Should You Wake A Sleeping Baby?
- April 24, 2014
- by Melissa Lawrence
Hi everyone! I just managed to get my 5 kids to sleep and I’m turning to tomorrow’ video. No matter how much we love our kids, we parents mostly love that time of day when they are nestled in bed and we have a few hours (hopefully!) of quiet time.
Well, we’ve all heard the old saying “Never Wake A Sleeping Baby”. For me, though, this saying proved NOT to be the thing to do with my young babies. That’s today’s video.
My Newborn Babies and Their Sleep Patterns
For starters, I did need to wake my babies to try to ensure a full feeding when they were newborns. Newborns are so sleepy that they can tend to eat a little bit and then go back to sleep. Their tummy’s are also very small, so they need to eat frequently. In order to keep my babies awake, my doctor advised me to change their diaper and even to change their pajamas to keep them awake. This would make sure that they would stay awake and be full at the end of a feeding. I liked this because it meant I was not feeding all day long once the baby was a few weeks old. It’s a personal decision, and that’s what worked for me.
Next up, do you wake your baby from long naps? Well, my doctor advised waking the baby up after 2-3 hours to try to feed the baby again. When I didn’t do this, as I discuss in the video, my babies tended to awake more at night.
Finally, should I wake my baby for feedings during the night? When my babies were first born, my doctor did advise me to wake them at night because he wanted to make sure they were eating frequently. Over time, he said I could let them go and that they did! But it took a while and wasn’t an easy time…
For more on why I think waking a sleeping baby can be helpful, please watch my video and weigh in with your own views. And thank you so much for watching!
Comments
sara
I have a 6 week old and am starting to transition him onto the schedule you recommend for formula feeding (every 4 hours – 7am, 11am, 3pm, …) So, you recommend letting him sleep as long as possible at nighttime without waking him up. Let’s say I put him down at 11:30pm and he wakes up at 2am, and then at 6am – won’t that throw off the schedule for the next day? How do I get his first feed back at 7am? I LOVE your videos.