Blog Posts 1–5, based on the United States of America Department of the Army Field Manual: Holistic Healing and Fitness, describe what really matters for your child’s sleep. If sleep is an important enough topic for national defense than surely sleep should be considered a serious topic for parenting!
Simple Message: Healthy sleep develops the brain like exercise builds strong muscles. Unhealthy sleep weakens brain development just as an iron deficient diet causes anemia.
Scientific Message: Professors Sarah Schoch and Salome Kurth wrote that “Adequate sleep is critical for development and facilitates the maturation of neurophysiological circuitries at the basis of cognitive and behavioral function. Observational research has associated sleep problems in early life with worse later cognitive, psychosocial, and somatic health outcomes.”
In a 2023 paper, they measured specific electrical activity from the scalp (EEG) in 6-month-old infants at 6 and 12 months of age. One measurement was EEG coherence (EEG coherence reflects neuronal connectivity). Also, at each age, objective sleep measurements (actigraphy) were obtained over a period of 11 days. They observed that:
At 6 months of age, babies who go to bed earlier, show more EEG coherence.
At 6 months of age, babies with more EEG coherence, had longer night sleep durations at 12 months.
Possible conclusions:
More on the Bedtime-Brain connection:
Blog Post 198:
Infants with early bedtimes have more night sleep.
Infants with more night sleep, sleep less during the day.
Infants who sleep less during the day (naps) have higher behavioral development scores.
Blog Post 199:
Healthy sleep, as described in Blog Posts 1–5, acts as a buffer to lessen the ill effects of circumstantial adversity, such as confinement due to COVID-19.
Dear Dr Weissbluth, we have been followers of your method since our son is 6 weeks old. He is now 33 months. He wakes up around 6 am, takes a nap at 12:30/1245pm til 3pm daily. It use to be that his bed time falls around 630/645pm and he’s a sleep in 15 min. Over the last 2-3 weeks he’s having a real hard time settling down at night, sometimes taking up to 1.5 hours to fall asleep, chatting, making noises, telling stories about his day…. We are wondering if his nap is too long or this is seasonal (due to long day time) or developmental? I have noticed more behavior/emotional issues during the day following the drop in total night sleep. We tried moving bedtime to 7pm, no change to the resistance and no change in wake up time in the morning either.
Please describe his mood and behavior between 5;30-6:30pm when he is alone with toys (no screens or parental interaction).
We do not use screen at all. Early evening he seems more hyper and more vocal, having a harder time settling down for bath, etc.
“Early evening he seems more hyper and more vocal, having a harder time settling down…”
Read Blog Posts 9, 83, 159, 171, and 172 and watch Blog Post 115X; then tell me what advice I would be giving you.
I am guessing an earlier bed time 6/615 for 3-4 nights and see how the naps fall in place after those days.
Please use subtle drowsy signs to determine the bedtime. To repay his sleep debt, consider 2-3 nights only of 5:30pm lights out. Let me know how it goes.