4MOMS GoodNight User Manual - page 7
Whether you nurse, rock, or recite poetry in Greek to your child, this is what you are
teaching your child is necessary to fall asleep.
There is nothing wrong with sleep associations. Even adults have sleep
associations. For example—try to go to sleep without a pillow. Sleep associations
only become a problem when they’re not readily available during our regular
nighttime wakenings. To use the pillow example, usually you wake briefly during
your sleep cycle, roll over and fall back to sleep, and never remember anything. But
if somebody snatched your pillow while you were sleeping, the next time you woke
up, you’d notice your pillow was missing and would need to look for it before going
back to sleep. If this happened often enough, it might make you quite grumpy by
morning.
Now think of your child’s sleep associations. The way that your child falls asleep
when you put him or her to bed for the night (or even down for a nap), is also what
your child will expect when he or she wakes each time throughout the night. Think
back to the pillow example. It’s no wonder your child wakes up crying if he fell
asleep in your arms and woke up in a crib or if he dozed off with a bottle and woke
up to find it gone. Remember that each time your child falls asleep, he or she is
building a sleep association based on this experience.
2.5
Choose which sleep associations to keep and which to discard.
Sleep associations are very helpful because they help signal to your child that it is
time to settle down to sleep. After 9 months in the womb, your child already has
some sleep associations. This is why movement (e.g. being rocked), white noise (e.g.
riding in a car), and having Mommy or Daddy close by are so successful at lulling
babies to sleep. However, all of these sleep associations are outside your child’s
control. Teach your child to associate sleep with new conditions that they can
control.
Since your goal is to get your child to fall back to sleep peacefully at each nighttime
wakening, try working backwards from here. If your child sleeps in a crib in a dark
and quiet nursery, these will be some of your child’s sleep associations.
We’ve found that some sleep associations work really well, while others are to be
avoided.
• A dark and quiet crib is the best sleep association for an infant. This means that
they need to be put to bed while drowsy but awake. A 2004 study commissioned
by the National Sleep Foundation found that, on average, children who were put
to bed awake slept over an hour more per night than their peers who were put
to bed after falling asleep. The study also found that babies who were put to bed
while awake were twice as likely to sleep through the night while babies who
were put to bed while asleep were almost three times as likely to need their
parents’ help two or more times per night!