Today, I wanna give you a few tips, my favorite three tips for getting a newborn off to a great sleep start. It’s possible. Absolutely you can guide a newborn down the right road so that they naturally develop great sleep skills. You’re never gonna have to sleep train them later. You’re never have to gonna bootcamp them later. You can just encourage it and it’s wonderful and so yay if you’re the one expecting a new baby or you’ve got a brand new baby, I’m gonna save you a lot of anguish that a lot of people wait months before they start making any kind of steps in the right direction.

So the first thing and the most important thing is that newborn babies don’t have a very high tolerance to being awake. They have a lot of hard work to do and most of it happens when they are asleep. So a newborn baby can really only tolerate about 45 minutes of time awake before they need to sleep again and I can tell you I wish with all my wishes that I had known that when I had my first son.

I’m telling you, that would have saved me so much grief. This was a kid who would stay awake for hours on end getting increasingly crankier and crankier and I’m feeding and feeding and feeding. Oh, gosh, I wish I had known.

So that includes the feed time. So if you’ve given your baby 30 minute feed, have a little bit of playtime, maybe some tummy time or go play with other siblings or just have a cuddle and you’re gonna watch your clock and when it’s 45 minutes, you’re going to attempt to put your baby to sleep and you want to catch them before they get cranky and that’s another common mistake is we’re waiting for crankiness.

Crankiness is overtired and often, crankiness gets mistaken for hunger again, right? You’re thinking to yourself, it’s only been an hour and a half, why is he so cranky, I guess he needs to eat again and it’s really because he was fatigued, he missed the window and now he’s cranky because he’s overfatigued, he’s overtired.

So just, I would encourage you, keep an eye on the clock. Every 45 minutes throughout your day, the child has an opportunity to sleep. Now, it can be in your arms. Absolutely it can. There is nothing more lovely than having a newborn baby sleep in your arms. I would never take that away from you.

On occasion though, try putting them down before they’re asleep. That’s number two.

You want to encourage your newborn to develop some skills that are independent of extra help from you. You want them to learn what do I need to do to get myself calmed down and fall asleep and if you’ve got the timing just right and you’ve put her the bassinet, she’ll surprise you, at least some of the time. You’ll go to fold some laundry, you’ll come back and look at her and she’s fast asleep and you will consider that a victory because she’s, excuse me, she’s on the way to learning some great sleep skills and that is really the number one reason why a baby becomes a good sleeper is because they start to put the pieces together for themselves.

They start to figure out how to fall asleep without a bottle in their mouth, without a breast in the mouth, without a pacifier in the mouth, without being rocked, without being jiggled, without being swung from side to side. They learn how to do this on their own and that is the key to having a great sleeper.

Another thing you want to keep in mind, number three, is I wanna encourage you to put your baby to sleep in the same place that they’re gonna sleep for the night.

Now, I get it, you like to have her close by or you maybe want her to be out with the family but sleep is sleep. I mean, we’re not in comas when we’re asleep. So to encourage her to have a nice long nap, have her go into the place where she’s gonna sleep and make that her sleep spot unless you’re out or it’s in the carrier, that’s okay too, but if you’re home and you’re gonna try for a nap, put her in the same place that she sleeps for the night.

The more often she goes to that location, the more her body and brain will get in line with the idea that I go to this place to sleep and that’s gonna help get you off to a really great start.

Thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well.