The One Thing You’re Probably Doing That’s Ruining Your Baby’s Sleep

If you’re like most parents of an infant, you’re eagerly awaiting the day you wake up to find your baby finally slept through the night! And by “sleep through the night,” we’re talking a stretch of 5-6 hours (not 8-10) because babies aren’t biologically meant to sleep all through the night, right?

So you’re probably doing all you can to help soothe and calm and ease your baby into a night of blissful, uninterrupted sleep. You’re feeding and diaper changing. You’re reading and cuddling. You’re dressing and tucking. You’ve got a process. A routine. A rhythm.

Then you put them down to sleep and do the worst thing you could possibly do – turn on the nightlight!

What’s wrong with a nightlight?

The wavelengths of different colors of light have a HUGE impact on your baby’s sleep.

According to this Harvard Health Letter:

“Until the advent of artificial lighting, the sun was the major source of lighting, and people spent their evenings in (relative) darkness. Now, in much of the world, evenings are illuminated, and we take our easy access to all those lumens pretty much for granted.

But we may be paying a price for basking in all that light. At night, light throws the body’s biological clock—the circadian rhythm—out of whack. Sleep suffers. Worse, research shows that it may contribute to the causation of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.”

Melatonin, the hormone that influences our circadian rhythms, increases in the evenings to tell our body it’s night and it’s time to sleep. However, melatonin is suppressed by exposure to light, especially the blue light wavelength that streams through TVs, computer screens, and cell phones.

Babies are primal, biologically driven creatures deeply influenced by the hormones guiding their body. Little things like the wrong nightlight will disrupt their biological rhythms, rhythms they depend on to be happy, healthy, playful little human beings.

And melatonin isn’t just about sleep:

“Melatonin is essential to the regulation of reproduction, body weight, and energy balance…In other words, if you don’t get enough darkness, you have a very good chance of ending up tired, cranky, listless, out of whack, and possibly obese.” (via Mother Earth News)

But you NEED a nightlight, you say? Well, you can have one. Just stay away from the white and blue light spectrums and go RED instead!

“Red or amber light doesn’t appear to wreck melatonin and sleep as much as blue or white light.” (source)

Now, this isn’t a make-your-baby-sleep-through-the-night magic trick, but it helps to not undo all the work you did getting them to sleep in the first place, right? As we all know, a well-rested baby is a happy baby, and happy babies make happy parents!