Podcast: Understanding Infant Sleep with Guest: Sarah Ockwell-Smith

Understanding Infant Sleep with Guest: Sarah Ockwell-Smith

Season 1, Episode 7

We all know that having a baby means your sleep is going to be disrupted. If anything, we probably underestimate exactly just HOW much. Understanding the biology and normal patterns of infant sleep can make the demands that life with a baby brings, just a little bit easier.

This week I am joined by renowned infant sleep and gentle parenting expert, Sarah Ockwell-Smith. Whether you are currently pregnant and wanting to get prepared, or it's 3am and you're right in the depths of new parenthood, Sarah's fascinating insight, top tips and gentle reassurance will have you feeling better in one short episode!

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I know right now you have no idea what to expect from birth, what it's going to feel like, how it's going to pan out.

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Welcome to The birth-ed podcast, where we open up conversations about all aspects of pregnancy, birth and parenthood.

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I'm Megan Rossiter, founder of Birth-ed, and your host here at The birth-ed podcast.

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Okay.

Before we kick off today, I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about the courses offered by Birth-Ed, because we are actually a little bit more than just a pregnancy, birth and parenthood podcast.

We offer in-person courses in the UK and an online course which is accessible worldwide.

The Birth-Ed course is totally unique in that it offers both a comprehensive antinatal preparation, so covering everything, all your birth choices, possible interventions, decision-making tools, your pain relief options, your birthplace choices, optimal positioning, kind of everything that you might want to know about having a baby.

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Okay, so back to today's podcast.

Okay, so welcome back to The Birth-Ed Podcast.

Today, I am very excited to be joined by the inspiring lady that is Sarah Ockwell-Smith.

Sarah is a renowned author who specializes in the psychology and science of parenting, gentle parenting and attachment theory.

And something that we're gonna be talking about today is infant sleep.

So if it's not clear from the episodes of the podcast that you might have listened to already, or if you don't follow us on social media yet, this is exactly the kind of approach that we take to everything at Birth-Ed, understanding the science behind things and kind of the impact that that has on making the choices that we have to make tends to make things much easier when we kind of understand exactly what's going on.

So welcome, Sarah, thanks so much for joining me.

Oh, thank you for having me.

So in, I suppose probably to kind of kick us off, gentle parenting kind of as an idea.

Can you explain a little bit about what that means?

We've got probably quite a lot of first-time parents listening who, you know, parenting is parenting at this point, and then there's kind of lots of different approaches, I guess.

So when you talk about gentle parenting, what is that?

Yeah, so it's not a name that I came up with, but I was trying to differentiate what I did, and I'd really love to use just parenting, but unfortunately we seem to live in a society where there are hundreds of different labels, and I think people like to identify with something.

So basically, if you look at sort of psychological research, there are only three styles of parenting, which is authoritarian, authoritative and permissive.

So authoritarian parenting, people will probably know as kind of old-fashioned Victorian parenting.

So sort of do as I say, not do as I do.

Children should be seen and not heard.

Lots of punishment.

Not a very good connection between the parent and child.

Parents very much in control over everything, and the parents tend to not really have a good understanding of child development or brain development.

So they tend to expect behavior that is more than the child is capable of.

Then we have permissive parenting.

I think everybody would understand what I mean by saying permissive.

So these are people who kind of let their kids get away with everything.

They don't really do any discipline.

Children completely rule the roost, have all of the control.

Parents are quite out of control.

There's two types of permissive parents.

So you would have what we call a negligent permissive parent.

So they let their kids do anything because they don't really care.

And then you have the really lovely permissive parents.

So the people who are too scared to discipline because they don't want to make their child cry.

And I think that's the type we tend to come across most often.

And then in the middle, you have something called authoritative parenting, which is really confusing because it sounds very much like authoritarian and really throws a lot of people.

But authoritative parenting is categorized by what we call high warmth.

So the parents have a lot of respect and a lot of connection with their child.

There's a good balance of control.

So when it's age appropriate for the child to control something, they will.

But when it's not appropriate and the adults need to lead the way, then the adults will as well.

And that basically just, that's what gentle parenting is.

So discipline is important.

Understanding what your child is capable of is important.

So what I call age appropriate expectations, but having a really good relationship, having a really good connection, lots of love, but you're not scared to upset them if they're doing something they really shouldn't be.

And in a nutshell, that's gentle parenting.

I don't know why people felt the need to give it another work name.

The problem is in our society today, most parenting is either permissive or authoritarian.

So if you think of all the main sort of parenting experts, which tend to be childless nannies, the advice they give is very much authoritarian.

So very punishment-based, very much focused on detachment.

So don't hold your baby too much.

And I think it's important to differentiate that.

What I talk about, what many people talk about is different to that style of parenting, but it would be great if we could just call it parenting.

Yeah, well, absolutely.

I definitely found before we had our little boy who's now three.

But yeah, before you give birth, people kind of expect you to choose a box, or choose a description of the kind of parent that you're going to be, and then kind of follow it exclusively.

Like you've got to pick a book and that's the way that you're going to be a parent, which is just utterly bizarre because you don't know what child you're going to get.

You don't know how you're going to respond to everything.

It's all a kind of instinctive learning curve as much as I know.

The beauty of gentle parenting is, lots of people say to me, why don't you call it natural parenting?

And I just think, well, natural, that makes me think that you must have a home birth, you must breastfeed, everything is organic, you don't vaccinate and everything's like natural therapies, which and some people are like that who follow gentle parenting.

But similarly, some people have elective caesarean formula feed, have a baby in their cot from day one, and that doesn't mean they can't be gentle.

It's just, it's more an ethos.

It's not the individual things that you choose to do, if that makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely, it does.

And so we'll really kind of unpick a lot of this with the kind of approach to thinking about sleep and kind of focusing more on probably like the kind of newborn phase, maybe the kind of first six months.

And something that I've always found quite interesting, quite amusing really, is how everybody seems to go into kind of the first few weeks, maybe the first couple of months, knowing that they're not going to get loads of sleep and that the sleep is going to be very broken.

And then somewhere along the lines, there's like this switch where suddenly everybody expects that the baby suddenly should be sleeping.

And it's like, it's something that we seem to understand for a very short period of time.

And then all of that understanding kind of goes out of the window.

Would you say that's your experience?

Yeah, so I think as a society, I think we're accepting of babies waking until somewhere around five to six months.

At that point, that's when you, even like our NHS website suggests that babies may be able to sleep through the night without a feed by then.

Actually, in my experience, six months is really young to not have night feeds anymore.

And it's also, I think, if you have a newborn one, two, three, even four-month-old, people don't tend to say, were they sleeping through the night yet?

Because I think we expect that they do wake lots, but you hit the sort of five months and everybody starts to ask you, everybody starts to give you advice about, well, they need solids, or you need to take away that night feed, or they need to be in their own room now.

But it's that five or six months point that all of a sudden, as a society, we become completely unaccepting with babies waking.

And then that's when I get all these really concerned mums contacting me and saying, is it my fault?

Have I created a bad habit?

Have I not taught them to sleep properly?

Is this something that I've done wrong?

When actually it's just completely and utterly normal.

Yeah.

So what would you say if a parent is expecting to meet their baby kind of at the moment?

What are the key things that you need to understand about an infant's sleep before they arrive?

Because do you know, this is so hard, because I came from the background of being an antenatal teacher in a dune, 15 years ago, I was teaching hypnobirthing when nobody knew what it was.

And I tried so hard to help the parents in my classes to understand about parenthood as well, because I felt that I was preparing them very well for birth, but that afterwards that I wasn't preparing them very well.

So I added on an extra session that was sort of parenthood-based, and we did loads on sleep.

And what I found was that people really managed to take it in.

I think when you're pregnant and you're planning for the birth, you are so focused on giving birth that it's quite hard to think about the realities, the everyday parenting realities of life afterwards.

So twofold answer to your question.

One, I would really love to prepare parents when they're pregnant to understand what normal sleep is, to understand brain development and just physical development in the first year of life.

I haven't managed to find a way to get parents to really take that on board yet.

But if you can, or if the parents who are listening really want to prepare for life afterwards, I would say prepare for a year, at least a year with very little sleep.

So the other thing I think people think that baby sleep is linear.

So as you said, they expect newborns to wake lots, but they may expect it to start to get better.

And actually we know from research it does, that around about the sort of 10 to 14 week mark, actually babies tend to start sleeping really well.

So they tend to do much longer chunks, and maybe you might only have, I don't know, two or three night wakings.

And quite often actually at that point, they're happier to be put down alone, not have to sleep in your arms.

And then somewhere around kind of 16 to 20 weeks, all hell breaks loose.

So they start to wake up way more than they used to do.

Actually, very often at this point, they'll wake up more than when they were a newborn.

They start to be very unhappy sleeping outside of your arms.

And this is the point that, there's two points that I tend to get parents contacting me.

The first is at sort of four or five months when this happens.

And they'll say things like, they were sleeping so well, what have I done?

They're sleeping almost worse than they did as a newborn.

And this is really common, it's really normal that actually at 12 weeks, we know from science that your baby is likely to sleep the best that they will sleep in the whole of the first year at that point, which is really depressing.

I'm sorry for people listening.

It tends to, you know, maybe not get a much, much better, but maybe improve a little bit.

And then somewhere around eight, nine, 10 months, things get much worse again.

And eight, nine and 10 months is actually the period that babies sleep the very worst in the whole of their life.

So we know at that stage that about 80% are regularly, and I mean regularly, like every hour, two hours, three hours, waking at night and feeding at night, because they have something called separation anxiety.

So they realize you and they are separate and that you can leave them, and they become very anxious about being alone.

And, you know, there's a whole lot of development as well happening physically.

And whenever something develops physically, sleep always takes a nosedive.

So I refer to the first year as a roller coaster.

It's really important if we drew a graph that parents don't expect it to start at the very bottom being sleep is really bad, and then nicely each month continue to get better in a nice sort of upward straight trajectory.

What actually happens is it goes very up and very down all the way through the first year.

And it's really common for it to take backward steps and get worse than it was.

And it really is nothing that people have done.

They haven't done anything wrong.

It's totally normal development, but the most unfortunate thing is I think in our society, we don't understand what's normal anymore.

We have so many books or websites or courses teaching us how to get our babies sleeping through the night for 12 hours, for 12 weeks or something, that we go into it with these expectations that all that must be what happens.

And it really isn't.

And I think if our expectations were more realistic, we could put more things into place to help us.

So it's not necessarily even the babies that need help.

And we focus so much on changing them, that I think if we knew this happened, what we could do is prepare more for it.

So it might be, consider the timing of when you're going back to work, or could you do start slightly later in the morning so you can catch up on sleep, or rather than having all of that help in the first 12 weeks, could you maybe stagger it?

So you have more help when your baby is older?

I mean, little things that you could maybe prepare.

Even things like freezing food to put in your freezer to get you through the first few weeks.

It's actually more important to freeze some for sort of four months and eight months.

So that you don't have to worry about cooking.

So yeah, just that expectation and the acceptance that sleep is not linear, it will be very up and down in the first year.

It's totally normal.

You haven't done anything wrong.

You don't have to sleep train.

It will naturally improve.

But I think if you know it's coming, it's a lot easier to handle than if it hits you out the blue.

I think you've done something wrong.

And it really isn't a bad habit to feed your baby to sleep, rock them to sleep, cuddle them to sleep.

So, just do with whatever feels natural to you.

And pessimistically, I guess, expect it to be quite bad.

I always hate saying that to people who are pregnant, or for those who've got a newborn.

I know it feels quite negative, but I promise you to have those expectations that are realistic now will be actually much more positive for you when that time hits.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so, what would you say, the story you sort of told of that first year is just sort of like ringing totally true for what our sleep experience was with our little boy in his first year.

But I do remember reaching a point, and it was in that kind of the four month window, and my partner works evenings, so I was doing every bedtime kind of on my own.

And it did reach a point where, to be honest, I was ready to throw him out the window.

Like it was, and there was everybody saying, you know, it's totally normal.

It's totally normal.

It just, I was like, I know I need some kind of like help or solution or something that is gonna make it more doable, whether that's, you know, for baby, or whether that was just sort of for me.

And so what would you say to anybody that's kind of reaching the kind of the end of that, the tether, I guess?

The tricky thing is, there is no magic solution.

If there was, everybody would know about it, everybody would be doing it.

We know from the research into sleep training is that if it works in the short term, it's not going to work in the long term.

So I have a lot of people who come to me having previously sleep trained whose child's sleep is worse than ever.

So I think it's important to understand that, you know, all of these solutions were sold, they don't last long term because you can't work against sort of normal infant development.

That said, I understand, I have four children, I understand the desperation of being completely exhausted.

There are two things you can do.

The very first thing is how, what do you do to yourself to be able to cope with it better?

So what can you change in your life?

What can you say no to?

What can you sort of ease up and, you know, even like don't do housework for a month.

I know for some people that would make them more stressed, but if you're a person actually wouldn't stress you too much, then just drop everything and do the bare minimum whilst you're going through it.

Don't try to be super mom.

Don't try to go to all these baby grips unless you want to, unless they make you feel better.

What is it that you can kind of just let go for a bit?

Even something like, you know, practicing mindfulness is really good.

Just 10 minutes every day, just focusing on grounding and being and relaxing.

Having, you know, if you have a day off, maybe if you have family or if your partner's around for one day, so you can just get away for a day.

That can really help some people.

Equally, I do know that some people, if you're saying they'll go and leave your baby and go to a spa day, that will make them feel much worse, because they don't want to leave their baby.

So I think it really depends on what you think will nourish you to get through it.

From the other perspective, you know, it's always better to change you than try to change your child.

Whether you're talking about sleep or whether you're talking about discipline for their behavior when they're much older, it's much easier to change us.

But there are things that you can do to improve their sleep that don't involve trying to sleep train them.

So I always, rather than sleep training, I talk about trying to sleep optimize.

So there are a lot of things that we do in our society that are actually really bad for infant sleep.

So some really simple ones would be the lighting we expose a child to in the evening or overnight.

So any light that is on a color spectrum that is not red, so technically it's under 620 nanometers, which is how we measure the wavelength, the color of light.

Any light that is not red really inhibits the secretion of melatonin, the sleep hormone.

So if you look at the light and you've got it in your bathroom, because for most people, they'll go and put halogen spotlights on while they give the baby a bath.

That's like putting a giant sun in their face saying wake up.

And then when you go in their bedroom, so even like a lamp, even if it's like a regular bulb, that's still going to be problematic, even if it's dim.

And then we use these nightlights that are pink or purple or green or white or blue, because we think they're soothing colors.

Or even like light shows, all of them can be really problematic.

Yeah.

So make sure that you only expose your child to red light.

So it literally looks like you're sort of in a red light district, unless you want to.

You can get light bulbs that are about 20 pounds, which have light, which is not red, but is on the red spectrum.

It's like a more sort of amber-y soft peach colour, but it can make a huge difference.

And at what point before you're putting them, kind of how long does that melatonin kind of take to-

So what we know from research is the light your child is exposed to for two hours before bedtime and overnight impacts their sleep.

So things like having the TV on in the evening around them could impact.

And in your living room, be really careful of lights and lamps.

So I have a Himalayan salt lamp, which there's a lot of myths about them.

They're not magic.

They don't do anything to the environment.

They're just lumps of salt, but they make really good lamps for your living room because they filter the light a little bit.

So I have one of those in my living area.

I wouldn't have one in my bedroom.

It's not red light.

I would only use pure red light in my bedroom.

But for two hours before bedtime in the bathroom, that's really important.

And overnight.

And the other-

That's the same reason why things like looking at your phone before you go to sleep or watching TV means that you don't sleep well.

So, yeah, exactly.

So if you're going to use a phone like during night feeds or something, it's really important you have a blue light filter on or night mode to take some of the blue light.

Because even if your baby's asleep, that will impact them.

Yeah, and I do actually, another thing kind of within that is I always remember waking up doing a night feed.

If I was sort of noodling about my phone or something, get the baby back to sleep.

If you've had blue light staring in your face, then the issue is that you can't get back to sleep, even though the baby's asleep.

So there are a few other things in the environment.

So number two after the light is temperature.

So we know that anything over 18 degrees centigrade can inhibit the release of melatonin.

We tend to live in houses that are very warm, tend to be much warmer than that.

So I would aim, if you have central heating, to have it coming on, if only if the temperature falls below 18, so thermostat 17 or below, or even better, turn it off overnight.

The best environment for sleep is a cool room, but a warm body.

So heating off, but maybe like an extra tug on their sleeping bag or an extra layer, like a vest.

So we know warm rooms really cause problems with sleep.

The other reason that central heating is really bad is it dries the atmosphere and the humidity levels are too low.

And that can cause issues with sleep as well, particularly if your baby breathes with their mouth open, because it dries their throat and then they feed more because they're thirsty, because the humidity is low.

So my idea would be no central heating at night.

Or if you do have central heating, then set your thermostat really low and also make sure that you have a humidifier in the room as well.

So like on a basic-

I would like my automatic kind of thought process would be all make it warm and make it warmer so they go to sleep.

Yeah, but you can.

So you make them warmer.

You just put like a long sleeve vest on them and go up a tog in their sleeping bag.

But change the warmth in what they're wearing, not in the room temperature.

It's much better.

You know, think these sort of babies sleeping in Scandinavia, right, in the snow or in a pram.

So dress them up for any warm, but a cool environment, that's the best.

And also if you have got central heating, then make all your babies sleep through their mouth open, even if you haven't, make sure you have a humidifier.

Or I use the aromatherapy diffusers that use water vapor.

Yeah.

And the next point that's really important is that the environment your child goes to sleep in needs to be the same all night.

So one of the major problems that we create is when we play music at bedtime, and then it goes off once a child's asleep.

So like a lullaby or something that will play for 20 minutes.

We know the age range we're talking about, a sleep cycle is kind of 50 to 60 minutes long.

So every 50 or 60 minutes, that child is going to come to slightly.

And if something in their environment is different, they're gonna wake up fully.

So if they go to sleep to a lullaby, or you've got a cuddly toy that plays music or a white noise app or something like that, then it's going to make them wake up at the end of that sleep cycle if it's no longer there.

So whatever they go to sleep to has to be there all night.

So if you utilize music, it has to play on repeat from bedtime to morning waking.

And also it's really important, it's the same music.

So a lot of people go on YouTube and play a playlist.

It's really bad for sleep.

If your child goes to sleep to one track and they wait to another, that could alert them.

So it needs to be the same track on repeat all night.

And do you recommend that?

Do you recommend white noise or musical silence, or is it just totally dependent on the baby?

So white noise, pink noise or whatever, I find works really well for newborns up to about 12 weeks because you're kind of replicating this whole fourth trimester sort of sound of digestion and blood flow and heart rate and everything.

Personally, I don't find it particularly effective after 12 weeks and I wouldn't recommend it at that age.

At that age, I recommend something called Alpha Music.

So very simplistic, 60 beats per minute, no voices, very repetitive, very basic.

If anybody's interested, I have a track called Gentle Sleep Music for Babies, which actually isn't music, it's alpha noise, which is it's on basically anywhere that you can download music.

It's on Spotify or iTunes or Amazon or Google Play.

I'm very intrigued as to what this sounds like.

It's not music.

Actually, it was really funny.

Somebody left me a negative ad, some of you saying bad music.

And it's like, yeah, it's not music.

You'll understand if you hear it.

It's very repetitive.

And it's really important you just play one track on repeat.

And also you can use it for naps as well.

The same thing applies to naps.

And naps sleeps slightly shorter.

So if your baby's waking up after 40 minutes of a nap and you'd like it to be near an hour and a half, it's also important to remember that what's present when they go to sleep needs to be there for the duration of the naps.

So music can work quite well for that.

The other thing I find works quite well is scent.

Only for babies sort of three months and older.

Before that, it's really important that they just know your natural smell.

Yeah.

But a recommendation that I would give after three months is that mums find an aromatherapy or they like the smell of.

So, lavender is the only one that's clinically proven to aid sleep, but I hate lavender.

Also makes me sneeze.

It makes my eyes sting.

But if somebody, if they like lavender, lavender's great.

If not, I would find an oil that's quite gentle and safe around your, something like mandarin or pettigrain or chamomile, or something that basically the mum needs to be happy and love it because she has to wear it as perfume every day.

So, a lot of people who pick like vanilla or coconut because they can tolerate smelling like that.

You know, you don't really want to walk around smelling a lavender for six months.

So, the idea is then is that you wear that oil every day as perfume, so, you know, just one or two dots on your neck or something.

So, that your baby then starts to associate that smell with you.

And then at bedtime, remember I said about using one as a diffusers that use water.

So, these work, they're really cheap.

They're sort of 15, 20 pounds.

And also they, if you get one that's color changing, you set it on red, that also doubles as a red nightlight.

So, fill it up with water and then just put a couple of drops of that scent that you've used in the diffuser at bedtime so that they go to sleep with the smell of it as well.

That what you're hoping for is at the end of a sleep cycle, when they come to, things sound the same, it looks the same.

And also they might breathe in and think, oh, my mom's still there.

So, can also help to reduce wake ups.

You know, they're still gonna wake because they still need you and they still need to feed.

And there's so many things that's going to wake them that they can't rectify alone.

But just, you know, those few environmental changes can make a really, a difference that basically means that you're not feeling at the end of your tether.

You just, I really can't wait for this to be over rather than I really can't wait for this.

I can't cope with this anymore, if you see what I mean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Just take the edge off a bit.

Yeah, and can you start using, you know, people talk about kind of sleep associations or sleep cues.

I suppose you can kind of describe them in all manner of different ways.

Some of them make them sound like good things.

Some of them make them sound like horrifying things.

But sort of things that signal to your child that it is like sort of sleeping.

Yeah, so that's exactly what, you know, the red light, the music and the scent will do.

I also, if your baby's under kind of 12 weeks, I would really just go with the flow.

I wouldn't worry about a routine or anything.

Just, you know, loads of cuddles and do whatever the baby does.

But from about 12 weeks, I would really recommend introducing a bedtime routine.

So it doesn't have to be exactly the same time.

I think it's really stressful trying to aim for a bath at exactly the same time every day.

But, you know, with an hour either side, maybe is quite good.

What matters more is what you do rather than the time that you do it.

So we know from research that having a really consistent, well thought out bedtime routine is probably the best predictor of baby sleep.

So from about 12 weeks, I would, you know, if I'm aiming for the baby to go to sleep at about half seven, then from sort of like half five onwards, I'd be really aware of the lighting.

And then I'd maybe do something, you know, half past six, go and give them a bath every night, same time every night.

Not sorry, same-ish time every night.

But also we tend to really mess baths up when it comes to sleep.

We tend to make them too playful and too bright and actually too cool as well.

So for the best bath, we want warm water, because what we know is that really warm water temporarily will raise the body temperature of the society, so that when they get out of the bath, it will drop quickly and that will really suppress the melatonin, the sleep hormone.

So I'm not saying hot baths, but a really lovely warm bath, fairly deep.

No bath toys, which is really mean.

Bath toys at bath time is really lovely, but really bad for sleep.

You're trying to prepare your child for bed and yet you're giving them a crazy playtime in the bath.

So reduce toys, or ideally remove the toys.

Dim the lighting.

So in the bathroom, I would just use battery-operated candles rather than the main bathroom lights.

Yeah.

Then I go through to the bedroom that the baby's going to sleep in, which I would have prepared already.

So curtains and blinds drawn, red light on the scent in the room, diffusing and the music already on.

If they're happy to, then a massage is a really lovely thing to do.

The skin-to-skin helps release lots of toasting, which will calm them down.

And then it's quite good to read a book as well.

That's more of a sleep cue rather than understanding the story.

If you read the same book every night, keep it really short.

There's a good book called Good Night Moon by a lady called Margaret Wise Brown.

That's a perfect length, and it's very rhyming and rhythmical about sleep.

So that would be my choice.

And I would just read that one book every night, because even the words and the rhythm of you saying them becomes a sort of a cue that it's time to sleep.

And then, you know, however you get your baby to sleep, rock them, feed them, cuddle them.

But doing the same things in the same order, with the same environment every night is absolutely key.

And you mentioned their kind of routines, and this tends to kind of split people.

Some people sort of follow quite rigid routines.

Some people are just totally happy to go with the flow.

And again, is this different from baby to baby, or is there a connection with sleep overall?

So I think most babies will have their own patterns.

They tend to sort of emerge somewhere between three and six months.

As I said, before three months, the worst thing you can try and do is impose a routine on a newborn.

But sort of three or six months, I'd be really keeping an eye on what the baby does.

So, you know, are they tired at similar times of the day?

You tend to find that they slip into a pattern by themselves very easily.

And just being aware of what they're doing like they're tired signs, you can start to be very baby led and following it, but you can try to sort of start getting some timings to help you.

So for instance, you might notice that your baby is tired, sort of half nine, 10 o'clock every day.

In which case, I'd try and aim for a nap then every day.

So sort of have a bit of a routine, but make sure it's led by them and be a bit flexible.

So allow, you know, if they normally nap at half nine, I would say, you know, anything between kind of quarters to nine and quarter past 10 is fine for that nap to start.

Don't be really rigid.

It must start at half past nine, because who feels tired at exactly the same time every day?

Who feels hungry at exactly the same time every day?

But some sort of a pattern that is consistent is quite helpful.

For bedtime, actually, that's the one thing that I am more focused on a time rather than necessarily what happens during the day.

So I think if you can keep a similar-ish time every day, that's really helpful.

And actually, as they get older, then I would have a really set bedtime for children, you know, sort of toddlers onwards.

It really would be, this is bedtime every day, because what tends to happen is they get very excited and they're really quarters old to keep them awake and hyper.

And then that overrides the sleep hormones, and you end up with this tired, wired toddler who can't go to sleep, because they've got themselves into this sort of situation.

Whereas I think as an adult, if we can say, do you know what?

I know you need to sleep at this time, and I know that if you stay up, it's harder for you.

So we're going to do that time every day, even if you would rather play.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So yeah, a bit of routine is good, but I just, you know, what I really don't like is routines that like feed to the clock.

Yes.

Because I think it's really disrespectful of the baby and their hunger cues.

Absolutely.

And they're not, they're gonna want, they're gonna have different needs on different days.

And it's about, as a parent, it's about tuning in to that and being responsive, isn't it?

Exactly.

And also, and if you're thinking sort of later in life with their eating habits, it's really important that they learn to eat when they're hungry and don't eat when they're not hungry.

But if you're feeding to a clock, what we do know that babies who are fed to a strict routine end up having more weight problems and eating problems later in life, because right from the very start, we've overridden their natural hunger and satiety cues.

So let's take it back then, sort of right back to, we sort of focus maybe a little bit later in that kind of babyhood.

But those first three months when, it's just totally all encompassing, isn't it?

It's about getting to know your baby, beginning to understand how they communicate with you, and they communicate everything from feeding to emotions, to sleep kind of absolutely everything.

Do they have any knowledge when they come out of what is day and what is night?

So no, for 12 weeks, for somewhere around sort of 10 to 14 weeks, up until that point, they don't have a functioning circadian rhythm.

So what we would know is a body clock.

When you're pregnant, what's really interesting is that those hormones, the melatonin, the cortisol, that regulate our body clocks, pass through and cross the placenta.

So when you're pregnant, your baby will have a functioning body clock.

Yeah.

Doesn't feel like it when you're pregnant and they're doing their wide awake in the middle of the night in summer solstice.

But yeah, they really do.

They borrow your body clock.

But when they're born, obviously, they don't get that anymore.

And it takes till somewhere around 10 to 12 weeks for their own body clock to really start kicking in.

Even then, it is still not anywhere near as mature as an adult one.

But for those first 10, 11, 12 weeks, it is utterly pointless trying to teach them the difference between day and night.

It's the purely biological, chemical thing.

They either have it or they don't.

So if you're advised, make sure you keep it really dark at night and really bright in the day, really active in the day.

It won't help your baby.

It might help you feel that you're doing something, but it will have zero impact on them.

So no, they really do not know day and night.

And you start to see this, I think is why I said, do you remember that, sleep in the sort of around three months is probably as good as it gets in the first year of life.

Because that's when their body clock really starts kicking in.

So you start to see more consolidated sleep at night, but, and then, you know, the rest of the world kicks in, and so does development and everything else.

And then it nosedives again.

But yeah, no, just, you really can't teach them the difference between day and night when they're newborns.

And I think something that surprised me, and I don't know if we were just very lucky, but something that I found surprising about this first 12 weeks is actually just how much they sleep.

They're asleep a lot, aren't they?

Particularly, I think the first two or three weeks, I think you end up lulled into a full sense of security because I think they're basically, they're just tired from birth and they just sleep all the time.

I remember when my first born, he was nearly 18 now, but when he was first born, in the end of my pregnancy, I just did not sleep because I have huge babies, terrible heartburn, terrible sciatic pain.

And the midwife came around and I think it was like day three or something, and she said, oh, how are you doing?

You getting any sleep?

And I said, it's amazing.

I've had more sleep than I've had for months.

I feel amazing.

And she looked at me like I was completely mental and said, you're obviously worrying that he was jaundice or something, he wasn't waking enough to feed.

And I said, oh, no, no, no, he's waking loads.

He's waking like every hour and a half, two hours, but I sleep in between and it's amazing.

Yeah, and that's it.

The first two or three weeks is not easy, because you have issues with feeding and recovering from the birth, but it lulls you into a full sense of security, sleep-wise, normally.

Yes, and we should probably point out that they're not going to do a nice 12-hour stretch.

They are waking every few hours, but it's like they wake, they feed, they go straight back to sleep again often.

And also their sleep in the day loads, because obviously they don't know the difference between night and day.

So they'll sleep as much in the day as they will at night, but it means you can rest and you can relax in the day, because they're mostly asleep.

And so that period, that first 12 weeks, we sort of mentioned already, it's sometimes referred to as the fourth trimester, or a kind of that sort of period where your baby is adjusting from life inside the womb to kind of life in the outside world.

And something that I often talk about with parents that I work with when they're pregnant, it's just kind of stopping for a moment and considering birth and that kind of period, not from a woman's point of view, not from a partner's point of view, not from a midwife's point of view, but from a baby's point of view.

And I suppose just to explain to the listeners what that fourth trimester period is, is that for a baby, absolutely everything about their existence changes, the way they eat, the way they breathe, what they see, what they hear, what they taste, what they smell, like everything that they know about life has kind of completely changed.

And so a lot of the aim of that kind of fourth trimester is to make that transition as gentle as possible, would you say?

Yeah, they've never been cold before, they've never been hungry before, they've never been thirsty before.

Actually, they've never even been in air before, they've always been in warm water.

So yeah, just understanding the enormity of what it was like for them being constantly held 24-7, always not in your arms, but in your uterus, which is still squidgy, nice warm hug constantly.

And the moment they're born, they're suddenly in air and they're alone, and they've never been alone.

And the amount of people who would say, my baby is like a month or two months old, and I just can't put them down.

What do I need to do?

And you just think, well, actually, if you realize that your baby was never put down ever, that even if you manage to put them down for 10% of the day, it's still a massive change for them.

And to not worry, there's so much information out there about it's really important to put them down drowsy bit away.

You can don't hold them too much or those will create problems.

And just think, it's so lose you, Christine, insane that they've been constantly held and constantly woman constantly snuggled next to you.

How could it possibly be a bad habit?

You know, why we create so much stress and heartache for ourselves.

Why are always trying to put them down when actually what they really need on a kind of a basic physiological biological level is just to be in arms.

And when you look at any other animal or any other mammal, that baby is kind of with the mother or sometimes the father, depending on which animal you're looking at, kind of close at all times.

And this is where I was always interested in the kind of the science and stuff behind it.

But in order to protect, like this is the most vulnerable they're ever gonna be, and they rely on us for absolutely everything.

So to kind of put them somewhere on their own from a kind of, yeah, like an evolutionary perspective is just so uninstinctive.

And even, you know, being in a different room, I don't think people realize that why being right next to a baby is protective for them when it comes to cot death or SIDS.

But when we breathe, as mums we're exhaling carbon dioxide, and that prompts the baby to inhale, to breathe in oxygen.

So if you're in a different room to them, it's really not recommended your baby is in a different room while they sleep.

And that isn't just night sleep, that's also day sleep.

I don't think people realize that.

So they really should not be sleeping in a different room from you until they're at least six months old.

Because the way that we breathe triggers them to breathe.

But again, it's always try and put them down in their nursery to sleep, and we'll put the monitor on and that's okay.

But I think people don't realize that monitors don't keep them safe.

They don't prevent that.

They basically tell you when something has happened, which is why no cop death society recommends their use.

They don't keep them safe.

What keeps them safe is us.

But everything, all the advice we get, and everything if you think about what you can buy equipment-wise for a newborn, Moses baskets, prams, bouncy chairs, it's all about separation.

It's all about putting them down away from this.

They don't like it.

They're much more unhappy with it.

And also that separation is really dangerous.

Yeah.

But we make mums feel really bad if there may be naps on them all the time, or if all they do is just cuddle the baby, which is ridiculous, because actually what they're doing is everything that baby needs.

Yeah, and I remember that in those first few weeks, just seeing anybody that wasn't me or my husband holding my baby, it felt like they were ripping my heart out from inside.

That was something that I just had never anticipated, was the kind of...

It wasn't even the kind of overwhelming love.

It was just like that protection, I guess, that you know that you are kind of fully responsible for this little person, and you want to keep them close and keep them safe.

It's like the worst thing when people come to visit you when you've had a baby and they come to help, and they say something like, oh, I hold the baby and you can go and have a shower.

Yeah.

And it's like, it's not helpful.

No, it's not.

It's the worst thing they can offer.

What they should say is, oh, I'll come around and make you some lunch, we'll make you some dinners so you can hold your baby.

Yeah.

But it's all the help is always focused on, oh, I'll look after the baby so you can get on with stuff or have a break.

Yeah.

You mentioned there a little bit about safe sleep.

Do you mind just kind of running through some of the kind of most important aspects of what parents should be aware of?

The most important thing is for the first six months, all of your baby's sleep needs to be in the same room as yours.

And that's a minimum.

I think people also think that once they're six months, oh, that's when they should be moved.

Because I think that the guidelines have been a little bit misinterpreted.

But it really, six months is the minimum.

If they sleep in your room until nine or 12 months, then arguably they may also be safer then too.

But the sleep and also in the daytime, naps with you in the same room are really important.

The thing that I'm most passionate about is for parents to understand how to bed share as safely as possible.

Yeah, I feel totally the same.

That was one thing that I always recommend.

If you know how to do it safely, it can transform the amount of sleep that you are getting as a parent.

And also, I think that sometimes health professionals take the line that they basically just warn parents to not do it.

It's really dangerous, don't do it, which is incredibly naive and incredibly dangerous.

Because it's something like three quarters of parents will bed share even if they never intended to.

So I did, about five years ago, I did a massive survey, and I think I had about 600 parents answered.

And I said, have you ever lied to a health professional about bed sharing with your baby?

Have you ever told them you don't do it and you do?

And three quarters of them said, yes, I have done it and I have lied about it.

So I think we have to appreciate that it is really common that at some point, even if you're dead against it and you don't want to, at some point in the first few months or first year, you will end up sleeping with your baby.

So it's really important that parents understand even if they don't want to do it, that they prepare for it as much as possible.

Because what we know is planned bed sharing is if you look at the research, it is really not dangerous, but unplanned can be really, really dangerous.

So unplanned bed sharing will be something like, I don't know, you're sitting in a rocking chair and you're feeding your baby and you accidentally fall asleep.

That's so dangerous.

Sitting on a sofa and accidentally falling asleep.

Or actually even just feeding your baby in your bed and drifting off when you haven't planned for it, it's really dangerous.

But planning for it and thinking if this happens, I'm gonna keep it as safe as possible.

So anything apart from a bed is dangerous.

So if you feel yourself in a rocking chair getting sleepy, for goodness sake, move to your bed and continue to feed.

Also, it's really important that you keep any duvets or pillows well away from your baby.

So push them right down to the end of the bed or you put them up to your knee level or something.

It's really important the baby isn't in the middle of the bed between you and your partner.

We know that mums have a protective mechanism.

They'll sort of sleep in what we call a C shape around them with baby at breast height.

Whereas your partner, I'm not saying that they're not bonded with the baby, but they won't have that kind of chemical protection.

They won't assume that position.

So anything you know, like if you've got any ties on a dressing gown or if you've got long hair, it's really important to tie that back.

Also, you should only consider bed sharing if you're a non-smoker and if you've not taken any medication that makes you sleepy.

So I think people focus on recreational drugs and of course you shouldn't bed share if you have recreational drugs.

But if you're taking an antihistamine or a pain reliever that makes you drowsy, that your baby should have their own sleep space then.

And ideally only if you're breastfeeding as well because we know that breastfeeding mums and formula feeding mums tend to adopt different positions when they sleep.

And also formula feeding mums tend to sleep slightly more deeply because breastfeeding tends to keep you in a lighter phase of sleep.

So you're more chemically responsive to your baby.

So if you sort of fall into one of those categories where you think, I think it could be dangerous, then my recommendation is always to have a co-sleeper crib.

So a crib that's sort of joined on your bed at the same level.

So your baby's right with you and you can cuddle and feed them to sleep still.

There's no bars, but they've always got their own sleep space.

Yeah, yeah.

But actually, most co-sleeper cribs end up in these very expensive storage spaces for nappies and stuff.

Yes, that's true.

Yeah, I think we had one where we'd sort of slide our son over and then not slide him back again.

So we'd start there and then edge closer and closer.

Fantastic, cool.

So is there anything else that sort of always comes up that people want to know or anything that you think we kind of haven't covered about infant sleep?

Not something to know, but my one tip would be find somebody that you can moan to.

He will listen to you, but not give you lots of unsolicited advice.

Yes.

So I think, you know, as moms, when we're really tired and we're not getting any sleep and we just need to offload and just complain about it.

But complaining about it and offloading doesn't mean that you want people to tell you to do it differently.

So if you find a safe place or a safe person, you can just say, look, I'm having a terrible time.

I'm really tired.

I've had no sleep.

And they'll just kind of give you a hug or say, yeah, I understand how you feel.

It's so important.

And if you don't have that in real life, then find like a discussion forum online that is sort of full of like-minded people who won't suddenly say, well, have you tried doing this?

Have you tried doing this?

Oh, you should do this.

So yeah, find that kind of support network that's like-minded and we'll let you offload.

Yeah, because that unsolicited advice does just come from literally every angle.

And it absolutely does.

It helps.

It starts to make you think, oh, actually, maybe I am doing something wrong.

Yeah, doubting that instinct that has so far served you quite well.

And I think also in our society today, I would say most people sleep train, whether they do it consciously or unconsciously.

So by unconsciously, I mean, you'll get people say, we don't run in to every noise.

If they're just having a grizzle, we leave.

Yeah.

That's sleep training.

Yeah.

So the society we live in is full of people who have sleep trained.

It's really important that you don't compare your baby's sleep to them, because of course it will make it seem like your baby's sleeping really badly, even though yours is sleeping normally.

But it's actually because all the sleep training has created unnatural sleep for babies.

So again, find a group of people.

Yeah.

What I always found entertaining was how people never actually say, people will say their baby's sleeping really well, or they'll say their baby's sleeping really badly, but unless you actually hear what that sleep actually sounds like, it's often not what, you know, people saying that their baby has slept all night, and then you find out they woke up five times and you're like, okay, so it's the same as mine, it's fine.

Most sleep research relies on parental reports of sleep.

So it relies on parents remembering when their child's woken up and reporting it.

And very often you'll sleep through it or not even remember.

Oh yeah, I would forget.

So, yeah, it's incredibly unreliable.

One last bit of tip, for goodness sake, don't download apps where you track your baby's sleep.

They just cause all sorts of anxiety and stress.

Yeah, I didn't even know you could get that.

You can get all sorts of...

And they draw graphs and just don't go there.

Oh really?

Yeah, I saw something that it's like, almost like a Fitbit for a newborn baby, where you attach something to it.

I was like, oh no, this is just gonna cause far too much anxiety, I think.

And the other thing I think parents don't realise is when you're looking at guidelines of this is how much babies sleep, this is how much a baby needs, what they don't realise is that they don't take off time for the sort of small wake times of the times that they're fed and stuff in the night.

So if your baby sleeps seven to seven, but wakes up every two hours for 20 minutes, technically they are still considered to accept for 12 hours.

But these sleep tracker apps don't take into account that, so parents are unnecessarily worried that their child is not getting enough sleep because of the way they add up all the sleep times and subtract a wake.

Oh, yeah, sometimes it's just a bit easier just to go right back to basics, listen to your instinct, do what kind of...

When your baby's crying, it's almost impossible not to respond to them.

And I think if something feels impossible...

I said some technology is good, like red light is good, but everything else, I really think that just the less technology, the better.

Yeah, yeah, I would definitely agree.

With everything from kind of pregnancy all the way through, the less we can rely on technology and tune back in to our own instincts with stuff, the better.

So, thank you so much for joining me.

We end every podcast with a question that I realize I now haven't told you in advance, so I'm just going to spread it on you and see what you can do.

But we ask everybody, so I normally ask if you were gonna gift a pregnant woman or a birthing mum one thing, what would it be?

But since we're talking about kind of the postnatal period, I'm gonna go with if you could gift a new parent one thing, and you can be as out of the box as you like here, what would it be?

A sling or a baby carrier.

Amazing, yeah.

Absolutely, have your hands free and have a happy baby.

Lovely, and that ties into everything that we've kind of talked about in keeping them close and supportive.

Yeah, so it's my go-to new parent present.

Anything in, like any kind of, while in particular, would you recommend kind of seeing?

I think, yeah, I mean, go, if you can see a baby wearing consultant, try them out, because it's not, they don't tend to be things you will find in the high street.

So I think everybody suits something different.

My choice for a newborn would be a wrap sling, whether it's a stretchy wrap or a woven wrap, but I think it's important that you find something that suits you.

Perfect, wonderful.

Well, thank you so, so much for joining me.

If anybody wants to, Sarah has, I don't even know how many books you've written.

Do you know how many books you've written?

Ten.

Ten.

So ten all brilliant books about kind of all aspects of parenting.

If people want to find the books or they want to find more about you, where can they find you?

I think, you know, most places that sell books.

I have a website which is just sarahockwellsmith.com.

I'm on Instagram at sarahockwellsmith.com.

For sleep, I'm on Facebook as The Gentle Sleep Book or just for general parenting for me.

My name is Sarah Ockwell-Smith.

I'm on Twitter as The Baby Expert.

Yeah, get around to it.

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

That's going to wrap us up for today.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode.

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