The A to ZZZZs of Safe Baby Sleep When Traveling

By Michelle Rowley, VacaDUN Baby Gear Rentals

Traveling with babies can be a fun, richly rewarding experience for the whole family. Whether it’s a trip flying across the country or a weekend trip driving in the country, “baby on board” can lead to great memories and a needed respite from the daily routine.

But home or away, babies need sleep. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, infants 4-12 months old need 12-16 hours of sleep every 24 hours, and kids 1-2 years need 11-14 hours. New environments – like hotels or rentals homes – can represent challenges to those goals and needs.

Another challenge is the availability of baby equipment on the road that’s appropriate for infant sleeping. Babies should never share a bed — soft mattresses and sleeping with adults run an unacceptable risk of entrapment and suffocation. Nor should a baby ever be placed on a couch or any flat surface not specifically designed and approved for infant sleep.

Whether it’s bringing gear from home – or renting from a baby equipment service like VacaDUN Baby Gear Rentals – parents increasingly have more options for safe baby sleeping. But be diligent and do your homework; the first priority is safety, and be sure the gear you’re bringing or renting has safety standards first on the list.

Sleep can be in a bassinet, crib, travel crib or play yard such as a pack ‘n play that conforms to current United States Consumer Protection Safety Commission safety standards (i.e. slates spacing less than 2 3/8″, firm mattress with a snug fit to the crib, no drop sides).

Keep in mind that according to experts, “bassinets” (small baby beds with low walls) should only be used until about 5 months. Once your baby can sit up, usually around 6 months, he/she needs something with higher walls, such as a Pack ‘n Play or a real crib.

PACK N PLAYS & PORTABLE CRIBS

Pack ‘n plays – also called playards and playpens – are economical, safe choices for travel. There are many options, for example:

• The Lotus Everywhere by Guava is a portable crib with a unique zippered side opening for snuggling with a sleeping baby. This eco-health option uses materials without flame-retardants and has a soft mattress. According to Guava, the Everywhere has a “greengold” standard certification and is free of flame retardant chemicals.

• The Graco Pack ‘n Play is a quality travel crib and playard for infants to toddlers. It’s great for on the go sleeping. Most families will be pleased with the features, functionality and overall quality of the Pack ‘n Play, especially since it comes with a bassinet, play mobile, diaper storage bag and a changing station making it one of the full-featured options available.

CRIBS

If your child is beyond the newborn stage, baby cribs are usually the go-to option. But beware – not all hotel or rental cribs are created equal, and not all have updated safety features or come with the most appropriate options.

For example, it’s important to have a firm crib mattress until your baby reaches the toddler stages. Softer, cushion-like sleep surfaces for infants may lead to suffocation due to the mattress forming to your baby’s body and face. Your baby should sleep on a firm mattress— an important aspect of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) prevention. All babies need to sleep alone in the crib on a firm, fitted mattress with a fitted sheet only. Your baby should never sleep with anything else in the crib.

This means no bedding such as blankets, quilts, or sheets. And, no crib bumpers, pillows, or stuffed animals. If the hotel or rental agency offers these features with the baby crib, be sure to decline or find another alternative provider for your baby equipment.

When your crib is set up, place two fingers in between the mattress and the crib. If you can fit more than two fingers in the space, ask for another crib or mattress, as it increases the risk of the legs, arms, and head getting stuck in the unsafe space. If it passes that test, press on the mattress with your hand. If the mattress holds firm and spring back in place quickly, it’s firm enough.

When you’re all set, place the baby on his or her back to sleep. Avoid sleep positioners that keep your baby in one position while sleeping to reduce the risk of suffocation. Any other position can increase the risk of SIDS.

A great option for a crib rental:

• Dream on Me 2-in-1 – Meets CPSC and American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) safety. Unique hinges allow the crib to fold flat for compact storage or travel. Included is the stationary (non-drop side) rail design, which provides the utmost in product safety. Made of solid pine, this portable crib is one of the most convenient portable cribs on the market.

There’s not a firm age when babies should stop sleeping in baby cribs, but parents should consider switching to a toddler bed once your little one starts climbing or is more than 35-inches tall. According to Andi Metzler, a Certified Child Sleep Consultant based in Ventura, CA it’s appropriate for most children to make the switch sometime between the ages of 2 ½ and 3 ½. In fact, it’s often best to wait until your child is closer to three since many just aren’t ready to make the transition.

Regardless if it’s a pack-n-play or crib, it’s also critical your baby’s sleeping arrangement is close enough so that you can see the baby and easily respond to the need for comforting, and feeding and monitoring. Speaking of monitoring…..

BABY MONITORING

If you are using a baby monitor that plugs into a wall, be careful that the cord from a baby monitor is not close to the crib, as a baby can strangle or choke. Wireless monitors are recommended for those reasons. One monitor recommended by Dr. Craig Canapari, a pediatrician at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, is the VTech Baby Monitor. It’s a simple, affordable monitoring option that doesn’t overly complicate with technology and provides audio and visual monitoring.

WRAPPING IT UP…..

Parents have places to go, people to see, and fun to have. Don’t be tethered to home worrying about how your baby will snooze on the road. The next time you’re booking a room in some faraway place or just going for a weekend road trip, try these strategies to get your baby to sleep anywhere. Safely!

About the Guest Author

Michelle Rowley is a co-founder and chief marketing officer of VacaDUN Baby Gear Rentals of Orange County, CA. She and partner Reggie Bautista founded VacaDUN to provide traveling families with better options for safe, family travel on the road with a wider array of quality, affordable baby equipment. She loves meeting kids and families from all around the world who travel to Southern California and is thrilled to meet people who are nearly as short as she is, albeit temporarily.

Getting Your Partner Involved. Magical Solution?

At the risk of generalizing here, it’s been my experience that there’s usually one parent who handles the bulk of the nighttime responsibilities.

And that parent, in a man/woman relationship, is almost always Mom.

Now, before you go accusing me of sexism of stereotyping, I’d just like to point out that there’s a reason this happens. As a sleep consultant, I don’t get called into situations where both parents are contributing equally, and where baby’s not relying on any external props, and everyone sleeps soundly through the night.

Anyone who calls a sleep consultant in that situation either has money to burn, or has mistaken me for a dream interpreter.

I’m usually contacted by parents who are having issues getting their babies to sleep, and that’s almost always because baby’s got an external sleep prop that they use to get back to sleep when they wake in the night.

And the most common prop I see, by far, is nursing, which pretty much leaves Dad out of the equation.

Now, this is a problem for a couple of reasons. Obviously, if baby’s waking up six times a night and demanding Mom come in to nurse her back to sleep, that’s taxing on mother and baby.

But there’s another person who tends to suffer in this scenario, and that’s Dad. It might be hard to imagine, if you’re currently reading this in the middle of the night with a baby hanging off your breast, listening to your husband snoring contentedly from the other room, but it’s true.

Dads, the vast majority of them anyway, want to be great dads. They want to have an active role in bringing up their kids, and they love it when they feel like they’re succeeding in that role.

But because Mom is the one with the magical breast milk, Dad often feels powerless to help out in the sleep department, which means Mom’s up every time baby cries, and Dad, while sympathetic, can’t do much but go back to sleep.

This can lead to some hostility from a sleep deprived Mom, who feels like she’s doing more than her share, and some defensiveness from Dad, who gets to feeling attacked for something he has no control over.

But here’s the good news for both of you…

If you’ve decided to give sleep training a try, it often goes better if Dad takes the lead.

That’s right! Take a load off, Mom. Dad’s taking point on this one. Because Dad doesn’t nurse, and baby knows it. So when it comes to breaking the association between nursing and falling asleep, baby tends to learn quicker and respond better when Dad comes into the room during the first few nights of baby learning to fall asleep independently.

Here’s the funny thing. Whenever I gave this little tidbit on a couple I’m working with, Mom lets out a big woot-woot and teases Dad about how much fun he’s going to have getting up six times in the night.

But then, night one, as soon as baby starts to cry, Mom shoots out of bed and goes straight into baby’s room. Or even more regularly, Mom stands in the doorway instructing Dad on the right way to settle Baby back down, and corrects him every step of the way.

I have literally sent full-grown women to their rooms in this scenario.

If Dad’s going to get involved, him and Baby have to find their own rhythm, and Mom needs to have little to no part in it. And as much as they always say they’ll have no problem letting their husbands take the wheel, when it comes down to the moment of truth, many women have trouble giving up control.

So remember, Dad might just be the magical solution to your baby’s sleep issues, but you’re going to have to let him take over. Take heart though. Most of my clients see dramatic improvements in their baby’s sleep in just a couple of nights, so you won’t have to control yourself for long.

After that, you and your partner will have the evenings back to yourselves, and your whole family can get back to sleeping through the night.

Attachment Parenting & Sleep Training

I’m hoping that I might be able to change some minds here today.

It won’t be easy, obviously, because when is it ever? But on parenting issues, there are so many emotional ties and hardened beliefs that enter into the equation that make swaying someone’s nearly impossible.

As parents, we bear an enormous responsibility. It’s not just about keeping our little ones alive, warm, fed and happy. We’re all looking to raise exceptional human beings. We’re responsible for the quality of our kids’ lives long after they’ve left the nest, and many of the decisions we make today are going to determine who they are 2030, even 50 years from now.

No surprise than that we take these decisions very, very seriously.

I’ll admit that I find the idea of attachment parenting more than a little interesting, and I can definitely see why it appeals to a lot of parents. After all, most of us want to love our kids unreservedly, especially in those first few years. Our instincts are all about holding baby close, meeting their every need the moment it arises, and protecting them with the strength and determination of a Titan. (Although if I remember my mythology correctly, those Greek gods made some pretty questionable parenting choices, so maybe that’s a bad example.)

For anyone who’s not familiar, attachment parenting is a parenting philosophy that was popularized by Drs. William and Martha Sears in their 1993 publication, “The Baby Book.” The idea, in a nutshell, is maximum closeness and responsiveness. You wear your baby, you share a bed with your baby, you breastfeed on demand, and you answer their cries immediately.

In theory, this creates a strong attachment between mother and baby, which results in well-adjusted children who grow up to be happy, healthy, contributing members of society.

Now, all of these theories have been debated endlessly and passionately, but there’s no strong evidence to show that attachment parenting is better or worse than other parenting styles. If you want more information on attachment parenting, a quick Google search will provide you with more material than you could possibly take in over a dozen lifetimes.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. This is about whether attachment parenting and sleep training are mutually exclusive.

I have worked with more than a few clients who subscribe to the attachment parenting ideology and they usually feel like they’re “cheating” a little.

You see, an important thing to note here is that Dr. Sears included a catchy bullet point list of the principles of attachment parenting that he refers to as “The Seven B’s.” They are, in no particular order..

• Birth Bonding

• Breastfeeding

• Baby Wearing

• Bedding Close to Baby

• Belief in the Language Value of Your Baby’s Cry

• Beware of Baby Trainers

• Balance

As you can see, he had to stretch a little to get these to all fit into a “B’ category, but I think he did alright. I mean hey, there are seven of them and the guy is a pediatrician, not a poet.

So the first three have nothing to do with sleep training. You can bond with your baby as much as you want, breastfeed until you’re blue in the face, and wear your baby in a sling everywhere you go, and as a pediatric sleep coach, I would tell you that’s all fine and dandy.

The three that follow are the ones that tend to give attachment parenting advocates pause when they think about sleep training.

Sleeping close to baby is another term for bed sharing, which Dr. Sears is a big fan of. It’s a common myth about pediatric sleep coaches that we’re firmly against bed sharing, and I won’t act like I don’t know where that came from. The consensus from most of my colleagues is that babies sleep better, and so do their parents, when they aren’t in the same bed as you. More people in bed means more movement, more movement means more wake ups, and more wake ups means less of that rich, delicious, deep sleep that we love to see everybody getting.

So is it a deal breaker when it comes to sleep training? Well, yeah. Pretty much. Teaching babies to fall asleep independently isn’t really feasible when Mom is in arms’ reach at all times.

Now, I have heard a lot of parents say they get better sleep when they bed share with their little ones, and that’s 100% wonderful in my book. If your family is all sleeping in the same bed and you’re all sleeping well, I say keep doing what you’re doing.

However, if your definition of bed sharing is that one parent is sleeping on the couch and one of you is sleeping in bed with baby, waking every 45 minutes to breastfeed back to sleep, that’s not what would be commonly described as “quality sleep.”

For anyone who wants to keep their little one close but would rather not wake up to baby’s toes in their nostrils ten times a night, I suggest sharing a room instead of a bed. As long as baby has a separate space to sleep, like a crib or a play pen, then sleep training is once again a viable option.

SO WHAT ABOUT CRYING?

Crying is how babies express discontentment, no question about it. Whether it’s a wet diaper, general discomfort, or just wanting something that they don’t have at that particular moment, babies cry to express that they want something.

You may have noticed that I specifically avoided saying that they cry to express a “need,” because let’s face it, not everything a baby cries over is a requirement. If you disagree, I urge you to take a look at these hilarious examples of kids crying for nonsensical reasons. “He met Bill Murray.” is my personal favorite, but they’re all pretty great.

So again, a lot of my clients are surprised when I tell them that sleep training does NOT require them to leave their babies to cry until they fall asleep. In fact, I typically don’t recommend waiting longer than about 10 minutes before responding to a crying baby.

I do suggest giving your baby a few minutes to see if they can fall back to sleep on their own, but the idea that sleep training requires parents to close the door at bedtime and leave their little ones until the next morning, regardless of the intensity or duration of their crying, is, in scientific terms, bogus.

So we’ve managed to get to the last two of the seven Bs without any real conflict, but this next one is going to be tough to navigate.

“Beware of baby trainers.”

So let me just level with you here, okay? I can’t speak for everyone in my profession, but as a Certified Sleep Sense Consultant, I am part of the largest collaborative network of pediatric sleep coaches in the world, and we all have one thing in common.

We’re passionate about helping families. We’ve been through this issue ourselves, we’ve found a solution, and we’re devoted to helping others the same way we helped our own babies because we know, first hand, the difference it makes in people’s lives.

And for anyone who might be thinking, “They’re just in it for the money,” I implore you to try working with exhausted parents and overtired babies for a few nights and tell me about how easy the money is. If this job were just about turning a profit, we would all find something else to do, believe me.

We work with people in their most frazzled, desperate moments, and it is challenging work. The reward is in the results; the smiles of those happy babies and the relief in the eyes of the parents who are feeling reinvigorated and re-energized about raising kids now that they’re getting enough sleep.

My only other issue with the attachment parenting style outlined by Dr. Sears lies in the last of his seven rules.

Balance.

“Wear your baby everywhere, breastfeed on demand, respond immediately to every whimper, sleep next to them, and hey, remember to take some time for yourself, because it’s all about balance.”

But on the fundamental principle of balancing your parenting responsibilities with your self- care, I totally agree. Being a mother is a priority. It can easily be argued that it should be your main priority. Many would tell you that it’s your only priority, which I would disagree with, but let’s say for a minute that it’s true.

If you’re going to be the best mom you can be, you absolutely, inarguably, need to get regular, sufficient rest.

Motherhood is incredibly demanding and requires a finely-tuned well-oiled machine to do it right. You have to be patient, understanding, energized, empathetic, entertaining, and focused to be a good parent. Ask yourself, how many of those qualities would you say you possess on three hours of sleep?

One of my favorite quotes on parenthood is Jill Churchill’s heartwarming reminder that none of us bat 1.000 in this sport.

“There’s no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.”

It reminds me that we, like our babies, are unique, and all of these parenting recipes need to be tweaked and adjusted to suit our individual familiar needs.

So if attachment parenting is your thing, more power to you. The best parenting strategy is the one that works for you and your family.

But if your little one isn’t sleeping and bed-sharing doesn’t seem to be rectifying the problem, I urge you to consider bending Dr. Sears’ rules a little and getting some help.

I won’t tell him if you don’t.

Why Your Baby Will Never Sleep Through the Night

That’s right, I said it. Your baby will never sleep straight through the night.

And neither will you, for that matter.

In fact, pretty much anyone who isn’t heavily sedated before going to bed can expect to wake up multiple times in the night.

This isn’t due to stress, caffeine, lack of exercise, or any other factors that can contribute to a lousy night’s sleep. It’s a normal, natural part of the human sleep cycle.

We’re all familiar with the various stages of sleep from our own experience. You might not be able to put a name to them, but you’ve certainly felt the difference between waking from a light sleep and a deep one.

Simply put, when we fall asleep, we spend a little while in a light stage of sleep and gradually progress into a deeper one. We stay there for a little while and then gradually re-emerge into the lighter stage, and when we do, there’s a good chance that we’ll wake up.

That all sounds great, right? You fall asleep at eleven or so, hit that deep stage by midnight, hang out there for six hours or so, and then start to come back to the surface around 6:00 or 7:00, gradually waking up refreshed and ready to face the day.

Except the whole process only takes about an hour and a half.

That’s right. From start to finish, going from light sleep to deep sleep and back again takes between 90 – 110 minutes.

Luckily for us (and for those who have to interact with us) the process repeats itself pretty easily. Either we’ll wake up for a minute or two and fall right back to sleep, or we might not even really break the surface at all.

Ideally, this happens five or six times in a row. We get a restful, restorative snooze in the night, and we reap the benefits of it throughout the day.

But enough about us grown-ups. What about our little ones?

Infants, despite their increased need for sleep, have a much shorter sleep cycle than adults. On average, an infant goes from light sleep to deep sleep and back again in an astounding 50 minutes.So whoever coined the term, “Sleep like a baby” was clearly misinformed.

This is where the essential element of sleep training comes into play, the program doesn’t teach your child to stay asleep, or spend more time in any one stage of the sleep cycle.

What we do is teach your baby to fall asleep independently initially, and when they wake up.

That’s it! That really is the heart if what we’ll be doing together. We’ll be helping your baby to accept these wake-ups as a non-event.

Once they’ve learned the skills they need to fall back to sleep on their own, they’ll wake up after a sleep cycle, their brain will signal them to go back to sleep, and that’s exactly what they’ll do.

There are a few reasons why I feel it’s so important for parents to understand this. First of all, I want you to know that we’re not doing anything that actually influences or alters your baby’s natural sleep. We’re just giving them the skills to fall asleep independently after they wake up, which, as you probably know by now, they’re going to do multiple times a night.

Second, one of the biggest arguments you might hear from critics of sleep training is, “Babies are supposed to wake up at night!”

And that’s absolutely, 100 per cent correct. Babies, just like adults, are supposed to wake up at night. In fact, it would take some powerful sedatives to prevent it.

All that we’ll be doing together is teaching your little one to stay calm and content when they do wake up, and giving them the ability to get back to sleep without any help from mom, a pacifier, or any other exterior source that might not be readily available in the middle of the night.

So if you’re wondering whether or not sleep training is going to put your child at an increased risk for SIDS, or if it will somehow alter their natural sleep patterns, or make them nocturnal, or damage them in any way, I can assure you with the full support of the American Academy of Pediatrics, that it will not.

What it will do is keep them calm and assured when they wake up in the night, and help to ensure that they get the sleep they need to be happy and healthy.

So although your little one is going to wake up numerous times a night, every night, they can quickly and easily learn the skills to get back to sleep on their own. It will only seem as though they’re sleeping straight through the night.

That, I would imagine, is something we call all get behind.