Sleep Tips

Most sleep advice is written for a calm house with two rested adults in it. The version worth having is the one that still works when dinner ran late, someone is crying and you have nothing left. Build for that evening and the good ones take care of themselves.

Order beats timing

A winding down works because it is a sequence, not a schedule. The same steps in the same order every night, so that the third step means the fourth is coming. Research on nightly bedtime routines has found sleep improving within a few nights of starting one, and the more consistent the routine, the better. None of that depends on it happening at seven o'clock.

So build it short enough to survive. Four steps, twenty minutes, possible for one tired adult alone in a small room. A routine that needs a bath, a massage, three books and a song will be abandoned the first evening you are on your own, and being abandoned is the part your child notices.

• Lights low in the room they will sleep in, not the whole house
• Diaper, sleepwear, sleeping bag, in that order every night
• Milk or a feed, in the same chair
• The same two books for weeks at a time
• One sentence you say every night before you leave the room

On a bad evening, keep the order and cut the length. One book instead of two. Four minutes in the chair instead of fifteen. Skip the bath entirely, it is the least load bearing part of the whole thing. What you are protecting is the shape, not the running time.

The clock will be wrong tonight. The order can still be right.

Sleep pressure, plainly

Two things decide when a small person sleeps. The first is pressure, which builds the whole time they are awake and drains while they sleep. The second is the body clock, which is barely running at birth and settles over roughly the first three to four months. Newborn sleep looks random because only one of the two systems has arrived yet.

Wake windows are shorthand for the first of those and ignore the second. Useful as a rough ballpark, unreliable as a rule, because hours awake today says nothing about how the last few days went. A child short on sleep all week carries that into this afternoon, and this afternoon's window will be wrong.

Signals beat numbers. The second yawn, not the first. Staring through you rather than at you. Getting cross with a toy that was fine four minutes ago. When you see two of those, start the sequence whatever the app says. Going up ten minutes early is cheap. Going up forty minutes late costs you the evening.

New skills break sleep

Sleep tends to come apart around new movement. Studies have found more fragmented sleep in babies who have started crawling than in babies of the same age who have not, and similar disruption around pulling to stand, walking, and bursts of new words. The skill is being consolidated overnight, and the body keeps trying it out at two in the morning.

Most of these skills arrive one way round first. They can roll onto their front and not back again. They can pull up to standing and then be stuck at the crib rail with no idea how to sit down. That is why the crying often sounds outraged rather than sad. The fix is daylight practice of the return trip, dozens of unglamorous floor repetitions, until coming back down is as automatic as going up. These stretches are measured in weeks, not months, so resist rebuilding your whole approach during one.

Naps and how they gather

Naps start scattered and slowly collect into fewer, longer blocks. Most babies move from three naps to two around six to nine months, from two to one between roughly thirteen and eighteen months, and drop the last nap between three and four years. Those ranges are wide, and they describe what is typical rather than what is required.

A transition announces itself as a pattern over a week or two, never as one bad Tuesday. The nap gets fought, or taken and then paid for with a five o'clock start. The gentler way through is alternating rather than cutting: some days on the new pattern, some on the old, with an earlier bedtime whenever a sleep goes missing.

Short naps, the famous thirty five minute one, are usually a pressure problem rather than a technique problem. Move the nap start by fifteen minutes in one direction for a few days and watch, rather than changing four things at once.

At three in the morning

Waking at night is ordinary well into the second year. However you define sleeping through, a large share of babies are not doing it at six months and a substantial share still are not at twelve. If you are awake at three, you are not doing it wrong and you are not behind.

Deal with the plain causes first, in the dark: hungry, wet, too hot, teeth, unwell. Then make the response as boring as you can bear. Low light, few words, nothing new and no bright screens. You are teaching a very fast learner what the night is for.

• Check the obvious first: diaper, hunger, temperature, illness
• Keep the light too low to read by
• The same short phrase every time, no conversation
• Nothing new: no lifting out to play, no going downstairs
• If you always feed at that hour, expect them to be hungry at that hour

Plan for the adult in advance, because decisions made at three in the morning are bad decisions. Split the night into two shifts so one of you gets an unbroken block.

Safe sleep, stated plainly

This is the part where the gentle tone stops. The evidence here is consistent and the advice is not negotiable, so take it flat.

• On their back for every sleep, day and night, for the whole of the first year. Once they can roll both ways on their own you still put them down on their back, but you do not have to turn them back over in the night.
• Their own firm, flat, waterproof mattress in a crib, bassinet or Moses basket. Not a propped incline, and not a car seat, bouncer or swing for sleep
• Nothing soft in the space: no pillows, duvets, bumpers, pods, nests, positioners, loose blankets or soft toys
• In the same room as you for at least the first six months, for naps as well as nights, on their own separate surface
• If you use blankets, feet at the foot of the crib, tucked no higher than the shoulders
• Room around sixteen to twenty degrees, one more layer than you are comfortable in, and check the chest or back of the neck rather than hands and feet
• Nobody smokes near your baby, and no smoking in pregnancy

Never sleep with your baby on a sofa or an armchair. That is the firmest line in all of this guidance, and it applies to the accidental version at four in the morning with the television still on, which is when it usually happens. If you feed at night in a chair and there is any chance you will drop off, feed in your bed with the space cleared instead, and put your baby back on their own surface afterwards.

sharing a bed is where national bodies genuinely differ. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends sharing a room but not a bed. UK bodies, including The Lullaby Trust and the NHS, publish advice on making sharing a bed safer for the families who do it. They agree on the absolute exclusions: never share a bed if anyone in the bed smokes, has drunk alcohol, has taken drugs or any medication that makes them drowsy, or if your baby was born premature or at a low birth weight. Never on a sofa or an armchair, ever.

Follow the guidance from your own country's body, not the loudest voice online.

This is general information, not advice about your child. Anything specific, breathing, reflux, unusual sleepiness, weight, snoring, or a settled pattern that changes suddenly, belongs with your pediatric nurse, doctor or pediatric professional. If they have given you different instructions for a medical reason, follow theirs.

Where this comes from: The Lullaby Trust, the NHS, the American Academy of Pediatrics.