BY SARAH HUBER FOR MYWINDSOR
MARCH 1
IS NATIONAL BABY SLEEP DAY
B
aby Sleep Day, marked on March 1 by the Pediatric Sleep Council, might be every parent’s favorite holiday – if they can get their baby to participate.
After all, sleeping through the night isn’t only a new parent’s REM-dream come true, it’s vital to infant health. During sleep, infant brains form neural connections – millions per second, so each moment of sleep really counts – and recharge for a new day of learning. Physical growth and immune system development are closely connected with sleep,and babies who receive adequate sleep are calmer and more responsive when awake, according to the Pediatric Sleep Council.
Yet, what’s a caregiver with a wide-eyed baby to do? Two local experts, a specialist with Pediatric Sleep Specialists’ northern Colorado clinics and an award-winning Loveland pediatrician, offered the following tips to exhausted parents.
Tried-And-True Routines
Routine is the bedrock of healthy baby sleep, according to Dr. Mike Quintana, pediatrician at Loveland Youth Clinic. For newborns, guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend 20 hours of daily sleep, divided into night sleep and two to three naps. Sleep requirements drop as children age, with babies four to six months sleeping 16 to 20 hours over 24 hours. “Around six to eight months, kids wake up,” said Quintana. “They eat, play, interact, drop off to nap.” By age one, pediatric guidelines recommend 12 to 16 hours of sleep a day, including naps. Jessica Ballou of Pediatric Sleep Specialists noted, “Healthy babies do not require nighttime feeds after three months of age. They are able to learn to self-soothe as early as three months and definitely by six months of age. This is also when their circadian rhythm starts to develop. The effect of these changes is that they transition to sleeping more at night than during the day.” Quintana acknowledged sleep transitions, from dropping a nighttime feeding to sleeping for longer spans, may be difficult 14 | mywindsor | FEBRUARY 2022
for caregivers, who learn “on the job” about when and how to respond to a baby’s cry. Referencing the French model, in which parents expect babies to sleep in five-hour nighttime segments by three months, he said parents “should check on a baby crying in the night and if there is no medical condition, like a fever or a foot stuck in the side of the crib, they should touch and look at the baby, then say ‘good night, baby’ and head back out of the room.”
When To Seek Help For Baby Sleep Of course, not only does this type of sleep training take mammoth will-power for many caregivers, it may not be a good fit for some parents, Ballou said. At that point, it can be useful to reach out to a baby’s pediatrician or a sleep specialist for an assessment and to rule out any physical health concerns. Likewise, caregivers should seek support if a child experiences difficulty falling or staying asleep, snoring, gasping, restless sleep, sleep terrors, sleep talking or sleepwalking, difficulty waking in the morning or daytime sleepiness, Ballou said. Both Quintana and Ballou said dabbling in the myriad of “baby sleep cures” offered online is rarely helpful. As with adults, the most commonly diagnosed sleep problem with babies is insomnia, or difficulty falling and staying asleep.
