The Discontented Little Baby Book

The safest place for your baby to sleep during the day is in the same part of the house you

I can imagine it. Two very old women walk with death perched on their shoulders like a wise old bird – death their friend, death their companion – and they know with stunning clarity the miracle of new life, the baby. They know how the new mother needs to be seen.

Bottle-feeding, too, has the potential to offer your baby the same calming and analgesic effects of cuddles, eye-contact, little soothing words and caresses.

It’s important not to put your hand or fingers on the back of your baby’s neck or head, because this triggers a back-arching reflex.

Sleep training approaches have not been shown to decrease night-waking in the first year of life. Also, it’s not the number of times of waking that cause mothers to feel miserable: it’s being awake for a long time, or regularly taking a long time to get back to sleep (that is, poor sleep efficiency) that causes distress. (However, if the baby’s sle

Unfortunately, burping is not entirely harmless. It interferes with the baby’s sleepiness at the end of a feed, waking the baby up and overriding the combined effects of sleep pressure, the hormones of satiety, and the parasympathetic nervous system. For this reason, burping interferes with the biological drivers of infant sleep.

all humans wake up intermittently throughout the night and are sensitive to what is happening in the environment,

just over a third of babies at 3 months of age, sleep from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. without disturbing their parents most (though not all) nights in the week.

The baby’s crying is metabolically expensive, too, using up calories at a great rate. This means long bouts of crying actually create a catch-22 situation: the infant is too upset to feed but needs more feeds.