How to keep your sleep with the time change

If this is your first fall-back time change with a baby, or you have parenting-induced amnesia about last year, here’s what’s going to happen:

This Saturday, the clocks turn back an hour, meaning your child’s perfectly great 7:30 bedtime is suddenly 6:30 p.m. the next day. After 1.5 seconds of celebrating that idea, your bubble bursts with the realization that they’ll also be waking up a whole hour earlier, which could be 6 a.m. Or maybe 5. Yuck.

But you can fight the time-change chaos! The key is to start early:

Starting the week ahead of time-change weekend, put your baby or young child to bed 10 or 15 minutes later than usual. Their bodies won’t usually notice a change that small. Then do the same thing two nights later, and two nights after that. If you do it gradually enough (and you’ve got solid blackout blinds in your child’s bedroom), their morning wakeup time should be moving a little later as well.

The idea is that by the time Sunday rolls around, your little one will already be on the new time (or only 15 minutes off) and not rearing to go when the clock shows 5:30 a.m.

If your child is already waking up too early in the morning, there are lots of things you can do to change that: you can book a free call with me any time to talk it through.

Why your baby will never sleep through the night

From about month 2 of a baby's life, most moms start wondering if their little one will ever sleep through the night.

By month 4 (when the vast majority of babies go through a sleep regression), sleeping through the night can become an obsession, or a seemingly impossible dream.

The truth is, technically, your baby will never sleep through the night.  That's right. Never!

That's because none of us ever does.

All human beings sleep in cycles. We start out in Phase 1 or light sleep - the kind when you're just nodding off and it's easy for someone to wake you. Then we move into Phases 2, 3 and 4, each becoming progressively deeper. (You know when your alarm clock wakes you and it takes a minute to figure out where you are and what's happening? That's because you were woken out of stage 4 or deep sleep.)

After that, we move into dream sleep, also called rapid-eye-movement or REM sleep because of the rolling eye movements that happen while we're dreaming. If we're woken during this phase, we often remember our dreams. 

For adults, each cycle lasts about an hour and a half. But the really important point for you and your baby is what happens after we've cycled through all of these phases?

We wake up. Every time.

Remember before you had kids, when you would blissfully sleep 8 or 9 hours straight and wake up feeling refreshed? You didn't know it, but you had actually woken up about 5 times during the night; maybe you rolled over, adjusted the covers, or nudged your snoring partner. So why don't we remember all these little wake ups?

The reason is simple: we learned at a very early age how to go from one complete sleep cycle to the next with barely a conscious moment. That is the key behind the commonly used term "self soothing." When it comes to your baby's sleep, self soothing is simply the ability to go from one sleep cycle to the next without waking up fully and crying out for help to get back to sleep.

So while it may seem like your baby really wants something else, once they reach a healthy 6 or 7 months and move past the age of actually needing calories to get through the night, what they're really crying out for is more sleep!

I know, I know - your baby drains two breasts or downs an 8-ounce bottle every waking, so they must be hungry, right?

Well, yes and no. If every time you had a little trouble falling back to sleep during the night, you got up and ate a peanut butter sandwich, pretty soon your body would start waking you up at those times, expecting calories, even though you didn't need them. You would probably even feel some pangs of hunger (and you wouldn't eat as much for breakfast because your belly was still full from your night-time picnics).

So if your baby is waking up every hour or two (and let's face it, a 6-pound newborn doesn't even need to feed that often), it's because they just haven't figured out that ever-important life skill for getting the sleep their brains and bodies need: how to go from one sleep cycle to the next without help from something or someone else.

That's where sleep "training" comes in. As circus-animal as the term can make our babies sound, sleeping is actually a skill they need to learn.

The good news is, you don't have to shut the door and let your baby cry-it-out until 7 a.m. (ugh). There is a supportive, gradual way that gives your baby the chance to learn with you right there beside them, while also shifting their metabolism toward getting all their calories during the day, rather than at the all-night snack bar. (It also works for babies who wake up after every sleep cycle looking for their pacifier or Dad's arms to be rocked in.)

In fact, most moms I've worked with tell me that daytime feeding becomes way better once their babies ditch the snack-and-snooze habit at night. (They also tell me that it's like "a miracle", "amazing" and "OMG I can't believe she slept through the night!" when their little one starts knocking off 11-12 hours without a peep.)

Once your baby learns the skill of moving from one sleep cycle to the next, they start to do it with just a quiet little moment of changing position, just like we do. They'll do that new trick 6 times a night until they're actually ready for food.

And the best part is, when morning comes, everyone wakes up happy.

The right time for the toddler-bed switch

I get this question a lot: When do we switch our child from crib to toddler bed?

Thankfully, there is a pretty easy answer.

There are three basic steps to follow when seeing your child make the milestone leap from crib to the big-girl/big-boy bed.

First, solve existing sleep problems first!

A lot of parents who are struggling with their toddler’s sleep try to solve the issue by ditching the crib and buying a cool new bed. The problem with this approach is, our kids are smarter than that! It takes about a nanosecond for most kids to figure out that when they’re struggling to fall asleep at bedtime or waking up during the night, they can just hop right out and toddle into your room! So the bottom line is, take action to help your child develop great sleep habits and a healthy association with sleep before making the switch.

Secondly, wait! The older a child is when they switch to a toddler bed, the more able they are to cognitively understand the idea of an artificial boundary. Before they are two-and-a-half, “stay in bed” means, well, zilch to most kids. (My “ideal” age to make the switch is older than 3.) You can still sleep train a child in a toddler bed, but the older they are, the easier it goes. And if they’re not climbing out of their cribs and endangering themselves, it is easier to go through a sleep-training program when your child is in a crib.

Once your child is sleeping well in his or her crib, keep them in it for a while. before making the switch. If your child is still struggling to fall asleep and stay asleep, it may look like they hate their crib, but once they learn the ever-important skill of how to sleep well, kids learn to love and feel safe and secure in their place of sleep. And that is always so beautiful to see.

And third, when your child is sleeping great and old enough to keep those great sleep skills in their big-girl/big-boy bed, celebrate it! Have a little bedtime party, buy them a new toddler pillow or special blanket, or something like one of those bed-tent canopies that IKEA sells for $19. https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/sufflett-bed-tent-green-30332475/

And when the honeymoon period is over on the awesome new toddler bed, and your little one starts testing the waters with their new-found freedom, relax; getting out of their new bed at bedtime or during the night is a normal part of their boundary-pushing and development. When they do, you can gently lead them back to bed, remind them that everyone stays in their bed until morning, and know that it will pass.