3 top tips for sleep at Daycare

The first tip would be to find out how they actually get babies to fall asleep. Some daycare's are great and they will do whatever you ask them to do, which, should be the way it is. But this doesn't always happen.  You are the parent. You are paying a lot of money. They should do what you ask them to do and they should be adhering to age appropriate sleep needs.

If you are very clear and say, "I always put my baby down, awake, and they fall asleep on their own. All they need is a dark, quiet environment, and a cot of their own and they will sleep well," why wouldn't they want that? That makes their job much easier. But some daycare's, for some reason, have certain policies in place where they do not do that. They wrap the babies, rock them or they put them in a pram until they fall asleep and then transfer them.

You need to find out what's going on when they are getting babies to sleep in the first place. If it's the total opposite of what you have worked really hard to create at home, then you need to keep looking for another suitable daycare.

Tip number two if your baby is already at a day care then I would investigate why your baby is not sleeping well at daycare. I find that a lot of people want to trust the day care and not want to cause a fuss around day-care, sleep and hope for the best. What I tell everyone to do when you are searching for the right day-care is find out what do they do around naptime.

Are things scheduled? Do they have a quiet place to sleep? Is it dark? Or is it just, "Oh, if they fall asleep in the pram, then great," and just go on like that? You really need to investigate a little bit and find out if the situation is conducive to what you have created at home.

Tip number three around this is, for some babies, they just don't sleep as well when they are out or at daycare or whatever the situation is. None of us do, really. We all sleep better in our own beds, so that makes sense to me.

If the daycare do what you ask and they have tried really hard and the babies are still not sleeping well, then just put your grumpy babies down early for the night, this could be as early as 5.45pm. I always say there is no reason why you need to live with grumpy, tired babies, just to hang on to a magical bed time that you may have in your mind. Do your normal bedtime routine then put them into bed by 6pm.

Because more than likely they are not going to day-care every day, then on the days they are home with you and sleeping great, then it is no problem to hang on to your normal bedtime. In the long run we would like the body clock to get in line with a consistent bedtime, but there is always wiggle room around that. It's not set in stone.

Babies can be amazing at differentiating between home and day care.