Infant Sleep Tip #4: Manage day and night feedings so that caregivers can get some rest too.

Even though she’s ready to hit the sack around 6 or 7pm, a later evening feeding works well for babies and parents. Rouse her for full, boring feeding 2-3 hours later (around 9-10pm), then put her straight back to bed. Then YOU go to bed too!

Babies can naturally take one long stretch per 24-hour period. At first the long stretch may just be 4 hours, but it will lengthen over the upcoming months to 5, 6, 7 hours and will eventually become her night sleep. We want to encourage the long stretch to be at night after that last 9-10pm-ish feeding. If she takes it during the day in the form of an epic nap, she will legitimately be up all night making up for calories didn’t receive during the day. (Yes, that means wake a sleeping baby from a nap so that she doesn’t sleep through a daytime feeding.) And if she does her long stretch from 6-10pm, then you haven’t benefited from it. So encourage her little body to take its long stretch after that last evening feed.

Note: If mom really needs some more sleep, see if another caregiver can do the next feeding (probably around 1-3am) so that mom can get a solid stretch herself. If breastfeeding, this can be a bottle of expressed breast milk. As the saying goes, “if mama isn’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” Knowing how intense as the first few months can be, we need to do what we can to support ourselves. An uninterrupted 6+ hour stretch of sleep can do wonders for a mom coping with baby blues, postpartum depression, or simply trying to regroup after a challenging postpartum time.