Parenting Pain or pleasure as your new baby sleeps all night?
When you are expecting your first born child, you have all kinds of thoughts and ideas going through your head ranging from excitement, elation, fear to panic and concern, giving you the jelly wobbles about how different your life will be and how you will fair as a new parent. Most pregnancy’s go well if you look after yourself and do not have any health implications, however while everyone can feed a baby and believe ‘it can’t be that difficult’ to settle a new baby, many ‘newbies’ parents find the reality of everything combined, a bigger task than first expected.
For many Mums and Dads coping with sleepless nights and the changes in your relationship even for the most qualified professionals it can come as somewhat of a shock and continue far longer than you expect. By month three your baby should have established breast feeding and sleep patterns and naps will have lengthened, however night wakings may continue for a lot longer.
By six months old your baby will no doubt be taking solids and this is also when you can sleep train your child and look forward to them sleeping all night from around 7pm-6/7am, if this has not already happened. Breast-fed babies can sometimes take longer, however I have had children much younger who have been waking every two hours for feeds go through the night within 2 nights and settle into a four hourly routine in the day. Was the mother pleased, oh my yes she was, she had been close to losing the plot and with an active toddler aged four too, she needed all the energy she could muster.
Interestingly on my first night, her husband came in to me to tell me his baby daughter was awake and tried to tell me how to do my job, I had never experienced this before and never since! What he didn’t realise was that he was too busy trying to tell me what to do, that he had overlooked the impact this situation was causing to his entire family and his young son was suffering emotionally too.
This father Tom, loved his kids, owned his own business and was also working for someone else too, which I admire in a parent, however in doing all this he was so busy in his own world, running checks on his staff etc. that he had overlooked the impact it was having on the family. By investing in some help as his wife was close to breaking point, they got results within a week and a happy family unit was restored.
Understanding baby and child sleep is not easy to figure out and some parents who get it ‘right’ first time often struggle when the next infant arrives. You can however save yourself the worry and sleepless nights by finding out more about my ‘Family Sleep & Transformation’ Programmes and have the same results within a week yourself. Please get in touch Juliet@sanitynanny.com to discuss your child’s sleep or family dilemmas, then you can relax and confidently look forward to your new born baby’s arrival!