing intervals. The parents are allowed to enter the room to soothe the baby after each timer has rung. However, they must leave the room within one or two minutes. The parents set another timer to increase the interval and wait until they can enter again. Each night of sleep training, the intervals are increased slightly, so eventually, the baby learns how to self-soothe quickly and efficiently.”
Crying It Out is what it sounds like: You put baby to bed and return to them in the morning (excluding a diaper change, feeding, or emergency) — letting them cry through their desire to be soothed or rocked by you until they eventually fall back to sleep. This method can be emotionally draining for parents and has been heatedly debated by pediatric sleep specialists.

Lopez points out that although the former two methods work faster, they involve more tears and are less likely to cause relapse. Parental-presence methods, on the other hand, require less tears and take longer to produce results. They also have a higher chance of relapse.

Overall, the hardest part of sleep learning is that there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ approach — only options. “The ‘best’ method,” Desper says, “is the one that parents can implement consistently, for as long as it takes and until it is no longer needed. That looks different for differing parenting styles and, even more importantly, for each child’s temperament.”

Wake Windows

The “wake window” is the amount of time a baby can be awake before getting overtired. When the wake window is exceeded, the body compensates by releasing stimulating stress hormones, making it harder to fall — and stay — asleep. (“It’s like you just slammed espresso before bed,” Zentz says.) An overtired baby will have more middle-of-the-night awakenings and short naps, so catching your baby’s “wave” of tiredness when it’s cresting (i.e. when they’re tired enough to fall asleep) but before it is “crashing” (overtired) is essential, Desper adds.

So how can you find that sweet spot for your baby? It’s not always so easy — while some babies will be obvious with their cues (yawning, rubbing their eyes), Desper says others are trickier, and “by the time they look and act tired, it may be too late.”

The average wake window is shorter for babies who are younger than their parents. Desper explains the most common wake windows according to age. It is common for newborns to split their sleep evenly between REM, or active sleep, and non-REM, or deep sleep. Around three to four months old, babies switch from stage-based to cycle-based sleeping patterns, creating a circadian rhythm. “The typical sleep cycle is 45-60 minutes, and their deepest and most restorative sleep is the first five hours,” Zentz says. “In the back half of the night, babies cycle between stages of light sleep, which is why they wake up so much more frequently, then require parental intervention” to go back to sleep.

Tiny Transitions provided the diagram

Bedtime Routines

Experts agree: Routine is what babies and children love. It can reduce anxiety because they know what’s coming next, and come to expect it. Routines are essential in the contexts of sleep (and napping) because they signal the body that sleep is coming. This allows for smoother transitions.

For newborns, Desper says that “very young babies are not super aware and can’t stay awake through a lengthy routine … so this may be as simple as singing the same song before bed each night.” After a few weeks, you can start to introduce more elements like reading a familiar book, feeding, bathing and so on.

Zentz suggests a sample routine

Bath
Massage using lotion
Final meal before going to bed Simply To keep them awake and alert, a diaper is recommended.
Pajamas
Book or song
Rocking
Swaddle (she particularly likes Swaddlou, a Conshy-based brand)
Place your body in a crib. Wake up

Desper suggests that you do all elements in the same order, from bedtime to sleeptime and from nap time to nap, so that you can maximize predictability. In that same vein, she even advises to head in a single “direction” until the routine is complete: “Once you go upstairs, don’t come back down and once you head into their room, don’t come back out. Heading all over the house and from room to room with your baby can be overstimulating.” The last 10 minutes of the routine should ideally be in the room the baby will be sleeping.

Naps

The newest of newborns typically won’t follow a formal sleep schedule, but understanding their cues and patterns will help build one. Keep in mind that wake windows are important. As Desper advises, “Stretching a baby to remain awake longer than is comfortable is a common (and logical) tactic but rarely results in more ideal naps.”

As you align to their wake windows and they get a little older, babies’ naps Will consolidate — generally into three to four naps per day: “The organization of daytime sleep typically begins around 12 to 16 weeks and is complete by four to six months of age, depending on the baby,” Desper says. “That organization or consolidation process should result in at least three naps each day, with the first two being long (about 90 minutes each) and the third and/or fourth being a catnap, which serves to break up the period of wake time leading to bedtime.”

Lopez suggests these numbers for naps per year:

From birth to 6 weeks, 4 to 6 naps
6 to 10 weeks: 4 naps to 3 naps
3 naps, 11 to 5 months
5 to 7 Months: 3 to 2 Naps
7- 12 Months: 2 Nnaps
One nap for children 12 months-to-3 years of age

Of course, this varies from one child to the next. Lopez states that while most children can transition to one-hour naps at 14 months, some children still need two naps until 18 months. By age two-and-a-half to three, most kids don’t nap anymore (though some will nap until kindergarten!).

As we age, so does the length of our naps. Lopez’s recommended nap lengths per age are:

From birth to 6 weeks, 30 minutes to 4 hrs
6 weeks to 15 week: 30 minutes to 2 hrs
4 months to 18 month: 1 to 2 hours
For 18 months or more: 1 to 3 Hours

Newborns don’t yet have a circadian rhythm, so part of your job is to help them establish the difference between day and night. “The best way to structure the day is to work on 12 hours of the day and 12 hours of night pattern, which is most closely aligned to their natural sleep rhythms,” Zentz says. “Working on your daily routine should always start with ensuring that the baby knows it’s daytime. Open the curtains, sing a song, flip on the lights — you want to make it a definitive ‘let’s start the day,’ versus them thinking it is still the middle of the night.”

Balancing Sleeping and Feeding

You may have heard advice that a big feed right before bed helps baby sleep longer, but the experts say that is not the case, and could actually be detrimental because using food as a sleep mechanism creates a bad habit that’ll eventually need to be eliminated, according to Zentz. Plus, “all of the advice surrounding bigger feeds, more frequent feeds, or starting solids will only improve sleep if hunger is the reason sleep isn’t going well,” Desper adds. “If, on the other hand, sleep isn’t going well because the timing, routine or environment … no amount of feeding will impact that.”

Lopez recommends that you feed your child when you wake up to maintain a healthy balance between sleeping and feeding. “In doing so, you will be feeding your little one when they are alert and well-rested, allowing them to get fulfilling feeds. This will also give them the chance to learn to fall asleep without having to be fed, and to start practicing independent sleep skills that will ultimately be essential for a good night’s sleep, and for long naps.”

Instead of timing feedings by the hour, Desper recommends focusing on the amount your baby must eat in a 24-hour period (for babies’ first year, that’s 24 to 32 ounces of breast milk or formula), and work that around their wake windows. “Feeding your baby five times a day with feeds spread two to four hours apart amounts to the same total as feeding them five times spread strictly three hours apart,” she says. “The difference is that being flexible with the space between allows for more optimal and flexible sleep timing and durations. This may not be ideal in terms of your desire for a schedule but is likely more ideal for your baby.”

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Sleep Regression

Once you’ve finally gotten a handle on your baby’s sleep, all of a sudden they reach a milestone and — BAM! — the dreaded sleep regression disrupts everything. Parents all around groan.

Sleep regression is when a little one’s sleep pattern shifts from its established regimen. Though they’re typically temporary, regressions are challenging for both child and parent, and can vary in length and when they take place. They’ve been said to occur around four months, six months, eight months, 12 months, 18 months, and two years. These ages are traditionally associated with development and “milestone” moments — developing a circadian cycle, rolling over, crawling, walking, teething, etc. — which can impact sleep.

“When your brain is hard at work, it tends to disrupt sleep temporarily, until your baby masters the new skill they’ve been working on,” Lopez explains. “I look at sleep regressions as progressions, because all they mean is your baby is growing and learning new things!”

Regressions are not to be panicked. They will pass. It is important to keep your routines the same. For example, Zentz describes: “If a baby stands, that might cause a regression for a night or two while they learn to sit back down. However, if you start to go in and lay them down, they begin to expect that … the expectation changed. Initially, they ‘needed’ you, they were stuck, our job as parents is to help. Now, they ‘want’ you, which is a habit that won’t go away … you are now laying them down every time they stand.”

Parents Get Better Sleep

We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the baby’s sleeping habits, but parents need good sleep, too. Experts agree that parents can get better sleep if they have a consistent bedtime and wake up time, a healthy diet and pre-bedtime meditation. They also need to be exposed to sunlight upon waking in order for their baby to benefit from it.

Zentz also recommends getting your hormones checked: “A misalignment in hormone levels or overworked adrenals could cause sporadic wakings that can be fixed with nutrient supplementation,” she notes.

But let’s be honest: Getting enough sleep as a new parent is no easy feat, and could require calling in for reinforcements. “Hiring a professional postpartum doula is an option for some families and, if not, recruiting friends, family members or an occasional sitter to care for your baby so you can rest can be key,” Desper says. “Even a four-hour uninterrupted block of sleep each night will work miracles for your mood and level of functioning.”

Parents should consider taking on a shift if outside help is not possible. Desper offers this example: “Parent #1 might feed baby and hand them off to Parent #2, then go to bed early with black-out shades and earplugs to get that block of hours; when Parent #2 goes to bed, Parent #1 is back on duty. You can also reverse this so one parent whisks the baby away in the morning so the other can sleep in a bit later.” If that’s not an option, she says, try to have the non-feeding partner bring the baby to the feeding partner for overnight feeds, and then handle the after-feed soothing.

“Finding a way to divide the workload and maximize sleep stretches is the goal,” Desper continues. If you’re nursing, having your newborn in a bedside bassinet for overnight feedings — and side-lying — can make feedings (and transitions back to sleep) smoother. A cooler with a ready-to-use bottle can be placed beside your bed if you are bottle-feeding. It will save you the hassle of going to the kitchen and make it easier to respond to a baby who is crying.

Bed sharing

While we’re on the topic of bed-feeding and bedside bassinets, what about the hot topic of bed sharing? Our experts, as well as the American Association of Pediatrics, discourage bed sharing. “I would not be doing my job if I told you that bed sharing with your baby is safe, because there is no safe way to do it; it increases the risk of SIDS and suffocation,” Lopez says. Zentz concurs: “The safest place for a baby is in their own space, free from padding, blankets and bumpers.”

While she agrees that bed sharing is not ideal (and does not recommend it), Desper also acknowledges that this is a reality for some families, “out of desperation or as an intentional choice,” and so part of the discussion should be how they can do it as safely as possible. “The bottom line is that parents are doing it, both proactively and reactively so let’s make that the conversation and support parents to wean from it if it is a reactive scenario or if the time has come. And let’s avoid ‘all or nothing’ conversations that lead parents to share sleep on the couch or in a recliner which is exponentially more dangerous than an intentional and prepared bed surface.”

When should you ask for help?

Okay, this is it! a lot There is a lot of information to take in. Even with all these recommendations, getting a good night’s sleep isn’t going to be easy. But sleep — for babies And parents — is so important to well-being, and it’s worth prioritizing it even if you’re feeling overwhelmed in new-parent survival mode.

Desper offers these “red flags” to look out for, as they may be signs that you should seek support from a professional:

Resentment towards your partner or baby (or your parenting journey)
Postpartum mood and anxiety issues: Are you experiencing or at risk?
Fragmented sleep causes baby to struggle to eat or gain weight.
One or both parents can’t sleep due to anticipating wakings, worrying about sleep safety, or just because the baby is keeping them up

Put simply, if Your current scenario feels unsustainable and is taking a toll on your family — that includes you, new parent! — you should consider talking to a sleep specialist. These specialists are not only experts who have seen it all and use evidence-based techniques, but they also meet families where they are to create a personalized, holistic solution that works. For you. You don’t have to do this alone.

The Experts

Erica Desper Confident Parenting, founded on the Main Line, is now in its tenth year. Desper was inspired in part by her own battle with chronic and severe sleep loss and the recovery process. “I wished someone had been there to help me understand why sleep wasn’t working for us, what our options were to improve it and to support me through making the necessary changes. Then I realized I could give others what I hadn’t had and heal myself along the way.”

Maria Lopez A pediatric sleep specialist, mother of three and the founder of Not a Peep in 2017, Lopez is also a mom of three. Lopez’s sleep plans helped hundreds of parents teach their children to be independent sleepers. “My inspiration was none other than my non-sleeping infant, Alina, who is now 10 years old,” she tells us. “Like all the parents I work with, sleep deprivation took a toll on my mental health, on my family dynamics, and on the way I was experiencing motherhood. My best parenting moment was when I decided to sleep train my daughter. It was a life-changing decision that changed my life. I also believe it saved me. Seeing how beneficial this was to our family, I immediately wanted to help others regain their life balance, by guiding them through the journey of sleep training, and by educating them about sleep.”

Courtney Zentz As a certified pediatric sleeping professional and certified postpartum support worker, she is also certified as a lactation consultant and certified doula. Tiny Transitions was established in 2015 by Sheryl. Tiny Transitions also published a useful and free guide for new mothers. Of her inspiration, she tells us: “When you leave the hospital, they make sure the baby is strapped in, and that’s about it. There was no village, support or guidance. You are responsible for raising a person and are completely unprepared. I never wanted my mother to feel as lost and alone as I did. After discovering the world of sleep consulting, I was hooked on a new mission, to serve and bring joy to families during what is supposed to be such a special time in their life.”

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