a multi-sensory approach to your child’s sleep routines

If you work with A Restful Night, one word you’ll hear Meg and I say time and time again is routine, routine, routine.  Newborns, infants and young toddlers can’t tell time but they can recognize a feeling or a pattern of events.  This is where routines come in –  a nap routine, a daytime routine, a wake up routine, a bedtime routine. Routines are key across so many areas of the day. Infants and toddlers love predictability and rhythm, and just like older children and adults they learn best using a multi-sensory approach to help their bodies understand and feel each step of the routine. Let’s break that down and connect that to sleep!

The Role of Routines

In the early stages of an infant’s life the routines we offer provide messages and cues about what’s happening. A baby’s body quickly learns what to expect and what these cues signal. For caregivers, these routines provide peace of mind and confidence knowing we have a predictable set of steps to follow. As your child moves into toddlerhood, routines will shift and change. For example, instead of a bedtime bottle or nursing session, you may do ten minutes of reading time together or a quiet activity like a puzzle. Routines are equally, if not more, important for toddlers because they set boundaries and establish for our toddler friends what is expected of them. Most children we work with thrive when we focus on flexible, but predictable routines. We can help you build those if you are struggling!

Bringing the Senses into Your Bedtime Routine

One routine that is particularly important for sleep is the bedtime routine. A predictable and soothing bedtime routine sets the tone for a good night ahead – settling your child’s nervous system and priming them to get the rest their body needs. While any simple routine will do, if we heighten different senses and bring a more multi-sensory approach into the routine, the hope is the child will find it easier to learn, recognize, and remember the routine. 

The human body has five basic senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. Gentle stimulation through more than one sense during the bedtime routine can really make a difference! Here are some examples to consider:

SightTake your child into a familiar space when starting the bedtime routine. Typically this will be their nursery, or your room if room sharing in the early months. Draw the blinds to darken the room and turn off most bright lights. Our body processes light and dark and sends signals to our body clock to regulate sleep, which is why we always recommend room darkening shades. Bring your child to a familiar place and shut down the room together in preparation for sleep. Engage in simple, familiar activities, such as a book or a quiet activity in this predictable space. 

Smell While this may not work for our most sensitive kiddos, and can certainly be okay to skip, you have the option of using a soothing scented baby/child lotion to put on after bath or before pajamas. Lavender and vanilla are common calming scents that are often in nighttime lotions for little ones. Another option is using a consistent bath soap that your child recognizes. Again, if your child has sensitivities, allergies, eczema, asthma issues, etc... you may want to consult with your pediatrician before using scented lotions or soaps, or skip this one altogether.

Taste—For our infants, a feed before bed is often an important part of the bedtime routine. For our toddlers, who don’t depend on milk feedings for their main source of nutrition, a before bath snack can be wrapped into the evening routine. Getting into the routine of brushing your child’s teeth (even if they don’t have teeth yet!) can be another taste cue to signal to them that it is bedtime. 

Touch A simple massage with lotion can do the trick to incorporate some touch into the routine. Alternatively, holding, snuggling, and hugging your child can offer a calm, soothing touch to your routine. Sit your child on your lap while you read a book or sing a song and offer the touch contact, maybe back rubbing or rocking, before bed so that your child goes into their crib or bed awake. This is especially important when we are working to foster independent sleep stretches, as we want to fill up their cup and anticipate their need with lots of physical connection before we lay the expectation that they sleep independently over the course of the night, as age appropriate. 

Sound Towards the end of the bedtime routine, incorporate a simple, consistent song and then pop on a white noise machine. Children love songs, and songs can be incorporated anywhere into the routine to help with transitions or to calm children. Continuous white noise can be a soothing, familiar womb sound for our youngest infants, and it can help drown out environmental sounds for our more distracted, older children. While music can be a part of the pre-sleep routine, I always prefer white noise all night versus music, as music tends to stimulate the brain and some children may have more difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep with music on. Also, we want the sleep environment to remain the same from bedtime to morning, so continuous white noise is a great option to offer consistent, soothing sounds. Keep the white noise machine at least six feet away from the bed/crib and not at ear level for optimal sound absorption and to keep the ears safe!

Give It A Try!

So there you have it – a few simple strategies to incorporate more senses into the bedtime routine so your child can feel and recognize bedtime. The bedtime routine will lay a solid sleep foundation for your child. It can be done as early as day one, but we always recommended starting by about 6 weeks of age when babies become more aware and recognize routines more efficiently. The bedtime routine will evolve over time so that it is developmentally appropriate, but you can keep some pieces consistent, despite age. It’s never too late to start a bedtime routine if you haven’t already and I’d venture to say that A Restful Night of sleep depends on one!

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