From snot suckers to swaddles, these 15 items help our babies sleep through the night
Say goodbye to your sleep.I can’t count how many times I was issued this warning during pregnancy.
The best part? They were all right.If you’re a new parent you likely understand that sleep is no longer a right — it is a privilege — and one that you’re lucky to have for longer than a few hours at a time.After one zombie-esque, sleep-deprived 3:00 AM feeding a few weeks after my daughter was born, I found myself facedown on the floor and woke up to her piercing cries three hours later.
Fortunately, I’d managed to tuck her safely into her own bassinet, but I’d severely missed my own bed.I’m probably not the only one who has crashed on the carpet.The anecdotal stories of sleeplessness speak for themselves, but the numbers are just as alarming.
A 2019 study in the Sleep Journal found that it can take six years for parental sleep satisfaction and duration to “fully recover” after childbirth.Another study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign followed 464 parents for the first two years of their child’s lives, to track their sleep habits.
The researchers found that mothers with three-month-old babies who fit the low maternal sleep profile got an average of 5.74 hours of sleep per night.In the average sleep profile, mothers got 7.31 hours, which is still barely hitting the 7 to 9 hours recommended by The American Academy of Sleep Medicine.Parents often debate types of sleep training to help their children rest through the night.
Such techniques can involve everything from an interval-based ‘Ferver Method’ of gradually spreading out parental check-ins, to the substantially stricter cry-it-out method, and extinction — an intervention-free method of ignoring a child, even when they sound distressed.This training isn’t for the weak, and not all of us can afford a night nurse to do it for us.Of course, for those who can’t handle the emotional turmoil of harsher methods (myself included), there are some alternative, gentler ways...