Routines

You often hear parents talking about their children's routines. Before you have children yourself it can seem a bit over the top, unnecessarily restricting for the family. But having a good routine in place for children is really important. Children thrive on having a predictable structure to their day, and having a child that expects a bath after dinner, a story after the bath, and bed after the story means that bedtime is made that much easier (we stop short of saying 'easy'). This makes more of a noticeable difference as the child gets older of course, and the idea of a routine for a 2 month old might seem laughable when they are getting you up for a feed twice one night and five times the next night! But introducing elements of a daily routine from a young age is important - particularly bed time routines.

Sleep (alongside weaning) is a hot topic between parents of young babies. More specifically, 'sleeping through' is the much longed for goal. Conversations repeatedly revolve around when they will sleep through, when they did, and when they stopped! All babies are different, and parents with more than one child can usually vouch for that. There are endless theories on getting a child to sleep through the night; indeed, there are many so-called 'experts' making a small fortune out of books hailed to have the magic answer. But if there was such a reliable solution, in reality, there wouldn't be a market for all the new books that come out every year. We would each buy the one guide, get our babies sleeping through the night and be done with the subject. The fact is, nobody has the key to getting every baby to sleep all night without needing some attention. Having said that, there are lots of things that you can do in order to encourage your baby to get into a routine, and here we give you lots of ideas and advice on where to begin and how to overcome some of the more common problems.