Hi I’m Dana. Welcome to this weeks video. Today I want to talk about sleep props. I want to help you identify what your child’s sleep prop is. If you haven’t heard, and I’m sure you have, and you don’t know what a sleep prop is yet, let me take a second and tell you. It’s really anything that your baby or child thinks they need in order for sleep to come. Right. It’s very simple. Some of us adults have sleep props. If you can not … You tell yourself “I can’t sleep unless those earplugs are in my ears”, then that’s your sleep prop.

Let’s have a look at why it’s problematic for babies. If I’m a baby and I learn that I fall asleep with a bottle in my mouth. That’s what I do every nap time. I do it at bed time, I do it through the night, then the bottle becomes a sleep prop in the sense that it’s not just food, it’s also for sleep. That can happen with breast feeding as well, that it becomes double duty. Now it has two jobs instead of just one.

Every time that baby has a naturally occurring wake up in the night, they are most likely going to need you or think they need you to come in and recreate everything that happened at bed time that got them to sleep in the first place. Let that sink in a little bit. It’s the vehicle basically that takes them on their journey into sleep. They are ill equipped in the middle of the night to get back to sleep without their prop, because they don’t know how. They do it this way every single time and that’s why you’re in there four times a night, feeding your twelve month old. It’s the prop.

Here’s a few of the most popular sleep props. Bottle feeding to sleep, breastfeeding to sleep, rocking to sleep, pacifiers to sleep and sometimes motion to sleep. A lot of people email me and tell me a bit abashedly that they put their baby to sleep in the swing every night. That’s where baby sleeps. It’s the movement that’s basically the sleep prop. I want you to sit down and I want you to write out all the things that you think might be your baby’s sleep prop. Here’s another little tip for you, most babies have more than one.

Usually there’s the number one way, let’s just say its bottle feeding, but sometimes that might not work and babies get a little confused some times. Sometimes the bottle works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I rock her. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I give her the pacifier and that helps. I find that most babies have a primary sleep prop and then they have a couple of secondaries. You really need to identify all of them because we don’t want to confuse babies. We want babies to know that every time I get into this crib, I do these things for myself that help me get to sleep and I do it every time and I do it all night long. I do it for naps as well. Then they become really 100% clear on how they get themselves to sleep.

It’s really such a beautiful thing when a child has the ability to sleep prop free and can take full mastery over their sleep and do it independently without a lot of fuss or bother from you. It’s a beautiful day when that arrives. It really can and it does happen. I want to encourage you to identify those props and then start taking some steps to eliminating them. That’s when you might want to check out the sleep sense program. It’s going to give you a really clear step by step guide on how to break those props and to say goodbye to them once and for all.

Thanks for watching here today, sleep well.