#sleeptraining #babysleepmadesimple #6monthold #6monthsleepregression
Sleep Training Your 6 Month Old: 5 Essential Steps
Is your 6 month old's sleep off track? Is he fighting bedtime or naps? This isn’t surprising, given how much development is happening. Sometimes it’s the 6 month sleep regression causing problems. Other times it might be a sleep schedule issue or that your 6 month old won’t sleep through the night.
Consider this to be your 6 month old baby sleep guide. It walks you through the best sleep training advice for your baby.
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Let's go over my 5 steps to sleep training your 6 month old.
Step 1: Create a sleep friendly space for your baby. Once your baby starts to roll or shows signs of becoming mobile it's time to ditch the DockATot, the Rock'n'Play or the bassinet as sleep spaces. The reason why is the crib is the safest place for your baby to sleep especially if your baby is moving around and rolling. Your baby needs the space to roll around and get herself in comfortable positions, which is an essential part of your baby resettling herself during the night when she wakes. Which is a critical part of sleep training.
Step 2: Sleep training begins at bedtime. When we're beginning sleep training we always focus on only one aspect of your baby's sleep at a time. And the reason why is if you try to fix naps and bedtime and night wakings at the same time, you're gonna end up with a really
overtired and cranky baby that refuses to sleep. Instead we always work on bedtime first because this is the part of the day where your baby is the most tired of any other part of the day so she's more likely to comply with changes to her sleep routine at this time.
Your baby's bedtime routine should include a bath, a massage, reading books, feeding and singing lullabies.
Step 3: Reduce night wakings. Once you have your bedtime routine going well, then it's time to start working on reducing or eliminating your baby's night wakings. Most 6 month olds need only 1 or 2 night feeds.
Night weaning and sleep training really go hand-in-hand. I find that they work best when done together. When you teach your baby to settle himself to sleep at bedtime, then he'll naturally know how to resettle himself during the night when he wakes. If you put your baby down in the crib at bedtime at half asleep then he's really not getting used to settling himself to sleep. And the reason why this is important is whenever he stirs or wakes during the night he's going to continue needing your help to fall back asleep. This could happen 4, 5 times. So what you need to do is practice on putting your baby into the crib awake so, to fall asleep on his own. A good indicator that your baby is awake enough is whether or not his eyes are open.
Step 4: Work on naps.
Once your baby is going down easily at bedtime and sleeping well at night then it's time to work on naps. So a 6 month old's awake times are 2-3 hours. And what this means is that your baby needs to nap every 2-3 hours after waking up from his last nap. So a really easy way to handle this is just to give your baby 2.5 hour awake times throughout the day.
But it doesn't work for every baby and if you'd like a little bit more of a structured approach you could do the following: Your baby's first awake time of the day can be 2 hours, the second awake time of the day can be anywhere between 2-2.5 hours, the third awake time of the day can be 2.5 hours and the last awake time of the day can be anywhere from 2.5-3 hours. You really have to see what works for your individual baby.
Step 5: Wake your baby up at the same time every morning. Waking up at the same time every day really sets your baby's body clock and it makes your schedule fall a little bit easier every day. Now a great way to decide what time to wake your baby up is to write down the time that she naturally wakes up for seven days in a row. Then pick a time that falls right in the middle of these times and that's your new wakeup time. Your 6 month old baby can learn to settle themself to sleep and sleep long stretches at night. All it takes is a consistent sleep routine and following the sleep training tips that we've just gone over.