«Sweet» baby sleep is every parent’s dream. When your children sleep well, they grow up and develop properly, and get sick quite rarely.
Moreover, nice baby sleep is a key element for mom’s mental balance, and therefore is crucial for the whole family well-being. What should you do with kids during the day in order for them to sleep well at night?
Tips on What to Do During the Day
Baby’s night sleep utterly and completely depends on how they spent their day. Depending on the circumstances, the same child can either sleep like a log – good, long enough, without waking up, or have problems getting asleep, tumbling a lot, grunting and groaning, waking up in the middle of a night screaming for his mother.
Sometimes child’s health can be the reason: stomach pain or hunger can bother them. Often babies have trouble sleeping when they have their teeth cut out. But if the kid is healthy and well-fed, has no stomach problems, and there is no suspicion of a new tooth cutting out, then the reason of his insomnia may be that he hasn’t spent his day actively enough.
Many parents are looking for easy solutions to this problem. For example, they set up white noise machine for baby hoping that this device will solve their child’s sleep problems. Yes, it is indeed a useful gadget. But if the child has developed insomnia, it is necessary to eliminate its cause.
In order for the kid to sleep well, he has to get physically tired and lose energy by the evening. This can be achieved in two ways:
- child can be saddled with physical activity
- or get «loaded» with emotional activity
Physical activity during the day and in the evening, before bath time and feeding is almost a hundred percent guarantee of a good sleep.
If your baby can already crawl, sit or even walk – crawl, sit and walk with him, make him move. If the infant is still very tiny and his activity range is not big – use exercise massage, swimming (bathing in a large bath) and gymnastics.
Emotional activity is quite an individual thing – active communication with other relatives and kids and educational games can both make the baby tired, helping him to have a good night’s sleep, or do exactly the opposite, i.e. over-excite him, which will lead to a sleepless night full of crying.
It often happens so that the child has insomnia after an excessively emotional day. So it is better to experiment with this kind of activities. One try will be enough to realize, if emotional activity makes your child over-excited, or helps him release energy and “puts him to sleep”.
If the child has trouble sleeping at night, think about going together on everyday evening walks. Kids often fall asleep so well in the fresh air that they can sleep without waking up through the whole night…
Rules for a Good Night’s Sleep of a Child
So, if you want your kid to sleep well and sound, you should provide him with the following conditions:
- The most dynamic physical activity should fall on the second half of the day and in the evening (emotional activity is under the question, physical – without a doubt).
- Organize a walk in the fresh air two-three hours before sleep.
- Do refreshing bathing (30-40 minutes) one – one and a half hour before sleep.
- Organize nourishing dinner half an hour before bedtime.
- The climate in the nursery should be cool and humid: 18-19 °C, humidity – 60-70 %.
If the child not only sleeps poorly, but also has trouble falling asleep – think of some sort of a ritual «going to sleep procedure»: sing him the same lullaby every day, or turn on the same quiet soothing melody while rocking the baby to sleep; put the same toy in his field of view (but it should be used only for putting the child to sleep – he shouldn’t see it during daytime).
Gradually, the baby will get used to it, so once you start singing or showing him his toy, he will get off immediately.
