Getting the room temperature and dress code right for your little one in the warmer months can be incredibly tricky, yet important not only for your little one’s sleep quality but also for their sleep safety.
In order to reduce and manage night wakings in warmer weather, we need to understand why they happen. Some of the most common causes - apart from the obvious need to stay hydrated throughout the day, are:
Sleep Environment:
This is a big one when it comes to sleeping well in the warmer months. Block out blinds are a great way to help manage your little one’s sleep. Not only do they help block out any light with daylight savings and early starts, but they can also keep the room cooler during the day.
If you can cool your baby’s room prior to bedtime, this can help make the bedtime settle much easier. An oscillating fan positioned away from the cot can help during the hotter months. Fans circulate the air and also provide white noise for your baby, which can help them sleep more soundly.
Dressing Appropriately:
Getting your little one’s attire right for bed can sometimes feel tricky!
It’s always recommended to dress your little one as you would dress yourself for sleeping in the same room, but they should use a tog (thermal overall grade) appropriate sleeping bag instead of regular bedding.
Using a room thermometer can help take the guesswork out of trying to figure out how to dress your baby. The CuboAi Smart Baby Monitor, for example, has this as one of its many built-in safety functions. For added peace of mind, you can also pair the monitor with the CuboAi Smart Temp, a medical-grade thermal sensor which is placed under the armpit to measure baby’s body temperature. By combining body temperature detection with AI, you can get real-time alerts when your little one’s temperature rises or falls out of the normal range.
Routine Awake Windows:
There’s a fine line between being over-tired and under-tired, and no matter where your child falls within the age-appropriate awake window, both can impact sleep, so it’s crucial to get it right!
We can do this by following an age-appropriate routine and awake windows. This ensures sufficient sleep pressure to encourage those much-needed long stretches of sleep without the added cortisol spike that comes with being over-tired.
Sleep Association
Sleep associations are quite simple to identify, as you will notice that each and every time your baby wakes, they will look for these to resettle, time and time again.
Usually, it will be at the end of your sleep cycles, around 2-4 hourly overnight.
Keeping a sleep log is a great idea to help you pinpoint the timing of these wakes. Again, I love the CuboAi Smart Baby Monitor for this; the Daytime Sleep Reports and Daily Sleep Summary (available on their ultimate plan via the CuboAi app) take any guesswork out and means you don’t have to log any information. The app will do this and store the data for you.
Hopefully, now that we’ve highlighted these four contributing factors, it will make it easier for you to eliminate any future night wakes in the summertime.
