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!
A healthy baby needs a healthy brain,
A healthy brain needs healthy sleep.
Q: Parents who observed drowsy signs in their young infant early in the evening and used an early bedtime and other parents of older infants and children who moved the bedtime earlier to successfully corrected a sleep problem might ask: When can I move the bedtime later?
Early bedtimes in sync with drowsy signs produce high quality sleep (long sleep duration and consolidated sleep). High quality sleep better stimulates brain development. As a result, he/she will be more intelligent, athletic and creative and he/she will be less likely to develop emotional or behavioral problems and mental health problems when older. Your child might even be taller because growth hormone is produced only during sleep and especially in the early evening.
Just as you would not withhold food when your baby is hungry, please do not withhold sleep when drowsy. Base the bedtime on subtle drowsy signs, best observed when he/she is alone with toys(no screens or parental involvement), that appear late in the afternoon or early evening. Individual variation of naps and sleep needs means that you should not compare your child to any other children. Choosing your child’s bedtime (Blog Posts 91, 174) is based on your child’s mood and behavior.
A: I do not know when his/her bedtime will shift to a later time.
If you fight circadian rhythms, you and your child will lose.
The brain alternates between awake and asleep outputs. This is an automatic process over which we have no control. The ancient and powerful force behind this biological process is the rotation of the earth on its axis creating day and night. Begin to put your baby to sleep at night as your baby starts to become drowsy. The brains in babies and young children also have drowsy periods followed by sleep during the day (naps). Healthy sleep occurs when the sleep is in synchrony with the occurrence of the brain’s output for sleep both during the day and night. When you put your well-rested baby to sleep at the beginning of the drowsy period, because the baby’s brain is naturally drifting into a sleep state (Blog Post 8) it is easier to fall asleep and stay asleep.
Every morning, around 4-5am, our core body temperature is at its lowest. Our temperature rises during the day and reaches a maximum in the early evening around 6-8pm. Afterwards, our temperature decreases. This temperature fluctuation occurs in all humans and is not affected by feeding, rest-activity, light-dark cycles, or sleep-wake schedules. Internal clock genes in the brain cause this automatic cycling of temperature over about a 24-hour period and it is an example of a circadian rhythm. The temperature circadian rhythm appears in babies around two months of age.
Rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep) has a circadian rhythm component with shorter bouts in the habitual early evening and longer bouts in the habitual later evening that are maintained even with experimentally caused abnormal schedules of feeding, rest-activity, light-dark cycles, or sleep-wake schedules. Every morning, shortly after the minimum body temperature, there are high values of sleep spindle activity in non-REM sleep representing a circadian rhythm component that is independent of feeding, rest-activity, light-dark cycles, or sleep-wake schedules.
‘Entrainment’ is defined as a temporal locking process in which one system’s signal frequency entrains the frequency of another system. For example, core body temperature rhythms entrain some sleep rhythms. This process is a universal phenomenon that is observed in all humans. In adults, to get high quality healthy sleep, the night sleep episode should begin in the evening shortly after the maximum core body temperature; that is, when the core body temperature begins to decrease. When the sleep episode occurs when the brain output is in sleep mode, optimum restorative sleep occurs. Sleep quality is highest when it occurs in synchrony with the brain’s biological sleep cycle (Blog Post 112). Sleep quality is lowest when it occurs out of synchrony with the brain’s sleep cycle as in jet-lag syndrome and with shift workers.
