Being relaxed about your baby's daytime sleep helps create healthy night-time sleep patterns

Parents often receive worrying messages which aren’t true or helpful about their baby’s sleep. Two things might happen when you're worrying a lot about your baby's daytime sleep.

• Your attention might narrow down onto sleep. It's easy to find yourself wearing a sleep lens, thinking of the whole day's plans in relation to sleep, always wondering when your baby should next be napping. After a while, this narrowing of attention worsens exhaustion, and is miserable.

• Long daytime naps can actually make the nights unnecessarily broken in a few weeks time, disrupting your baby’s body clock.

I’d like to invite you take off the sleep lens and live the days wearing a sensory lens. This means turning your attention to thinking about your baby’s sensory motor needs as well as your own sensory enjoyment and emotional needs. It means focussing on pleasurable activities outside the house which are satisfying to you, usually with plenty of walking thrown in, all the while experimenting with your two superpowers (frequent and flexible feeds, as well as rich sensory nourishment) to dial your baby down.

This way, you're not trying to get your baby to sleep, and you're not trying to keep your baby asleep. You're able to relax into creating the most enjoyable days possible for yourself (outside the home), and let your baby’s sleep look after itself.

So many parents have said to me over the years that their baby simply never goes to sleep on his own without dialling up, or without them making an effort. They are quite astonished when they put in place these strategies from The Possums Sleep Program, and suddenly their little one has quietly dropped off to sleep in the high chair, cheek down in the food, or in the middle of a baby music class!