Routine Doesn't Have to Mean Restriction
Routine Doesn't Have to Mean Restriction
One of the things I hear most often from parents after we've worked together isn't necessarily that their baby is sleeping better.
It's that they feel more relaxed.
That might sound strange when one of the things we've often introduced is more structure to their baby's day.
Why structure can actually create flexibility
When we look at a baby's sleep, I don't just look at bedtime or what happens when they wake overnight. I look at their whole 24 hours. Sleep, feeds, naps, awake time, activity and everything else that makes up their day. Once parents have a realistic framework to work from, something quite interesting often happens. They stop feeling as though they're constantly reacting, instead of wondering When will they need another nap? Will they sleep in the car? When should I feed them? Can we go out this afternoon?, they have a better understanding of their baby's natural rhythm and needs.
A schedule shouldn't mean staying home because a nap is due at precisely 10:03am.
It's a framework.
Real life still happens.
But when parents understand roughly what their baby needs and when, they can make informed decisions about when to stick to the usual rhythm and when it's absolutely fine to change things.
And when their baby is happier and more settled as a result, unsurprisingly, they tend to feel better too.
Then I realised I wasn't taking my own advice…
This got me thinking recently about my own routine.
I spend a significant proportion of my working life looking at other people's 24 hours.
Yet when I looked properly at mine, I realised just how much I was trying to squeeze into every day - work, family, driving, the house, exercise, life admin and all the other things that somehow need doing.
Downtime?
Sleep?
They seemed to be the things I fitted in around everything else.
Well… half an hour of actual productive conversation amongst quite a lot of laughing and gossip!
We mapped out my own 24-hour timeline.
And what I loved about it was that it wasn't based on some imaginary version of me with unlimited motivation and 30 hours in her day.
It was realistic.
It worked around my actual life.
There was time for the things I needed to do, but there was also something I hadn't been particularly good at prioritising:
downtime and SLEEP.
Babies aren't the only ones who thrive with a rhythm, I came away from that conversation feeling remarkably similar to how parents often tell me they feel after we've put some structure around their baby's day.
Not restricted.
Relieved.
Suddenly everything had a place.
I could see what was realistic, what wasn't and where I'd been expecting far too much from the hours available to me. And it reminded me of something that's incredibly easy to forget:
Routine doesn't have to take freedom away.
Done well, it can create it. We talk a lot about babies and children thriving on predictability, rhythm and routine. Perhaps sometimes the grown-ups need a little bit of it too. And yes, I appreciate the irony that it took someone else looking at my 24 hours to remind me of something I tell parents all the time!
Comments