Tips to Help Your Baby Sleep Better

Tips to Help Your Baby Sleep Better

Instilling Good Sleep Habits in Your Baby

by Visa Shanmugam

If you are a first time parent, congratulations! You have brought this tiny little human being home and it is your sole responsibility to care, feed and teach everything you know to him/her. It can be extremely overwhelming and despite all the child birth classes that you have taken and books you have read, it still doesn’t fully prepare you for the task ahead. No matter how much you prep, you learn by doing when it comes to taking care of a little one. But, a little bit of education and knowledge goes a long way in calming fears and building confidence.

Facts about Infant Sleep

  • It is a well known fact that infants (0-3 months) need a lot of sleep. In fact, they sleep 16-18 hours in a 24 hour cycle, however the longest stretch they sleep is 2-3 hours. It doesn’t mirror an adult’s sleep habits, hence the reason that parents of newborns are so sleep deprived and tired.

How to Nurture Your Baby’s Curiosity

Nurturing Baby's Curiosity

Interactive Ways To Encourage Baby’s Curiosity With Objects

From birth to 2 months, baby’s tiny hands are usually found clenched in fists. According to this parents.com article, How Baby’s Hand Skill Develops, by 3 to 4 months baby “has developed enough muscle coordination to get a grip on small objects placed in front of him.” Free, wiggly fingers combined with a new curiosity may mean you have a “new” baby on your hands; one that is far more interested in objects now than he was a month ago.

Understanding Toddler Development

Toddler boy reading

How to recognize developmental milestones for Children ages 12 – 36 months

 

Child Development is not a race — there is a wide range of “average” development. Children achieve milestones at different ages depending on their physical, emotional and mental attributes, as well as exposure to different environments, parenting styles and activities. Developmental milestones can be impacted by vision, hearing, general health, medical history, genetics, nutrition and the emotional health of the family.

There are certain developmental milestones, however, that most children reach within a specific time frame. The age when your toddler laughs at your silliness, puts words together to communicate, completes simple puzzles, starts to run and masters other tasks can give you and your pediatrician valuable information regarding how they are developing in relation to other toddlers.

There are three key areas in developmental milestones that your child should be achieving.  These areas are motor development (using their hands, arms and legs in a coordinated manner), cognitive development (thinking, reasoning, using memory and problem solving) and language/social development(communicating and socializing appropriately).

Following you will find a list of developmental milestones.  Under each developmental age, you will find specific milestones for that age. Following the milestones are “red flags” that you should probably bring to the attention of your pediatrician.