4MOMS GoodNight Benutzerhandbuch - Seite 7

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Whether you nurse, rock, or recite poetry in Greek to your child, this is what you are 

teaching your child is necessary to fall asleep.   

There is nothing wrong with sleep associations.  Even adults have sleep 

associations.  For example—try to go to sleep without a pillow.  Sleep associations 

only become a problem when they're not readily available during our regular 

nighttime wakenings.   To use the pillow example, usually you wake briefly during 

your sleep cycle, roll over and fall back to sleep, and never remember anything.  But 

if somebody snatched your pillow while you were sleeping, the next time you woke 

up, you'd notice your pillow was missing and would need to look for it before going 

back to sleep.  If this happened often enough, it might make you quite grumpy by 

morning.   

Now think of your child's sleep associations.  The way that your child falls asleep 

when you put him or her to bed for the night (or even down for a nap), is also what 

your child will expect when he or she wakes each time throughout the night.  Think 

back to the pillow example.  It's no wonder your child wakes up crying if he fell 

asleep in your arms and woke up in a crib or if he dozed off with a bottle and woke 

up to find it gone.  Remember that each time your child falls asleep, he or she is 

building a sleep association based on this experience.   

2.5 

Choose which sleep associations to keep and which to discard. 

Sleep associations are very helpful because they help signal to your child that it is 

time to settle down to sleep.  After 9 months in the womb, your child already has 

some sleep associations.  This is why movement (e.g. being rocked), white noise (e.g. 

riding in a car), and having Mommy or Daddy close by are so successful at lulling 

babies to sleep.  However, all of these sleep associations are outside your child's 

control.  Teach your child to associate sleep with new conditions that they can 

control. 

Since your goal is to get your child to fall back to sleep peacefully at each nighttime 

wakening, try working backwards from here.  If your child sleeps in a crib in a dark 

and quiet nursery, these will be some of your child's sleep associations.    

We've found that some sleep associations work really well, while others are to be 

avoided.   

• A dark and quiet crib is the best sleep association for an infant.  This means that 

they need to be put to bed while drowsy but awake.  A 2004 study commissioned 

by the National Sleep Foundation found that, on average, children who were put 

to bed awake slept over an hour more per night than their peers who were put 

to bed after falling asleep.  The study also found that babies who were put to bed 

while awake were twice as likely to sleep through the night while babies who 

were put to bed while asleep were almost three times as likely to need their 

parents' help two or more times per night! 