Your babies sleep environment should facilitate safe sleep and help develop a good association with sleep.
From a very early age (4 months approx) your baby begins to develop memories and expectations about where they will be put to sleep and where they expect to go back to sleep when they wake during the night.
Therefore creating a good sleeping environment for your baby is extremely important in order to make bedtime a calm, relaxing experience for baby and mum.
When creating a good sleep environment try and take the following in mind:
- Be mindful of the fabric of the babies bed, check the fabric for any scratchy fabrics such as labels, lace or raised patterns. These may be irritating for your baby especially if against the skin directly. Imagine if you yourself where sleeping on a sheet that was hard and had a label scratching you, you would just change it but your baby can’t do this!!!
- Darken the room for day time naps and nighttime.
- A sleep environment which incorporates soft sounds that are calming to your baby.( each baby is different, some may want a nursery song)
- Limit loud unexpected noise.
- Breathable bedding so that baby doesn’t get too hot at night.