A Guide to Sweet Dreams for Your Baby

If somebody had handed me one page before Shan was born, I'd have wanted it to be this one: the small number of things that count, in the order they count, with everything else left out.

The list is shorter than the industry would like you to believe. Most of what's sold for infant sleep does nothing, and a fair amount of it is actively unsafe. Here's the part to keep.

The non-negotiables first

These come first because nothing else outranks them, because they're the only items where getting it wrong has a real cost, and because they're also, mercifully, free.

• On the back, for every sleep: naps included. Side and front sleeping both have higher risk, and the back is the position all the evidence supports.
• In her own clear, flat, firm sleep space. A cot, a crib or a Moses basket with a firm mattress and a fitted sheet, and nothing else in it.
• Nothing loose in the cot. No pillows, no duvets, no cot bumpers, no pods, no nests, no soft toys for the first year.
• Feet to the foot of the cot, with any blanket tucked in firmly and no higher than her shoulders. A sleep sack removes this problem entirely, so most families here end up using one.
• In your room for the first six months, for both day and night sleep. This is one of the most strongly evidenced protective factors there is.
• Smoke-free, always, and no sofa or armchair sleeping with a baby under any circumstances. That's the most dangerous place a baby and an adult can fall asleep together.

If you do nothing else, do those six. Everything below is comfort and convenience.

The room

Singapore makes this harder than most guides acknowledge, because they're almost all written for climates where the problem is keeping a baby warm. The recommended range is 16 to 20°C, which is nowhere near what most flats here run at overnight, so what you're managing is the combination of room temperature and what she's wearing, and the way to check it is with your hand on the back of her neck or her chest. Warm and dry is right. Hands and feet run cool on babies as a matter of course and tell you nothing at all, a fact I wish somebody had given me before I spent a small fortune on socks. Overheating raises risk, so when in doubt use one layer fewer. A fan is fine and helps circulate air, provided it isn't blowing directly onto her. Dark repays the effort, because light suppresses melatonin and blackout in a bedroom is one of the cheapest improvements available. White noise is safe and helpful at a low, continuous volume, think of a shower running in the next room, positioned well away from the cot.

The most common mistake is building a routine so elaborate that you abandon it in week three. The value of a routine is entirely in its repetition, so the correct length is the length you'll still manage at eleven at night when you're on your own and everything has gone wrong.

Twenty to thirty minutes is plenty, and the most common mistake is building something so elaborate that you abandon it by the third week. Ours was a bath on some nights, a feed, a change into night clothes, lights down, one book, one song, into the cot. Six steps, and it never varied, and by about four months the second step was enough to make her eyelids go heavy. Or the third, since I can't remember which.

Start it whenever you like. There's no age at which a routine becomes valid, and no harm in beginning one at six weeks purely because it gives the evening a shape. What counts far more than the content is that the order stays the same and the lights go down at the same point every night.

Drowsy but awake

This phrase appears in every book and almost nobody says what it's like in practice.

The idea behind it is sound. A baby who goes into the cot awake has the chance to learn what falling asleep feels like in the place she'll wake up in, which makes the surfacing between cycles less alarming for her. Where the advice goes wrong is in presenting it as a switch you flip.

Some babies won't do it, and Shan was emphatically one of them. I followed the guidance to the letter for months and she woke every single time, and eventually I stopped and let her fall asleep on me, and everybody in the house slept better. She learned it perfectly well later, on her own schedule, without any of the misery.

Try it, by all means, and try it again in a few weeks if it fails. It's a good thing to aim at and a terrible thing to grade yourself against.

Timing beats technique

This is the part I'd tattoo somewhere visible if I were starting again.

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Almost every settling problem I had in the first year was a timing problem. An overtired baby is harder to settle, and the state builds through the day, so by the evening you're fighting something you created at two in the afternoon by missing a nap. Watching for the early signs, the stare, the slowing down, the first yawn, and moving before the crying starts counts for more than every technique in every book put together.

Wake windows are a rough guide and not a law, and by the time you've read three articles about them you'll have found three different sets of numbers. Watch your own baby, who is a good deal more reliable than the internet.

What not to buy

A brief and slightly bad-tempered list, because a great deal of money changes hands here for no benefit at all.

• Cot bumpers, pods, nests and sleep positioners. None are recommended for sleep by any safe-sleep authority, and several have been withdrawn from sale.
• Inclined sleepers and anything that props a baby up for sleep. These have been recalled after deaths, and reflux isn't a reason to use one.
• Weighted sleep sacks and weighted blankets for infants, which safe-sleep bodies advise against.
• Consumer breathing monitors sold on the promise of preventing sudden infant death. There's no evidence that they do, and they generate false alarms that cost you the sleep you bought them to protect.
• Most of the rest of it. A firm flat mattress, a fitted sheet and a sleep sack is the entire kit.

The questions that kept me up

This guide is general information, written to help you understand a topic and ask better questions. It is not medical advice and does not replace your own doctor, midwife or paediatrician. Anything that worries you about your baby belongs with them.

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