A good night’s sleep pretty much tops every parent’s wish list.
And getting to that point where your baby sleeps, if not through, then at least for long stretches during the night, is often a shining beacon at the end of a long, sleepless tunnel (also known as Baby’s First Months).
But were you aware that instead of helping your baby learn how to sleep for longer periods of time, you could actually be doing this (very common) mistake that will keep them (and in turn, you) awake instead? Uh-oh.
According to research, a full 45 percent of babies were sleeping over five hours by the three-month mark, compared to just 10 percent at five weeks.
What’s more, at each age, about a quarter of infants woke and resettled themselves back to sleep – on their own. And this ability to “autonomously resettle” without help at five weeks resulted in longer bouts of shut-eye later on: 67 percent of babies who could autonomously resettle at five weeks were sleeping over five hours later on, compared to just 38 percent of five-week-olds who couldn’t resettle.
The study, conducted at the University of London, followed 100 infants by filming them overnight with an infrared camera when they were five weeks and three months old.
What this basically means, is that if your parental gut feeling is telling you to attend to your baby the very second you can hear him stirring in his cot, you might, in fact, be doing little else than depriving him of learning how to settle himself back to sleep.
Which, of course, also means only one thing: You are not getting any quality shut-eye either.
