Babies are often called a “bundle of joy,” and for good reason. All the same, a newborn is also a huge responsibility, as new parents will learn. These parents may end up juggling buying and installing a crib, baby clothes, diaper changing practice, breast feeding on the mother’s part, and even sleep training. It may sound odd to say that you must train your baby to sleep, but training your baby to sleep is an important step to take. Babies are known for sleeping a lot, but as a baby grows during its first year and a half, its sleep schedule may be inconvenient and erratic, which may frazzle the parents and be troublesome for the baby too. Should this happen, baby sleep training will be necessary, and a baby sleep coach may be hired. Programs such as Sweet Dreams LA and its kin can provide these professionals, and the services of Sweet Dreams LA and its kind may be found online. What might a baby sleep coach from Sweet Dreams LA and others do?
Babies and Sleep
Babies and toddlers sleep a lot, since their bodies are still growing. In fact, for the first two months of life a baby’s circadian rhythm has not yet developed, so that baby cannot tell day from night at all. Meanwhile, by age six to 12 months, most babies will take naps twice per day on average, and those naps may be one or two hours in length each. Toddlers will need 12-14 hours of sleep on average in a given 24-hour period.
This is a lot of sleep, but rarely will a baby or toddler get all that sleep at once. Babies need to be fed often, such as every three months as a newborn, and this means that they will repeatedly wake up (day and night) and need feeding. A baby’s ample sleep will be done in sets of a few hours each, regardless of their parents’ sleep schedule. The problem is that toddlers may still have erratic and inconvenient sleep schedules, and even a baby may need help getting a more regular sleep schedule established. If this can’t be easily done by the parents themselves, they may reach out to the likes of Sweet Dreams LA and its kin for professional assistance, depending on where they live.
What a Baby Sleep Coach Does
It may first be noted that this industry is not strictly regulated, and parents who choose to hire a baby sleep coach are urged to research any baby coaching firm that they find and also consult the staff there before hiring anyone. If a baby sleep coach checks out and is deemed a trustworthy professional, that coach (most likely a woman) will be hired to help the clients’ baby or toddler learn a more regular sleep schedule.
How is this done? To begin with, the client parents will be given a questionnaire to fill out, and this will allow them to list their needs and current everyday life with their baby or toddler. Once the baby coaches have this information on hand, a coach will be sent to the clients and visit them regularly for the coaching sessions. During the first visit, the coach may converse with the parent and view the home to get further details about the family and their everyday life.
The exact methods may vary from one child to another and one coach to another, but over the course of a week (longer for toddlers), the coach will help train the baby or toddler to stay asleep for a much longer period of time than before, and at more regular times of the day and night. This means that, by the end of the training session, a baby or toddler may have sleep pattern that much more closely resemble their parents’. If the training is successful, the child or baby may stay asleep for seven to eight hours at a time, which may be quite a relief for the parents since they won’t be woken up by a distressed baby or toddler so often. Extra work may be done so that the child is put on a regular nap schedule as well, which may also be helpful for the parents.
