Baby Sleep Problems - Can Feeding Have an Effect?

First-time parents and even parents with several kids, regularly find that their young child isn't sleeping as well as he or she should.

Many parents try to find the underlying cause of the problem, hoping to find a simple answer. This also leaves countless parents questioning if feeding might have something to do with the issue.

The aim of this article is to burrow deeper into the different aspects of feeding your small child and examine the effects that feeding could possibly have on a babys sleeping schedule and habits.

Initially, we should list the different feeding areas that we will be considering. These are:

Mixing Breast-feeding and Bottle Feedings
Feeding your child to sleep
What are YOU eating and will it affect your babys sleeping pattern?
Will solids help your baby sleep?

Mixing Breast-feeding and Bottle Feedings

It is believed that the mixture of bottle and breast in feedings could potentially sleeping problems. There are a number of different reasons for this when you are breast-feeding your young child. With each feeding, the breast is signaling to the brain that more milk needs to be produced for the coming feeding. When a bottle is incorporated into feedings, this process could be affected. The breast will start to produce less milk due to the less frequent breast feedings.

Furthermore, during the times when you do breast-feed your baby, he or she will not get as full with the breast-feeding because of the lessening of milk supply. This effectively means that your baby will need feeding more often, which will mean his or her sleep patterns will be interrupted by the need for feeding.

Feeding your baby to sleep

Feeding your child to sleep may be creating a problem with their sleep patterns. Your baby will soon begin to recognize that you feed him or her at bedtime. This will become something they depend on and expect. Generally, this will be the situation with each waking throughout the night as well.

There are of course, techniques you can use to avoid your baby from depending on feedings to fall asleep.

Initially, change the time or the length of time you feed your baby when nearing his or her bedtime. Doing so will gradually disconnect the  association of bedtime with feeding.

Another option is feed your child earlier in the night instead of as a bedtime routine. When you do these things your child will not associate eating with bedtime. This will help your baby learn to fall asleep on his own accord.

What are YOU eating and will it affect your babys sleeping pattern?

The one word answer is yes. As a breast-feeding mom*,  everything that you put into your body affects your breast milk. If you are not eating the appropriate amount of foods and calories each day, your breast milk is greatly affected. It is important that you eat the recommended three meals each day and perhaps a few snacks in between. Your milk needs to have enough calories in it in order for your baby to feel pleasantly full and satisfied. If it does not, he or she will continue to feed longer until he or she is full.

You need to eat healthier foods and try to eat them more often, as well as drinking fluids throughout the day. This will benefit your
milk supply, therefore helping your baby and his or her sleep patterns. The fuller your baby feels, the better he or she will sleep.


Will solids help your baby?

Many parents believe this will help, but numerous studies haven't associated any change in those who were fed by the breast and / or bottle and those who are fed solids. This has not been proven to help the sleep patterns in babies at all. Doctors recommend not adding solid foods prior to six months of age.

Co-Sleeping: Should Your Child Sleep In Your Bed?

Co-sleeping is the practice where the child sleeps in bed with his parents. Not surprisingly, it is one of the most hotly debated and controversial topics related to pediatric sleep. Let’s see why.

Some people argue that co-sleeping is the right and natural way to raise a child because the practice fosters a stronger bond and a more secure attachment.

Conversely, others will tell you that co-sleeping is risky, ridiculous, or even dangerous and they don’t want it for their family.

So, which approach holds the truth?

First, it’s important to understand that co-sleeping is not magic. Although some proponents of the family bed would disagree, numerous couples have reported that their babies did not necessarily sleep deeper or longer because their parents were close by. In fact, some parents found that their child slept longer and woke less frequently when they stopped co-sleeping and moved him into his own crib.

However, whether families choose to co-sleep or have their children sleep independently is a personal decision, and if both parents and child are safe, rested, and fulfilled, then co-sleeping is nothing to worry about.

If you decide do co-sleep, this commitment requires some very careful thinking about what you and your spouse feel is right for you as individuals, as a couple, and as a family.

Ask yourselves the following questions:

•    Is it nice to think about enjoying the coziness of sleeping in close proximity, or does one or more of us tend to stay active during sleeping – potentially disrupting the others?
•    Does everyone in our family want to co-sleep, or are we leaning toward it because one of us feels strongly?
•    Are we willing to commit to being quiet after our child falls asleep, or do we like to watch TV or talk in bed?
•    Will we enjoy being able to feed our baby more often throughout the night, or will having him next to us make it tougher to wean nighttime feeds?
•    Are we agreeable to getting into bed when our child does, to ensure his safety?
•    For working parents, does sleeping next to our child allow us to feel more connected to him?
As expected, co-sleeping has both advantages and disadvantages.
Let’s take a closer look at them.


Advantages:

•    Constant closeness whenever the child is awake. Many children and parents enjoy this feeling.
•    Immediate action and support for any sleep-related problem
•    The ability to nurse and respond to other nighttime wakings without getting up
•    More time to spend with the child
•    Possibly better sleep for both the child and the parents, if the child was sleeping poorly to begin with

Disadvantages:

•    Parents may sleep poorly if their children are restless sleepers
•    Parents may end up sleeping in separate rooms, and they may become angry at their child or with each other
•    Children’s and adults’ sleep cycles do not coincide
•    Parents may have to go to bed at a very early hour with their children and be left with little time for their own evening activities
•    Parents have little privacy
•    There may be a slight increase in the risk to the infant from SIDS and related causes.

The decision to co-sleep should be yours, made by the parent – or parents – and based on your own personal philosophies, not on pressure from your child or anyone else. Another family’s good or bad experience with co-sleeping should not influence your decision: your child is unique and your family is not the same.

My Child Is An Early Bird – Can I Do Something About It?

Early morning wakings are one of the toughest sleep problems to fix, if not the toughest. If you’re wondering why, it’s because after a decent night’s rest your child has got more energy to fight sleep in the morning. And the truth is, all of us come up into lighter sleep phases in the last hour of our sleep, preparing to take up for the day.

Remember, however, your child is waking early only if he is not getting the right amount of night rest for his age and his body. In other words, if your child sleeps from 7 PM to 6 AM, it’s a perfectly reasonable schedule for him, even though it might feel early to you.

We can’t ask our children to sleep more than 11 hours at night. Their bodies are usually rested after this much sleep, and they won’t be able to do more.

Also keep in mind the following fact: if your child is waking even at 10/½ hours, if he is rested and energetic in the morning and makes it easily till his naptime, then he’s getting enough rest for his body.

Problems arise if your child sleeps from, say, 7 PM to 5:30 AM. In this case, you’ll need to push the bedtime later by 15-minute increments, then watching to see if your child can sleep later in the morning.

 A word of caution, though: Making the bedtime later can often have the opposite effect of causing your child to wake up earlier. This is the reason why things need to be done in small steps.

Here are some other ideas to try if your child is an early bird:

•    Make sure that your child’s room is very, very dark.

•    If there are any sounds that could be waking him – such as garbage trucks, barking dogs,
sprinklers – put white noise in the room and make the volume loud enough to protect him from these sounds

•    Remove all stimulating toys from your child’s crib or bed, which can be distracting once the sun enters his room.

•    If you are checking in on your child within the last hour before his wake time, your interaction may prevent him from returning to sleep. Don’t check on him if it’s less than one hour till his wake time.

•    Make sure the bedtime is not too late for your child’s age. Adjust the bedtime earlier by 15-minute increments, and watch what happens in the morning. In doing so, you will allow your child to sleep later, as he is less overtired at bedtime. If he does wake earlier, return to your previous bedtime. If moving the bedtime earlier has no effect on the wake time, you may want to consider using the earlier bedtime anyway to help your child get the right amount of night sleep for his age.

•    Make sure your child is not hungry. If you have a child under 12 months and have newly begun to wean feedings, you may want to slow the process down to give him more time to adjust. Moreover, be careful to ensure that you are offering the breast or bottle more often during the day to help him transition his previous nighttime feeds to the daytime, so he won’t be hungry going down for sleep at night.

Baby Sleep Tips - Create A Familiar Environment

All newborns are, of course, different. Some sleep better than others at a young age, which prompts many parents to trade stories of how "lucky" or "unlucky" they were with a given child. There is, no doubt, a certain amount of mystery to getting a child to sleep well and through the night on his own. Nevertheless, a plethora of baby sleep tips exist intended to speed up the process which your child goes through before sleeping on his own.

Getting your child to sleep on his own in a timely fashion involves speeding up a natural transition: the one from sleeping with his mother to sleeping on his own. At first, when your baby wakes up in the middle of the night, he will cry for his mother, as this is the only way he knows how to fall asleep. One of the things you must do as a parent is help create the best environment for your baby to fall asleep on his own.

Many people naturally assume that the best environment for sleep is one of total silence: most of us are familiar with having to tiptoe around a sleeping baby's room. Although a quiet environment is the best one for most adults, you'd be well advised to remember where your newborn baby has been sleeping for the past nine months: in his mother's womb. In the womb, of course, your newborn slept in many situations that were far from quiet - when the mother was out in public, or socializing with other people. For this reason a newborn baby will often sleep better by being exposed to some quiet background noise.

You should be trying to allow some ambient "white noise" to be around your baby when he goes to sleep. Sudden loud noises will, of course, rouse him, but in most cases some background chatter and other soothing noises will help the sleep process: most adults, I'm sure, can likely remember falling asleep to the sounds of their parents and their friends having a conversation.

There are products marketed to new parents to create these ambient noises - most notably audio CDs containing tracks of soothing noise. It usually isn't necessary to buy these, however - in most cases simply leaving the door to the baby's nursery ajar will do the trick. In a similar vein, if your baby falls asleep around company, allow him to stay there rather than moving him to a quiet room.

By helping to create the best possible environment for your baby's sleep, you help him learn to fall asleep in his own. Often a humming noise can help - we all know how easy it can be to fall asleep in a moving car - so having a humidifier or fan in the baby's room can often do wonders.

Whatever solution you choose, remember that it needn't be overly complicated. Simply leave the door ajar, or let your baby sleep in the company of others. Contrary to what many people intuitively think, if you keep your baby from sleeping in total silence, he'll often sleep much better.