Dana: Hi. I’m Dana. Welcome to this week’s video. Today I want to talk about the number one bedtime mistake that parents are making, Now, most people understand the importance of a bedtime routine, or you read it somewhere that you should try it, and so that’s what you’ve been doing. A bedtime routine is really important, and what it does is it acts as a keeling system to our body and our brain that it’s time to transition from day into night. When you think about it, we all have bedtime routines, right. Even you have one. You wash your face. You brush your teeth. You get your jammies on. You do a little process that helps you get ready for bed. This is important just for your general hygiene, but it’s also important in keeling your body that it’s time to make that transition.

Bedtime routines are super important. There’s a few dos and don’ts around them though. One is don’t make them too long. A lot of people are dragging this out with videos or extra game playing and it takes an hour to finally get this baby down, and that’s too long. A good length is somewhere between twenty to thirty minutes. That’s long enough to set the stage and get baby used to the idea of going down, but not too long that he’s getting confused by it because you really do want it to be predictable, that he understands, “First we do this, then this, then this,” every night, it’s the same, no change. That would really help them understand that, “I’m going to sleep for the night now. This is not nap-time. This is now night-time.”

Not too long, but not too short either. If it’s too short and you basically just go in and change a diaper and plop baby into the crib, that’s not enough time to get their bodies and brains around this. Thirty minutes is a perfect length. Some of it should take place in the child’s bedroom. Again, you want to really set the stage that, “We’re going to do a few activities in the room here and then you’re going to go to bed.” That takes you away from the distractions of the house, the other children, the TV, the noise, of doing the dishes and just spending a little bit of quality time with your baby in their room.

Now, the biggest mistake that people make in this routine is that they, somewhere in the process there is usually a feeding and that makes sense, right, if we’re talking about a baby here. It makes sense to fill their tummy before bed. What they do is that they feed the baby to sleep. They have a bath, get the jammies on, brush their teeth, give a feed until baby’s asleep, then transfer to the crib. Why that’s a problem is because they are now prop-dependent on that feed to get to sleep, right.

If a baby is prop-dependent, they’re never going to be successful sleepers because they’re going to have wake-ups in the night where they’re going to need assistance from you, usually with food, to get themselves back to sleep at night. Have a look at your routine. You will most likely see that the little snag or the little flaw in your routine is that nursing to sleep, so keep everything the same. Don’t let your baby fall asleep on the feed, then put baby into the crib awake.

You may be wondering, “Well then, what do I do?” I got a whole book that’ll explain exactly what to do once you get your baby into the crib awake, but that’s really the most important piece of the whole sleeping puzzle is that a baby needs to learn the skills that she needs for falling asleep independently and then she’ll start sleeping through the night. She won’t sleep all the way through the night. No one does. Any wake-up she has will be manageable because she has the skills to get back to sleep without the prop. That makes sense, doesn’t it? That’s the number one mistake that most of you are going to have to have a good hard look at tonight. Thanks so much for watching. Sleep well.