6 Common Baby Sleep Myths – Busted!
Ask any parent what their biggest challenge was when they had a newborn and I promise you all of them will say “sleep.” Not only is it hard, but there’s a lot of bad information floating around that keeps getting repeated. Here are some common baby sleep myths you should know about.
Myth 1: Adding cereal to a bottle will help baby sleep.
Sorry, no. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, cereal may be too many calories for a young baby and begin a pattern of obesity. The AAP recommends waiting until four months before you start offering solid foods.
Myth 2: Keeping baby up later makes him sleep in later.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t work like that. A baby who stays awake too long becomes overtired, and overtiredness actually makes it harder to sleep. Plus, if your child has begun developing a circadian rhythm, they’ll be roused by the sun anyway.
Myth 3: Baby should sleep through the night at X weeks.
I say “X” because it’s always different. There’s no hard rule that says when children should be sleeping through the night. Some moms brag that their kids sleep all night because they coincidentally sleep the same six hours as mom. That isn’t “all night.” For a child under a year, “all night” is ten or eleven consecutive hours, which takes a while to learn.
Myth 4: You have to keep the house silent during sleep time.
Newborns love background noise. They dealt with a lot of it when they were inside the womb. You don’t have to create a silent environment, but if they become accustomed to silence, you’ll always be struggling to keep thing quiet.
Myth 5: Crib bumpers protect baby.
Has anyone ever seen a baby with a serious injury from banging their head on the crib? Doctors haven’t either. Bumpers don’t provide protection, but they do create a suffocation risk.
Myth 6: You shouldn’t wake a sleeping baby.
This is the only myth I actually understand, as in there’s a part of me that believes it even though I know it’s objectively false. After spending so much time helping our children sleep, waking them up seems like shooting ourselves in the foot.
Truthfully, though, sometimes you have to wake up a newborn or infant. They should never go more than two or three hours without a feeding. Once a newborn has regained his birth weight, it’s OK to let them sleep for more than three hours, but four is pushing it. Feeding is essential at that age.
What did you learn about baby sleep that just wasn’t true?
Check How To Teach Your Baby To Self-Soothe
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Written by Stephanie Parker from Sleepingbaby.com, inventors of the Zipadee-Zip
The motto for Sleeping Baby, makers of the Zipadee-Zip, is: "Inspiring Dreams One Night at A time," and that, in a nutshell, is how it all started…with one little dream that has since become the Parker family's reality. When Brett and Stephanie Parker's daughter, Charlotte, was born, the feeling that welled up inside of them was indescribable; they never realized until first looking into those baby blues of hers that they were even capable of that kind of love.
When it was time to transition baby from swaddling, the Parkers tried every sleep sack on the market and every swaddle weaning trick they could find for nearly two weeks and nothing worked to get baby Charlotte to fall and stay asleep.
Stephanie became determined to restore sleep and sanity to their household and set out to find a solution that would soothe Charlotte's startle reflex and provide her the cozy womb-like environment she loved so much but still give her the freedom to roll over and wiggle around in her crib safely. Out of sheer desperation and exhaustion, the Zipadee-Zip was born. The first Zipadee-Zip(R) Stephanie put together on her little sewing machine worked like magic!
To date tens of thousands of Zipadee-Zips have been sold and all from word-of-mouth marketing. It is so rewarding for the Parkers to see other parents and babies getting the sleep they both need and deserve!
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