January 2025: Your Plan of attack to get sleep back on track

December with all its festivities might have been fun, but it might also be a recipe for disaster when it comes to sleep. All the traveling, jetlag, parties, and events may have been fun but might also be very disruptive when it comes to your child’s sleep. As we enter into January, you may have established some new year resolutions for yourself, or goals for your family. The tricky thing is, however, that as a parent of young ones, you realize that actally, a lot of it is out of your control. Your energy, determination, and time is very much governed by the little one(s) in your household. Say if your infant/toddler gets sick, or is waking up multiple times in a night, or throwing temper tantrums - chances are you may feel very depleted already just to try and survive the day. I know, because I’ve been there myself.

What I’ve come to realize as a mother of two, is that amidst the busyness of the day-to-day grind, with better sleep in our children, comes better productivity for ourselves.

When a child’s daily routines and rhythms are regulated, and when the home environment is supportive of calmness in your child, your child’s sleep (and temper) can be much better regulated — which in turn will give YOU, much better rhythm and control as you attack your day.

#1 Wake Your Child up at a Fixed Time (eg. 7am)

A lot of times parents underestimate the power of regulating the morning wake-up. The morning wake-up is like the beginning of a race. If you start the day off right, it truly sets the tone for how the rest of the day will go. It is also arguably the easiest variable to control when it comes to regulating sleep.

When you control the wakeup time, you are effectively “tuning” his/her biological clock to get used to waking up at this time. Of course you should decide on this wakeup time based on your family’s needs and your child’s natural tendencies as opposed to imposing something that wakes them up cranky and upset all the time, so parents should be delicate with it — but there are a multitude of benefits that come with regulating the morning wakeup and having a good morning routine.

#2 Having Solid Morning/Bedtime Routines (SO KEY!)

We know from scientific research that young infants and toddlers thrive on set routines. Predictable routines give them a sense of security and comfort that regulates their mood and keeps them in a calm state, because they know what to expect, and what the rules are. They would be less likely to feel dysregulated, and also eventually supports their independence to follow through with routines increasingly independently as they grow older.

Morning routines set the tone for the day, and bedtime routines communicate in the most gentle way that it is time for the body to rest. Regularity and habitual routines and schedules are the easiest window towards healthy and struggle-free bedtimes, and it is important to note that having bedtime routines is in fact a science-backed approach that supports and helps with improving sleep quality in little ones as well as adults!

#3 Find their Unique Happy Sleep/Wake Schedule — and Stick To It

Every child is unique, so do not fully follow age-based sleep schedules when you see one! It should be based on your child’s agreeableness and happiness while awake, signs of tiredness, and truly tracking sleep trends and observing till you find what works best for your child. This may seem like a lot of work, but if you have a happy child and a happy sleeper, you will thank yourself later.

When you find their Unique Happy Sleep/Wake Schedule, you are helping your little one’s body get used to a particular wake up time, which in turn would help calculate when the first nap would be, which would then help you determine when bedtime would be, given all the information online about age-based wake windows. With a regulated schedule that keeps their body physiologically happy and sleep needs met, you’ll generally have a much happier and more patient child, and you would be able to manage your time better in terms of scheduling feeds, meals, etc. as well as your own personal tasks or household chores.

That’s not to say that your schedules need to be rigid that you have to follow it to the minute — but it serves as a good guideline to see the sleepy cues and give them the rest that they need when they need it, but depending on growth, activity levels, stimulation levels, and even the introduction to new foods and experiences, schedules may have variance, and that is okay! I do suggest however that during a “coaching” period of 2-3 weeks when you are trying to improve sleep, that sticking to schedules a little bit more religiously would be helpful for you.

#4 Remember: You are Your Child’s Mirror

Sometimes we forget that our children are naturally very curious learners and not a blank slate, and they LOVE to learn not by what they are told, but rather what they see in us as their caretakers. If we can model calmness (easier said than done), our children are more likely to mirror that. If we can model slow and steady breathing while holding our infant and toddler, we may not immediately get a calm child, but they will also be able to mirror that over time if they see that you’re doing that consistently. When we try to select an approach to coach our young ones to sleep, we need to make sure that we can execute it calmly and unwaveringly, so that our children can absorb that calm confidence from us too, that everything’s going to be okay when lights are off, and everything is going to be okay when they close their eyes and drift off to sleep.

I hope that with these few tips, that you as a parent would also be able to better manage everything else outside of sleep.

Good luck!