Infant Insights: How to Bring Some Order to Your Day
When you bring your newborn baby home, there can be days when everything seems out of your control. Feeding, sleeping, crying, doctor appointments, weight gain, family visits – just navigating all the things can leave you physically and emotionally depleted.
If your bandwidth for anything ‘extra’ on your plate is already stretched to the limit, I’d like to suggest the following approach to your day:
The E.A.S.Y. Plan!
With the E.A.S.Y. Plan, parents can feel more ‘in control’ of their time and learn to better predict what their baby may need in the moment.
The EASY plan was described in a book by Tracy Hogg, The Baby Whisperer.
Photo of the book Secrets of the Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg.
“But I thought that you shouldn’t put your baby on a schedule?”
And that’s the point - It isn’t a schedule!
Regrettably, the backlash against strict schedules has given parents the mistaken impression that any kind of structure or routine will inhibit their baby’s natural expression or development.
Nothing is further from the truth. After all, she (or he) is just a baby! They don’t know what’s best for them.
There is a big difference between respecting your baby and allowing her to be in charge.
What is the EASY Plan?
The EASY Plan is a structured routine that simply involves repeating a set order of events over and over throughout the day...
Eat
Activity
Sleep
You time
Eat
We all know that newborns have to eat frequently because their tummies are so small. Whether your baby is breastfeeding, bottle-feeding, or both, nutrition is their primary need. Their caloric needs are so high because they have to fuel rapid growth!
Activity
During the first 3 months of life, your baby will spend about 70% of the time eating and sleeping! For the first 6 weeks, eating will be her main activity! Other than eating, she will spend time looking around, going on a walk in the stroller, in the tub and interacting with the people in her life. Doesn’t sound very exciting to us, but that’s about all they can handle! By the time eating is done, there’s not a lot of time left before it’s time for another nap!
Sleep
The importance of frequent sleep bouts cannot be over-emphasized. Prioritizing sleep now will help keep your baby from becoming overstimulated and overtired – two conditions you want to avoid because they increase the amount of crying.
You Time
About an hour – more or less – for you to fuel yourself, take a shower, and generally live your life!
The Benefits of a Structured Routine
The time it takes for each event is as individual as your baby is! The beauty of following this routine throughout the day is that you become better and better at recognizing your baby’s cries and cues – whether it be hunger cues, sleep cues, or boredom.
And over time your baby comes to know what to expect NEXT. Babies like patterns and routines. Their lower level brain is able to recognize patterns early on, if they are reinforced over and over again.
By the third week, the pattern changes slightly to include cluster feeding, aimed at helping your baby sleep slightly longer stretches at the beginning of the night. This means that you give your baby 2-3 feeds close together as bedtime approaches, often referred to as ‘tanking up’ for the night.
“So, should I follow this routine through the night?”
No. At night you will encourage your baby to Eat, Sleep, Eat, Sleep. Keep the lights extremely low. In fact, if you need a light, please use a red or amber-colored nightlight, since white and blue light waves suppress melatonin production. If you’re breastfeeding, your baby is getting melatonin through your milk. And we want you producing and passing on to your baby as much melatonin as possible!
Around 6 weeks old, your baby may be able to sleep slightly longer stretches. In addition to cluster feeding, there is another tool you can use to prioritize your sleep…
Dream Feeds
A Dream Feed involves picking up your sleeping baby right before YOU go to bed, usually between 10-12pm, and giving baby a top-off feeding. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. [Read more about Dream Feeds here.]
Newborns wake up easily and frequently. But if you begin sleeping shortly after your baby has consumed a large meal, you may get a bit more time before your baby awakens again. And every bit helps, especially if it helps you to sleep uninterrupted for at least 4 hours.
Why? Our brains are designed to prioritize the most restorative stage of sleep – NREM3, or deep, slow wave sleep – during the first few sleep cycles of the night. So, if you can protect only one portion of your nightly sleep bout from interruptions, it should be the first 4-5 hours of sleep.
Does Dream Feeding Work?
As the weeks go by, it is considered normal sleep development for a baby to sleep in longer, more consolidated bouts. When all goes well, young infants develop more consolidated sleep patterns at night, and the first consolidation of sleep happens at the beginning of the night. But does scientific study support this?
One study found that babies who had been given focal, bedtime feeds at one month postpartum tended to sleep for longer stretches when they were 6 months old. Compared with babies who hadn’t received these bedtime meals, the longest nighttime sleep bout averaged 62 additional minutes (Quante, et.al., 2022).
Is there a downside?
· For babies who are underweight or have a medical condition, dream feeding might not be the best choice.
· Possibly disruptive for some babies – for babies who are waking to feed anyway, dream feeding doesn’t make sense.
· The “feed-them-while-they-sleep” approach might be a bad fit for babies prone to reflux since they need to be kept upright after a feeding.
· Feeding-while-sleeping might contribute to delays in the development of self-settling. (This is why I recommend only using the dream feed until about 8 weeks.)
When should I stop using the Dream Feed?
I know there are a lot of opinions out there about appropriate times to use the Dream Feed. I feel strongly that once your baby reaches the age of about 4 months old (and has likely gone through the 4-month sleep regression), it’s time to ditch the Dream Feed. My reasoning behind this is that at this age we need to be consistently encouraging more independent sleep to at least past midnight. If there are no weight issues to deal with, most babies can make it past midnight with a little initial sleep training at bedtime. How you put your baby to bed at the beginning of the night will impact their ability to put themselves back to sleep at any wakeup. And if you give them the opportunity to learn that one skill, you will be ahead of the game when it comes to getting better sleep for the entire family!
