A blog about getting a baby to sleep

In my circle of friends with babies it’s generally the dad’s job to get the baby to sleep at night.  The first month or so was reasonably easy.  We watched Harvey Karp’s video the happiest kid on the block.  I won’t go into detail because that’s his thing not my thing.  If you’re about to have a baby you should watch it.  He has great advice for getting a baby to sleep.  We found though that it only lasted for about two months then the techniques stopped working.  Maybe you’ll be lucky and it’ll last longer.

With our techniques outdated what were we to do?  Mum, the baby’s not my mum, had no trouble getting her to sleep.  Onto the breast and the baby was asleep in no time.  There were a couple of flaws with this technique though.  First, mum was the only one that could get her to sleep.  Baby didn’t want anything to do with me when it came to bed time.  Second, mum couldn’t do anything after she’d put baby to bed.  Third, it was making baby very reliant on breast milk as a means of sleeping and would have trouble if she couldn’t have any.  It wasn’t ideal.

After a semi frustrating month of trying things out I developed the voice.  I found that while calming the baby off to sleep I had to be calm myself.  I had to rise above the wails of my baby and reach an inner peace.  Not easy when your baby is crying.  The result; I would speak about the importance of sleeping and why humans needed to sleep in a calm and logic way.  I could probably be talking about anything the key here is the slow constant rhythmic way of speaking.  Once I got into the rhythm of it I would relax which in turn made my voice relaxed as well as slow, constant and rhythmic.

For any dads out there trying to get a baby to sleep I recommend developing your own calm voice.  The key here is to never lose your cool in the face of a crying baby.  Pat her or him and just talk away don’t worry about if the baby can hear your voice over the sound of his or her crying.  Just keep it constant slow and calm and you should be right.  Practice it on your friends.  If they start getting sleepy then you’ve got the voice.

Related articles

• Your Baby’s Snooze Time Routine (nappytimes.wordpress.com)
• Dr Harvey Karp’s ‘Happiest Baby’ technique: Calming method that stormed the U.S. comes to the UK (dailymail.co.uk)
• Happiest baby on the block (happiestbaby.com)