The Baby Sleep Book: How to help your baby to sleep and have a restful night. Martha Sears

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step 4: create a variety of bedtime rituals

      You are learning where baby sleeps, when baby sleeps, and how to create a comfortable sleepy environment, and now we come to the next step in our plan: helping you work out what bedtime rituals work best for your baby. As you use these same routines night after night (or alternate through several routines consistently) baby will learn to fall asleep easily and stay asleep longer.

       Creating healthy and relaxing sleep associations

      A sleep “association” is not a naptime playgroup or a group of sleepy parents who gather to yawn and complain about their baby’s sleep habits. A sleep association refers to a connection in baby’s mind between falling asleep and the various activities, places, experiences, and feelings that precede his nodding off into slumber. The wiring in baby’s brain is full of patterns of association. For example, if you usually feed and sing your baby to sleep in a rocking chair, this setting will become programmed into your baby’s mind as a sleep-inducing routine. He will remember the calm and drowsy feelings he gets from rocking and feeding, and this will help him fall asleep.

      What kind of sleep associations do you want to teach your baby? Do you want to create attachment-based sleep associations or independence-based sleep associations?

      (We will discuss sleep anxiety more on page and the harmful effects of crying it out on page.) We all want our babies to eventually learn to fall asleep independently by their own self-soothing strategies at an appropriate age. Our sleep plan teaches them how, rather than forcing them to sleep independently.

      As parents ourselves, we chose to create attachment-based sleep associations in our kids. But we know that not all parents will make the same choice. Is there a middle ground? Is there a way to help a baby learn to fall asleep independently but without excessive crying or stress? Is there a way to create attachment-based sleep associations that meet baby’s need and at the same time aren’t overly demanding on parents? We believe the answer to these questions is YES!

      Why is it necessary for you to help your baby develop healthy sleep associations? Why not just put baby down in her cot, walk out of the room, and let her fall asleep on her own? Won’t she learn that being in the cot means there’s nothing to do now but sleep? Well, yes, she will begin to associate being left alone in the cot with sleep. Her developing brain is busy building patterns of association all the time. That’s what brains do. But in the early months, babies do not have the developmental capacity to transition themselves from the state of being awake to being asleep without help. A tiny baby left alone in her cot to fall asleep on her own is likely to cry fearfully and then sleep anxiously. Going to sleep anxiously defeats one of the goals of your sleep plan: to teach baby a healthy attitude about sleep; that sleep is a pleasant state to enter and a happy state to remain in.

      Babies need to be parented to sleep so that they can form pleasant sleep associations. So what kind of activities, experiences, and feelings do you want your baby to associate with going to sleep? Babies who fall asleep while breast- or bottle-feeding will learn to associate warm milk, rhythmic sucking, and being cuddled close to Mum with sleep. Babies who are carried around or rocked to sleep will learn that motion and comfort, as well as contact with Mum or Dad, are what send them into dreamland. Babies who are put in a cot to cry themselves to sleep learn that sleep is a lonely time when they need to comfort themselves.

      Remember, you not only want your baby to sleep longer, but to sleep happier. So, in considering any advice about sleep, including the advice in this book, ask yourself:

       “If I were my baby, how would I want to go to sleep?”

      Getting behind the eyes of your baby and imagining how you would want your parents to act in a certain situation is one of the most important parenting tools we have learned over our years as parents and pediatricians. You will nearly always make wise decisions about how to parent your children if you begin your decision process by trying to understand the situation from your child’s point of view. If you were a baby, would you rather be parented to sleep at the breast of mother or in the arms of father, or just put down in a lonely cot and left to cry off to sleep?

      We are now going to show you ways to create sleep associations that have one goal in mind – to help baby learn that sleep is a pleasant state to enter and a happy state to remain in.

       Primary and secondary sleep associations

      Another concept we want you to understand is primary and secondary sleep associations. Think of your baby’s primary sleep association as whatever usually turns on the sleep switch.

and the sleep association winners are:

      Primary