Um uh it's really been a a pleasure to have uh peanut reach out and and ask me to um to have an opportunity to speak with you so um my goal for this um hour or so um will be to talk a little bit about uh babies and and sleep and uh maybe some of their other behaviors as well and then answer some questions about Um about babies and sleep as well that have already been submitted maybe talk a little bit about toddlers as well just because they grow up they it seems like those first
few months can last forever but actually they really go faster than you could possibly imagine you know so many people kind of feel like you want to just put them in a little snow globe And and keep them forever the way they are because even though the days are the days are long um they go by more quickly than you can than you really can believe um and as a father of a 36 year old i can tell you that's really the truth um so um many many different things to talk about you may have
heard of the happiest baby On the block and thank you trisha for mentioning that that's a book and a and a video to help people understand how to calm their crying babies and and how to get more sleep it's kind of interesting when you look at babies they're really three main jobs you have when you're taking care of a new baby uh feed the baby calm the crying and get sleep and pretty much everything else works Its way out you know bathing the baby and you know umbilical cord care and um you know changing a
diaper those things work out without that much trial and error uh feeding there's a lot of help for right there are books and videos and magazines and lactation consultants and la leche league and so there's lots of great support to help with breastfeeding and then of Course if you're bottled feeding there's lots of great alternatives as well and your doctor or nurse practitioner or midwife can help you with that as well um not so much help with crying and exhaustion as a matter of fact there's kind of a a general saying in in the world
about babies that is you know you you know they're not going to be easy you're going to be up a lot that's just What babies do they fuss a lot they wake up a lot they need to be fed all throughout the night so prepare yourselves for that because it's going to be challenging and and and it is challenging and for some parents obviously more than others every baby's a bit different some are a bit easier or better sleepers and some are a little bit more wakeful at night But to give you an idea of
how stressful it can be uh when you're when you're dealing with the babies crying and and and your own fatigue um it helps to know that the the the navy seals the special operations forces in our in the u.s military are trained to endure torture by putting them through chronic sleep deprivation With the sound of babies crying over loudspeakers so it's kind of the everyday life of parents across the country um but it can really get on your nerves um it's like that fingernails on a chalkboard kind of a experience that even though you love
your child and and you you want to do everything for them It's hard when you're exhausted and if the crying goes and goes and there's nothing more you want than being able to calm the baby and nothing more frustrating when you can't so so it turns out that there are lots of myths about babies and crying and sleep and misconceptions um and um and lots of misconceptions about having babies too i mean You you you know you think that nine months is is is a long enough period of of gestation and then you have your
baby and that they're going to be ready for the world but they're really not ready for the world until they're really three or four months of age that's when they start smiling more and cooing more and interacting more and you say Hi baby and your baby goes [Music] and then you have a dialogue back and forth they can't do that in the first week or two of life it's going to take several months for them to have that coordination even sucking on their fingers people say let your baby suck on the fingers because in the
womb they can suck on their hands but in the womb they have a wall Around them so they really can't extend their hands out or or in any direction so they're really kept very close to the face so it's much easier to suck your thumb than it is once you're born in this real world where that's so big for babies and so the idea that you can expect your newborn baby or even the first couple of months of life to be coordinated at sucking their fingers is not Is not valid because it takes them months
for the development to work its way down first the eyes get developed and they can look to the right and they can look to the left and they can follow you as you cross the room i mean that takes weeks to to a month or two to really for them to get good at that then their faces get better then they can smile And they can frown more under their own control i mean they do a little bit of that in the first months because it's just reflexive it's just automatic behavior but but really smiling
when they want to volitional smiling or willful smiling usually takes two months to three months for them to be able to be getting good at that and then their necks get stronger and then their Shoulders get stronger in the upper back and then their arms get a little more coordinated and finally goes to the fingers and ultimately the fingertips at eight or nine months it's an interesting process as the development moves down the body um but to say that in the beginning they don't have a lot of that coordination and so um in my work
i talk about this concept of the fourth trimester which is the idea that it really takes Babies a good three or four months or sometimes five months to to be ready to be in the world to be you know regular members of the team and during those first four months or so you imitate your womb and so to imitate your womb you need to know what it's like in there and it turns out it is um it's pretty interesting inside there it is um it's loud it's it's actually as loud as a as a as
a Vacuum cleaner 24 hours a day people you know when they when you go in for your um for your checkup at the at the obstetrician they'll put this microphone on your on your um on your belly and you'll hear a shh kind of a sound but that's not what babies hear inside because babies are underwater So everything everything is filtered and it's down uh low pitched and so what a baby really hears is more of an kind of sound and that becomes important because if you use a sound machine or something to soothe your
baby into sleep you want something that's low pitch and rumbly you don't want something that's very high pitched and squeaky and irritating because it's not going to be as effective for a Baby or for you it'd be hard to sleep in the room if it's too high pitched so other kind of myths and misconceptions are this thing about sound that you know everyone says the baby's sleeping tiptoe everyone be quiet but actually babies sleep better when they're when there's noise around them uh babies can sleep better at a crowded party or At a basketball game
that an adult can we we can't do that very well at all but babies go to sleep almost entertain instantaneously in those situations so that's why we use sound machines or or white noise for babies when they're sleeping because the quiet of the room is actually sensory depriving it's too still it's too empty it's too um [Music] free-floating there's not enough form around the babies to make them feel reassured um the other thing is the idea that um that that the normal family what is a normal family well it's we tend to think of it
as as two parents and a child um but that's completely abnormal completely i mean up until 100 years ago and for the entire history of humanity The only normal family was um an extended family it was you know parents and a child and a grandmother and a mother and an aunt and and your next-door neighbors and it was seven or eight or nine people in fact the mother was babied as much as she was babying the baby um and that was the process and then you helped your friend and then when they had a baby
four months later um I mean they helped you and when they had a baby four months later you helped them and that was the process and now we're locked up in especially with kovid now we're locked up into our homes and apartments and we don't have the help of extended family um and many people don't even think they deserve that help they think that a normal mother just sucks it up and deals with it on her own or a normal Dad just you know you just kind of you just kind of grin and bear it
um but it's it's hard it's hard work especially if you have a toddler as well but even with just a baby all of those hours you know for you to imitate what your uterus did for free takes takes a lot of effort because even if you hold your baby 12 hours a day and you rock your baby for Eight hours a day in your arms and you feed your baby every two hours from your baby's point of view that's a rip off honestly because up until the instant of birth you held them 24 hours a
day you rock them 24 hours a day you fed them every single second and so from your baby's point of view they're doing you a favor to be quiet you know for a couple of hours um And to put up with only being held 12 hours a day but it's pretty interesting like i said people are taught that well babies have to wake up a lot they're going to cry some babies cry for hours a day we call it colic which is kind of a mysterious problem if you read a pediatric book or a parenting
book it'll say we don't know what causes colic but babies outgrow it and they Doesn't seem to be related to any disease for the most part which is true but um but it's kind of strange isn't it to think that babies can cry for hours and we don't know what i mean we can put a man on the moon we can you know speak to antarctica you know in four seconds um why wouldn't we be able to figure out why baby is crying kind of seems wrong seems like we should Be able to do that
um and that's where it kind of gets confusing because then you start speaking to your friends um if i mean you may have experience yourself some people did a lot of babysitting or they raised their younger brothers and sisters but it's remarkable how many people have babies today and they have very little experience i mean they're good at school and maybe they have a good job and They're competent at work but just because you've seen babies on television or you or your or you saw your cousin's baby or your sister's baby doesn't mean that you
are suddenly competent to take care of a baby i mean not that it's rocket science it's not the hardest thing in the world but there are skills and there are techniques and there's insight that can make it easier for you or make It more difficult if you're if you don't know about that and those are the things i wanna i really wanna talk about but the this idea that you should do it on your own you know there's that saying macho a guy who's very mantra just depends on himself and there's a term matcha you
know that a woman feels like she should do everything and every time her baby wakes up she should Be there all night long all day long and that was really kind of never done by mothers in history you always had people helping you out and so um you know that's the reality though you know we have smaller families and you need to be there for your baby so the question is how can i arrange things so i get a little more sleep the baby gets a little bit more calm I have the skills i need
to be able to meet my baby's needs i can nurse my baby or feed my baby successfully and get through these first four or five months without it being so so harsh and so difficult that it puts me into a tailspin the sad thing is that crying babies and exhaustion it's not just a joke it's not just Something that you see on a sitcom you know oh that crazy mom she was so tired she went and brushed her teeth with the sunscreen instead of her toothpaste you know um or fell asleep at a red light
um it's burdensome it's it's challenging and for some parents it's crushing um if they don't have the help and they have a challenging baby and In fact we talk about issues like postpartum depression and anxiety which can affect up to 20 of new mothers and many new fathers and the chief triggers for those are not hormonal changes their exhaustion and and feeling overwhelmed and feeling like you have nobody to turn to that it's all on your shoulders um things like um even even overweight trying to lose your Baby weight when you're sleep deprived you know
you know how it goes you know you you eat carbs you're kind of you know comfort feeding yourself you're eating impulsively uh you're not exercising so it makes it hard to lose that baby weight and then you judge yourself about that perhaps and and that becomes a negative cycle so sleep and calming crying are not just A task that you have but they are major skills that will differentiate between feeling overwhelmed and and like a failure and feeling you know i've got this i can i can handle this i'm good at this actually and i
know my baby loves me and i know that i'm i'm um effective at calming my baby down so so the fourth trimester is based on the idea that we're imitating the womb And so what is it like in the womb well you have to understand five characteristics of what life is like in the womb um and i call them the five s's and these are the things that you're trying to imitate with your baby and that you probably naturally imitate with your baby to calm them down so one is swaddling which is wrapping the baby
snugly with the arms at the side the hips are loose But the arms are tightly at the side the second is the side or stomach position the back is the only safe position for sleep but it's the worst position for calming a crying baby they feel like they're falling all of this by the way is demonstrated i mean it's talked about in my book the happiest baby on the block but uh and it's a good book and it has lots of Interesting stories and anthropology etc but to really learn these techniques um you don't need
to read a 200 page book what i would recommend is taking a look at the streaming video that we have it's a 30 minute video i mean you can find stuff on the internet and and youtube but it really i think helps to spend 30 minutes to learn how to be a good baby calmer and help your baby sleep Um and so that's on our website the happiestbaby.com or a number of other places you can find that on the internet um so the 5s's are swaddling the cider's stomach position for calming a baby the back
is for sleep the third is shushing or white noise the fourth s is swinging or rhythmic motion and the fifth s is sucking and it turns out that every baby's i mean babies are alike right i mean Pretty similar but they're not cookie cutter they are a little bit different and um uh some babies they they really all need to be swaddled even though i know parents will say my baby hates swaddling and i tried to swaddle my baby and um you know he fights it in struggles and he clearly doesn't enjoy it he wants
his hands free that's what he likes and babies do Struggle against swaddling because in the womb they're packaged like this and within a couple of weeks their arms start to stretch and and kind of spread out and get a little bit more relaxed and down at their sides but when they get upset they go right back to that fetal position and so when you try to straighten their arms and swallow them They fight you they resist you and you think that your baby doesn't like it but honestly your baby doesn't have control over their body
and your baby doesn't get a vote you know with rights come responsibilities and babies don't have enough responsibility to be able to earn the freedom not until they're really four or five months of age and they're really much Better with their hands and it's self-soothing so um at least this is the way i look at it and and so i recommend swaddling all babies for sleep and for crying if they're not asleep and they're not crying they don't need to be swaddled um and um and it's with the arms down and it's very snug they're
different ways to swaddle babies they're you can use a regular big swaddle blanket Or they're pre-made swaddle blankets we have one called sleepy um that s-l-e-e-p-e-a that was rated the number one swaddle by um by the new york times so i was proud about that excuse me one second um and um and so they're they're very similar but they do have differences so some babies you swaddle and then the thing that really suits them is sound So you swaddle them and you go shh and they melt in your arms they just get so quiet and
start looking where's that sound coming from and they they become alert and interested in what's going on or they fall asleep if they're tired and ready to fall asleep other babies you shush them it does nothing until you give them a little bit of bouncy motion a little swinging motion and let their heads jiggle a little bit Kind of like jello on a plate you have to get a little bit of bobble for this to work if you're holding the head and not allowing it to move then um then the the sensors inside the inner
ear are not making these little waves that it turns out that is the sensation that is actually soothing babies um other babies you do sound emotion doesn't really work what they really Want to do is lie on their stomachs or over your shoulder and parents will say all the time nothing works except if i let the baby sleep on me in the bed which obviously is not safe and and there are ways around that they're with and that's really kind of the point here is that um if a baby has one particular preference sometimes if
you give them enough of the other things You you make them feel like okay it's not really exactly what i want but it's it's good enough i'll i'll i'll accept this as a compromise so even if you're not giving them sleeping on the stomach if you give them enough motion and sound or maybe sucking because that's the fifth s um then they'll give into that and that becomes pretty important in terms of where the baby sleeps because Um because there are certain things that you might be tempted to do that are risky with a baby
in terms of sleeping like putting them on the stomach or bringing them in bed with you um which which dramatically increases the risk of infant sleep death so it's kind of curious because you would kind of you would think that well we've been around babies for thousands of years we probably just Know all this right i mean you know why does every generation have to keep relearning this and yet when you go on the internet there's so much controversy and people say never swaddle your baby always swaddle your baby swallow with the hands up swallow
with the hands down be quiet have noise you know nurse them and then put them to sleep oh no don't do that nurse them and then play with Them and then put them to sleep put them on a schedule never put them on a schedule have them in bed with you don't have i mean you see what i mean there are a lot of different opinions and of course there isn't one way that works for every baby um there or every family so there are variations that you might that you might choose having said that
there are some absolutes That are going to be effective for the 95 98 of all babies for example swaddling is one of those using white noise is one of those keeping them out of your bed is one of those about 25 percent or one in four moms will say that within the last two weeks she was so tired that she had the baby in bed with her nursing the baby perhaps or feeding the baby And she accidentally fell asleep and then woke up shocked and frightened um and not realizing she'd fallen asleep or fell asleep
on a sofa which is even more dangerous than in your own bed and so um it's important to do the things that you have to do to help your baby sleep better and um and what i what i hope to be is A source of information to give you practical and effective guidance that allows you to be successful so you're not pulled in different directions by different opinions on the internet that may or may not be may or may not be correct um we by the way we have lots and lots of free information on
our website happiestbaby.com um that anyone can come to and and just Um you know purchase required um so when it comes to the feeding of your baby there are important things to learn and i recommend that you um speak with a leche league or speak with a breastfeeding consultant if you're going to be nursing so that or with your physician or your or your nurse practitioner to learn the the practicalities about breastfeeding and i'll just share one Tip with you that um it's so simple and yet it's one of these strange things that people don't
talk about it and if and if you don't know about this before you're having your baby it can create massive pain and suffering and and feelings of incompetence um in the very first days of life and that has to do with flat or inverted nipples it turns out that for most women if you Stimulate the nipple it'll it'll erect you know maybe a half an inch or so give or take a quarter of an inch at least but some women have nipples that when you stimulate the breast they really don't erect very much at all
um or they actually pull in and that's what an inverted nipple is now once you have the baby and after a few days if if they're sucking on the Breasts your breasts are going to fill up with milk and they become what's called engorge meaning that they're like balloons and they become tense so they're so filled with milk and with blood actually blood the blood vessels swell up because those are the factories that are making the milk and so that can whatever nipple you have as the breast gets bigger and rounder it tends to Flatten
out that nipple so if you're flat to begin with if the nipple is flat then it's very hard for the baby to get something to latch onto um and so we want to take care of flat nipples before the baby is born and there are special things called nipple shields that you can put under your bra that have a little it's like a donut but with a hole just on one side And you put it in the bra and your nipple starts to protrude through the opening and stretches and stretches and stretches so over a
month or two your nipple can stretch out and then you won't have a problem when the baby is born or you're less likely to have a problem so it's a super easy thing to speak to your speak to your um to your pediatrician or your obstetrician really About to get some guidance on that or your lactation consultant or your midwife or whomever is helping you so um so let's talk a little bit about um about sleep if you know the five s's those can really help you when your baby is crying and fussing um and
pretty much if you're doing the 5s's correctly and that's where the trick comes in Because the 5s's don't just make a baby nostalgic for the womb they're actually turning on a reflex so a reflex in a baby is an automatic behavior that all babies are born with so um blinking is something you don't teach a baby it's they just are born knowing how to do that um sucking swallowing or normal reflexes that all babies are born with Everywhere around the world what wasn't known until my my my baby book came out is that babies are
also born with a calming reflex that's almost an off switch for crying in an on switch for sleep and you activate that reflex by doing these five esses the five things that imitate the womb experience but to turn on a reflex you kind of have to do it right if you're doing it halfway right it Oftentimes fails kind of like hitting a knee reflex if you if you're off by three inches it doesn't work if you hit the right place and you do it too softly it doesn't work so you have to hit it hard
enough and in the right place and then you'll get a reflex a thousand times in a row same thing with the five s's you need to practice and swaddle correctly and trish correctly and jiggle them Swing them correctly to be able to be effective not that it's hard to do those things correctly in fact what's interesting is that even though people tell you that there are some babies you can't come and and babies have to wake up every two or three hours at night parents are also told that if you have a very fussy baby
or if your baby's waking up a lot you need to get some more sleep What can you do you can go for a car ride and if you drove your baby all night long in the back seat of the car they would sleep for an extra hour or two and they would cry less and so the interesting thing is that we've always known how to reduce crying and increase sleep we've just never really had the tools to be able to do that and in fact we've done just the opposite We've put babies flat on their
back in a quiet still bed unwrapped free in the world too much freedom for their arms and then we go why is my baby sleeping better why is my baby crying so much because you just took away everything that your baby was used to or everything they had in the womb i mean if i did that to you if i took away your bed and pillow and comforter and Sheets and just made you sleep on a cement floor you could sleep on it but you're not going to sleep well and same thing with babies if
you take everything away from them that they're used to they're not going to sleep well so you can give them something like swaddling uh arms down swaddling at least for the first couple of months or so A pediatricians now say and i think that this is correct that if the baby can roll over swaddled then we we need to stop swaddling them because we don't want a baby on the stomach swaddled because then they can't lift their heads up very well and they have a higher risk of stopping breathing and as many of you probably
know about 3 500 babies Die in their sleep every year in the united states half of those babies die on their stomach and about half of them die in bed with their parent or on a sofa or some others unsafe location so um so you you you want to be able you don't want the baby rolling over when they're swaddled because that puts them into a into a riskier situation uh white noise Is another great thing that anyone can use it's not very expensive to do that and that's another sensation that helps babies to be
able to sleep better because the quiet and stillness all night maybe something that you like but it's not something that babies feel comfortable with um in fact i recommend white noise for at least the first year and really i mean Longer than that a lot of adults find that they sleep better when they use white noise so so what do you do for sleep so you can wrap your baby and use white noise and those things can be helpful for the first couple of months the white noise longer than that but the swaddling for the
first couple of months and feed your baby so how do you feed your baby to help them sleep at night well what you want to do is wake them up During the day because um babies are pretty smart in a certain sense is they're not going to eat and eat and eat and eat and eat more and more if you offer them more and more at a certain point they're just going to stop eating i've had enough thank you very much mom and it turns out the more you feed a baby during the daytime The
less they need at night because they got their calories during the day so that means waking your baby up if they're napping more than an hour and a half or two hours and then feed them and then if they're still tired put them back down let them sleep again um but interrupting their sleep is not a bad thing even though they say never never wake a sleeping baby this is an exception to that rule Um and then when you feed the baby um you want to give them um adequate amount of food and that gets
into another tricky one of these situations that you probably heard different answers to the question but how long should you nurse a baby and should you nurse them on one side or two sides and it turns out that um you have to understand how the breasts work to really understand what's the Best way to feed your baby so the breasts make milk a drop every second drop drop drop and that milk then collects in a little a little collecting system a little bag if you will under the areola under that brown circle of your nipple
and after two or three hours that collection system gets filled and it gets tense and your breasts get hard And you feel uh like oh my gosh my breasts are really full i'm ready to feed my baby then the baby suckles and after a few seconds you might experience what they call let down which sometimes even feels like electricity or a little prickly feeling or sometimes you don't feel it at all but you hear the baby starting to gulp and you may even see milk leaking on the Other side or even spraying out the other
side sometimes after about five six seven minutes your baby's gulping will slow down you can hear you can feel them relax you can feel them kind of just melt a little bit in your arms and you hear less sucking and what that means is that the collecting system has emptied the ounce or ounce and a half or so in That system is gone and now the baby is just suckling the drop drop drop at a time that's coming out meanwhile your other breast is going me me me take me right because it's it's full it's
ready to go people might tell you that well you should nurse 20 minutes on one side because the baby needs the for milk and the hind milk the early milk And then the late milk which is fattier richer milk and yeah babies need both for and hind milk but you can do seven minutes on this side burp your baby and then switch to the other side and finish the meal there so that way they get the four milk on both sides and then they'll get the hind milk from the second side or you can even
go back to the first Side where the hind milk is waiting for you and do seven and seven and then back and seven and seven again when you do that your baby's gonna get an extra half an ounce or ounce of milk which means that they're going to be more satisfied that you're going to have a shorter amount of time nursing the baby and the baby is going to be able to sleep better at night another thing you can do to help your Baby sleep better at night is something that they call a dream feed
where you wake your baby up um um maybe 11 o'clock or 11 30 something like that and you you see if your baby will take another feeding and you kind of like top off the tank right and get them ready for a longer episode of sleep so those are various things that you can do to help a baby sleep more i'm gonna and there were a number of questions That were asked about sleep training babies which really for the most part means letting them cry and into exhaustion or quiet out routine and um and that's
definitely something that parents can do a lot of pediatricians recommend that it definitely can work um and can help a baby learn to be a better sleeper at night um most parents will say it Doesn't really feel very good to do that because everything about you is to respond to your baby and so it's quite uncomfortable sometimes when you have a baby screaming your baby screaming on the other side of the door you know begging for you and for you not to go and meet their needs having said that if you're sleep deprived if you're
driving into you know stop signs or if you're getting Into arguments with your with your partner um you need to do something about that and you need to get your baby into a better sleep routine so how do you get your baby in better sleep routine well um for the most part the most common technique well there are kind of two main techniques that people use one is a more gentle way which is the baby cries you go in there Um of course you you feed your baby first because most of the time that's what
they're upset about but say you just fed your baby and they're up an hour later and your baby isn't really suckling with with interest um you might hold your baby and rock them and then put them down and then they get upset you pick them up again calm them and put them down you do that back and forth 10 20 30 times until they they finally fall into sleep um and you've got the white noise playing and that kind of stuff um that's a more gentle method i have a book also called the happiest baby
guide to great sleep that talks about sleep over the first five years of life and techniques to get babies sleeping better and and that's discussed there um Many times your baby is more tenacious than you are and so you're finding that you're going in and out over and over throughout the night and it's even more exhausting for you to do that so that doesn't always work for families so the other way people do sleep training is called the cry it out routine where the baby cries you pop your head in the room uh assuming that
the baby isn't hungry so You mean you'll feed them every three hours or so um through the night or four hours if they go that long but um but when they cry you pop your head and say i love you sweetheart go to sleep and boom you're out you just see that they didn't your child didn't catch an arm in a strange position or didn't vomit or something like that um and then you wait five minutes of Crying or four minutes of crying which is pretty hard to do they say put cotton in your ears
and gin in your stomach you know to be able to tolerate that and um and then you pop your head in again i love you go to sleep sweetheart but you don't walk in you don't go to the bed you don't touch your child or pick your child up because that gives them a mixed Message um the closer you get to the bed the more they think you're going to pick them up because that's what you usually do and so it gives them false hope it in fact makes them end up crying longer and more
intensely and so sometimes you have to go in three or four times or more than that once you get to 15 minutes you're going every 15 minutes And the first night can be bad you might have an hour or even two hours of crying and the second night can be bad as well usually by the third and by the fourth night they're they're pretty much sleeping through the night that's something we don't really do before babies or four or five months old because for those first months they need to eat you know and That's really
the deal that you make with them so another way of solving the sleep problem is this special bed that that my team and i created which is called snoo um which is short for snooze and um and this is a bed that rocks and trish's babies imitates the womb basically and um um and when the baby gets upset um the bed will rock and Church a little bit faster and a little bit louder and go up another level and another level another level which is imitating what an experienced nurse or caregiver would do when the
baby is um is in your arms or on your lap whoops sorry about that um and um and so what happens is that you put the baby down it has a special swaddle Blanket also it's called the five second swaddle that's very easy to do you attach the swaddle to the bed they're little clips on the side of the bed that you attach the swaddle to so your baby can't roll over so we've measured now over 100 million hours of baby sleep and snoo over the last three years so it's been used by parents you
know Every state every city you know truckers teachers lawyers doctors nurses are using this bed and um and when you attach them to the bed they cannot roll over so we're we're hopeful um that um well we definitely know we can keep babies from rolling into an unsafe position in the middle of the night so you can swaddle babies and get all the benefits of swaddling without the worry that They're going to roll to an unsafe position and then once they're attached you push the button and the bed starts to rock and shush and actually
starts out very slowly like you just rocking your baby in a rocking chair um and like i said the baby's upset it'll go a little faster and louder and go up four different levels And you can actually change those levels too because your baby may actually sleep better on a little bit higher level just like driving them in the car they may do best when you're driving on a bumpy road uh some babies need that little bit of extra jiggle and so you can you can choose that in the in the bed and what parents
tell us is that this is i mean what we've we've now studied Um over 10 000 babies so it's the largest study ever done on infant sleep and we've demonstrated that within a week or two we add one to two hours to a baby's sleep on average some babies more than that and um um uh and oftentimes with parents they have an app and they can get it you get a daily readout of the baby's sleep and you can see you wake up in the Morning and you look at your app you go oh my
gosh honey the baby woke up at three o'clock did you i didn't even hear that did you um and the bed will respond and oftentimes calm the baby down in under a minute about 50 percent of the time it'll calm the baby in under a minute and fifty percent of time it won't it means a baby's hungry or needs a diaper change so after a minute of crying you can just turn the Bed off and get your baby and take care of your baby's needs and what we find is that when you stimulate the baby
in this way you naturally sleep train the baby so you don't have to do sleep training or quiet out routine um and usually by four months you start liberating their arms from the swaddling around five or six months you you you stop the motion and just give them the sound And um that's a special weaning feature on the app and then usually by six months the baby's out um of the bed and they're just seamlessly transitioned into the into the crib um so we sell these beds we also rent these beds so for under four
dollars a day which is pretty much a starbucks you can get an hour two more sleep you can get peace of mind that your baby's gonna stay Safely on the back all night long and you can have really basically a 24 hour seven day a week babysitter or helper in the house because what many people will tell us is that snoo is like an extra pair of hands so when you're cooking dinner or taking a shower or playing with your two-year-old or trying to get some sleep um the bed will hold in rock babies and
give you a break Basically and so this is in a way an answer to the to the um to the the need that we have for the extended family that we all or so many of us moved away from um stu i'm proud to say it's now the most awarded baby bed in history and it's in it's been actually taken into the permanent collection of the smithsonian institution as a as a breakthrough uh invention for The 21st century and we're using it in dozens and dozens and dozens of hospitals and um and doctors are recommending
it etc so we're very proud of that and and of course four dollars a day is not affordable to everyone um but to be honest i mean many people are spending that on coffee or red bull just to stay awake with your babies and i think that's why um why the bed has Become so uh so popular so um let me leave it at that and get to the questions that we have some of them i think i've answered through my own you know chit chat here um but the first one is um my six
month old still eats two hours every night um all through the night and i've tried to increase the uh food during the day we started solid food about two weeks ago but still no Success so in that situation i would make sure that the baby has got white noise i would um make sure that the baby is not just eating during the day but is is getting sufficient amount of calories meaning switching breasts or um or letting the baby drain the bottle because by six months they can oftentimes eat a six ounce and even an
eight ounce bottle of milk um and the Food is actually not helpful the solid food that we give babies people used to say oh give them mix some rice cereal into the milk but that doesn't really work um because it doesn't have calories even the foods that we give babies banana and carrots and you know peas and whatever squash that's diet food it's food you would eat if you want to lose weight And so um milk is much more caloric and so if your baby is hungry all throughout the night that's a sign and they're
gaining weight properly which i'm assuming if they're not gaining weight they need to be checked to make sure they're getting enough milk something else is going wrong but if they're gaining weight properly and they're peeing and poo pooping a lot then they're just not Getting enough calories during the day and so that's what you want to make sure that they're that they are being fed more often in a larger amount so with daytime naps should i make the room dark or is it okay to have sunlight again every baby is different but in general um
especially once the baby gets over two or three months of age they're nosy they're curious And so you want to darken the room if you can um to um to reduce your babies being distracted and wanting to be social during the day um so another family talked about sleep training they said i just think trained their four and a half week old baby which worked but then in six weeks it fell apart and that's the problem with sleep training At that early age and why i don't recommend it because at months two and three and
four and five they're going to go through growth spurts and colds and teething and sleep regressions and things that are just going to be a house of cards um and ultimately listen in the beginning your job is to meet your baby's needs it's not to let them cry themselves into exhaustion and so um at Least personally i wouldn't recommend sleep training babies before you know four or five months of age um so then what about getting naps more consistently sometimes the baby announced for two hours sometimes 20 minutes and one of the things you can
do there is using the white noise um sometimes smells help babies recognize when it's nap times you can use a little bit of lavender oil And just rub a tiny bit onto the mattress of the bed and your baby will smell that underneath the sheet and will be it'll be like a reminder for the baby that this is the place for sleeping um and then for naps i wouldn't let your baby sleep over an hour and a half or two hours during the day because um then they're gonna get into that pattern and they're gonna
Not just nap more erratically during the day but they're also gonna sleep less at night um sleep routines what is a sleep routine so babies are creatures of habit they learn by repetition the more times you do something the more they figure it out they do that with breastfeeding for example or bottled feeding they don't they've never seen a bottle before or breastfeed they don't know What to do um um when you bring the baby to the breast you gotta touch the nipple to their mouth and tease them a little bit and get them to
open their mouths really big so that you can get them on the breast and you have to do that over and over and after a week your baby's figured it out and they sometimes when you're opening your bra they'll open their mouth like i'm ready You know and they're anticipating what's going on because even a one week old baby can learn um um and so that's why you might do a sleep routine to help your baby understand the message that now is the time that's coming that i'm going to put you into the bed and
so sleep routine can be a little massage it can be a bath it can be rocking in Your arms of course a feeding a white noise machine dimming the lights in the house and i recommend dimming the lights maybe an hour before you put the baby down so that that's giving a signal to your baby's brain that sleep is coming it starts the release of the melatonin from the brain and lets the baby get used to that and for older babies of course you can sing songs and you can Read books as part of your
bedtime routine and cuddle up with them i have to say one of the questions about about snooze people go well should i be trying to have my baby nap out of the snooze so they get used to not being in snow all the time or am i going to have a problem weaning the baby off of the bed at six months because my baby's gotten so dependent on rocking And fishing so it turns out you don't have to worry about any of that it just is so much easier it just works out that you use
this new as much as possible then your baby learns what to expect they sleep better and faster and by six months or five months even they're totally different they're there now have learned how to be good sleepers and so what happens is that You just you just wean them it's it's so easy you just turn the the setting to where they have sound but no motion the motion will come back if the baby cries but most babies by that age aren't crying at night anymore and within two or three nights they're ready to be in
the crib end of story you automatically sleep trained your baby you didn't have to do any crying it out and so that's something that parents Really love i should tell you if you want to free snoo also you might be able to get that through your employer there are 50 major employers that provide this as a benefit for their employees they just rent it from us and we give it to the employees for four months six months um so so facebook and google and hulu and snapchat and under armour many many other companies provide their
Rental beds to their employees and you could get a free snow by speaking to your your employer about that um and um so let's see what else is here what else is a good routine for newborn or for an older child so bedtime starts first thing in the morning believe it or not so by getting out for fresh air and getting sunlight And having a regular routine of feeding and naps during the day you're setting up your child to learn about rhythms of the day and be more likely to develop a good rhythm at night
so you don't have to be you know obsessive about your schedule um that exactly this is how long the baby will be between feedings and exactly i can't go out of the house because the baby has to be put Down exactly at this time um but still having routines in general is is probably a good idea just to help you as much as to help the baby get through the day so i want to tell you just a tiny bit about about toddlers um [Music] and by toddler i mean kids between eight months of age
so younger than you might Be thinking and um and five or six or seven or 32 or 56 years of age because honestly we all become toddlers if we get upset enough and so the happiest toddler book is about um teaching parents the skills to be the best toddler magician who ever lived you know how do i teach my child to be patient and cooperative and use their words and um And to be respectful and ultimately to communicate their upsets but not to scream and yell and and have too many of these tantrums it turns
out with babies the key concept is the fourth trimester meaning that they're born three or four months too soon and your job is to imitate the womb and hold them and rock them and trish them and feed them as much as possible when you understand that then it's pretty Obvious what your job is with a new baby for toddlers the key concept is that toddlers are not little children they're really little cavemen they're primitives they're unfreaking civilized and your job as a parent is to civilize them you have to teach them to say please and
thank you and wait in line share your toys and don't spit and scratch and don't start the food and These are all the the laws of living in a culture that babies that toddlers rather have to learn and they don't learn it all at once it takes them it takes them years to really learn all of these rules and so when you understand that you're that your toddler is like a caveman or a neanderthal then it helps you to to recognize that even if they have a good Day they're not always going to have good
days you know there'll be good days and bad days and so you're you're going to be more patient with yourself and with your toddler and um just like they're the five s's there are many many specific techniques in the happiest toddler that help you like um playing the boob and patient stretching and gossiping and And toddleries and the fast food rule and lots of other kind of odd sounding names that will become like the back of your hand as you use those to really um be uh be a very skilled parent with your with your
toddler but the one thing i do want to tell you about one specific technique which is one of the things that is confusing to parents and we often do incorrectly And it can have some pretty serious consequences is um when our child is screaming and really upset we're taught now to acknowledge our child's feelings which most people think means honey honey no honey sweetheart i know you're honey calm down i know you're upset i need you to calm down sweetheart calm down that sounds reasonable right i mean might be a way you speak to your
Co-worker but it's not the way you speak to a a an upset out of control toddler or caveman because what happens when you're upset is you turn off your left brain we all do we become less logical less reasonable less eloquent less patience less patient um less verbal and we're all about the right brain the right brain is the center of emotionality and Fight or flight reflex and recognizing a face in a place which toddlers are really good at and non-verbal communication so your tone of voice and gestures so even with an adult who's upset
the words you say don't matter as much as the way you say the words if you're with someone who's who's grieving and they're very very upset you might just go Oh i'm so sorry i'm really really sorry and that means more than saying i am so sorry i know that's terrible you must feel terrible you know or going calm down calm down i know you're upset i know you're upset but you have to stop crying i need you to stop crying so i can talk to you which wouldn't feel good at all and so what
you want to do with an upset toddler or an upset best friend for that Matter is narrate back using what i call toddlers which is short phrases lots of repetition and mirroring a third of their emotion so you might say to a little child who's upset you you're you're you're you're you're mad you're you're you're mad you're mad mad mad man man you're really really really mad you're So mad your face is mad and your body is mad that seems like baby talk and seems kind of wrong or seems overly dramatic but that's exactly the
way you the way you you help a young child understand that you get their feelings that you're respectful of them once they calm down then you'll distract them or you'll give them suggestions Or try to make them feel better or or something like that what's curious is that when children are very happy we do this technique anyway when they're very happy we don't say honey i see you're very very happy i will tell father right we go yay good job you did it you did it you were trying and you climbed up there and you
tried so hard and your face is so you're so happy you're so proud of yourself That's the way we acknowledge them when they're very happy using the same general technique as we use when they're very unhappy and the reason that this is important is because if you respond to your child's unhappiness or frustration by saying honey come sweetheart calm down i need you to calm down the thing about emotions are is if you don't express them they don't go Anywhere they stay inside of you and if you've been embarrassed or insulted or hurt you know
that that those feelings stay deep those are wounds and if you if you can be with someone who you care about who cares about you and you can tell them how that felt and express it with the emotions that you felt at that time that would be a healing experience if You have someone you're angry at and you can tell them how angry you are and they can listen to you and respect that you actually can have a better relationship than you ever had before and so the key is not to um stifle your child's
feelings doesn't mean they can act on the feelings they can't rip things off the wall or hit you that you're going to stop right away but You want to acknowledge their feelings in this toddler's technique and then oftentimes after four or five or six or eight or ten times of repeating it they settle down and they you know listen to you and then they're ready to be your friend and to go on to the next thing that means you've taught your child how to how to What to expect from friends and their closest um intimates
from someone how someone should respond to their feelings um so that they will feel like they have the right to their feelings and they know how to pick a friend and pick a partner in life who's going to be respectful of them so so those are the general things that i wanted to share with you i know we could go on Forever my voice is giving out a little bit but um there's so much more to talk about about babies and toddlers and sleep and discipline um but i hope that's been helpful and for more
information please contact us you can contact us through instagram or facebook or our website at happiestbaby.com of course lots more information on Peanut as well and um and um i wish you to be safe uh take this pandemic seriously it's not going away anytime soon and you not only to protect your child but you need to protect yourselves you can only imagine how desperate the situation is if if parents get sick and have to be hospitalized and who's going to take care of your child so Be neurotic be overprotective keep your distance keep your mask
on um and take this all seriously because we need to we need to stop the spread of this in our community otherwise this is going to be with us for a much much longer period and we're all going to suffer the consequences so stay safe and thank you all for joining Take care you
