Sleep training simply means teaching a baby how to sleep on their own without being rocked cuddled, and its really helpful because it aids the mother and other care givers in the family to get enough rest, since lack of enough sleep can cause the mother to suffer from conditions such as postpartum depression.
Another benefit is that it helps the mother and other family members to be productive since they are not sleep deprived. There is no specific time when train a baby how to sleep on their own, but pedestrians normally advice that it should start from the age of between four and six months.
There are important tips to ensure that sleep training is successful and they include:
Separate yourself from the baby so that they can learn how to soothe themselves to sleep, and this is by putting them down when they are sleepy. when babies learn how to soothe themselves is really helpful especially when they wake up in the middle of the night.
It’s always important to have a specific time when the baby goes to sleep and to always be consistent with it. Another important thing to learn is to be patient with the baby and yourself and know that it takes time for babies to learn how to sleep on their own.
Another important thing to know is that methods of sleeping training work differently for different families and its important to find what works for the care givers and the baby also.
Different approaches can be used to help a baby sleep on their own and they are such as:
Whereby the parent puts the child to sleep when they are sleepy, then they stand there or sit on a chair as they watch them fall asleep. The parent also continues to keep distance each day until the child learns to sleep without seeing them near.
The other approach is where the parent takes the baby to bed then leaves them, and when they start crying, the parent doesn’t respond and then the baby will eventually sooth themselves to sleep.
The other method involves the parent taking the baby to sleep, and when they cry, the parent goes immediately to check on them, then after few nights they increase the amount of time they take to go check on them.
There are other important tips of sleep training are: swaddling the baby, start training them early and also doing it as a team.
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