Creating your bedtime routine

Babies come into the world not knowing day from night and vice versa as well as having an internal clock that is a bit topsy turvey.  Babies spend the first several weeks of their lives just acclimating to the space around them, adjusting to the fact that they are no longer snuggled in utero and are very much working hard to make sense of the outside world.  As your baby moves closer to 8 weeks old, he or she is able to start to become a bit more predictable.  Please don’t misunderstand though, your child will not be predictable in that you can set your watch by him or her.  You may just start to have a sense of the times of day when your baby is happy, fussy, alert, and so on.  And sleep starts to become more organized in your child’s brain around this time. 

8 weeks is also when you can start to create a bit of a familiar and predictable bedtime routine for your baby.  There is no harm in doing this before 8 weeks but your baby may not really be able to recognize what is happening until this point.  This is because at around 8 weeks, your baby can start to recognize patterns.  This relates to both patterns on a surface like a book or a blanket and also patterns of behavior.  Eventually, your bedtime routine creates associations that cause your child’s brain to produce melatonin which is the hormone that allows you to fall asleep and stay asleep.  When you first start doing a bedtime routine at 8 weeks, this may not be happening quite yet because your baby doesn’t produce their own melatonin until about 3 months old. 

If you start doing a bedtime routine at 8 weeks, your routine may end with your baby falling asleep either being held or fed.  This is very normal because babies often don’t have the ability to fall asleep independently until they are a bit older, often closer to the 4-6 month range.  I often hear from parents that they are confused about when to do the bedtime routine for their newborn.  Make no mistake, this is a confusing situation.  It can sometimes be hard to determine exactly when bedtime is going to happen in the early weeks.  Bedtime tends to be pretty late, sometimes between 9 and 10pm, or possibly even as late as midnight in the early days when days and nights may still be scrambled.  Newborns also have a habit of sometimes being hard to put to sleep.  Parents often ask “what happens if I do the bedtime routine at 8 but my baby doesn’t fall asleep until 10?  Do I need to do the routine again?  Does it not count?”  All of this is okay.  The timing of bedtime will start to become clearer as you move into the 3-4 month range and you find that you can’t get your baby to take another nap for the day so the next time it is time for sleeping, it is now bedtime. 

So what does a bedtime routine actually consist of?  This does not have to be elaborate.  In fact, I encourage parents of babies to keep bedtime routines pretty concise because as your child moves into toddlerhood, the routine tends to grow.  Next thing you know, you’re tucking in all the stuffed animals, putting all the hats on the dolls and lining all the cars and trucks up by color.  Oh, and the books, they start to grow in number and in length.  I most definitely encourage parents of toddlers to start to create limits around the bedtime routine, but if you start from a place where it is a bit shorter, you have a little room for it to grow.  Bedtime routine for a young baby may involve, a bath, a short massage, diaper change and pajamas go on, maybe you read a book, maybe you sing a song, and in the early months, the routine often ends with a feeding and possibly some rocking depending on how hard it is to get your child to sleep. 

As children grow and start to become capable of falling asleep independently, I encourage parents to move the feeding to the beginning of the bedtime routine in order to disassociate feeding and sleeping.  At that point, the routine ends with your child going into their sleeping space awake.  I also remind parents that routines also train us.  They remind us that everyone needs time to wind down and be ready for sleep.  Your baby can’t tell time.  He or she does know that it is bedtime other then the fact that tiredness may set in.  Still, some are very good at hiding their tired signs.  Your routine is sending a signal to your child that it is time to change gears and start to settle in for the night.  Nighty night!