When babies don't sleep, parents don't sleep. That's been the story of our lives for the past few years as we've been raising young children. When babies sleep well, it's a wonderful thing! Some babies are natural sleepers while others seem to struggle with insomnia. Proper sleep hygiene can make a big difference when it comes to sleeping babies. Many of these same sleep hygiene principles also apply to toddlers, kids, and even adults. I hardly ever have trouble falling asleep, but I know many people who seem to always struggle with insomnia (including our kids). Sometimes, we use a sound machine in our baby room to produce white noise. We don't live in a large city where you have street noise entering the home. We also don't live near large busy streets, so it's actually fairly quiet inside every room. We're surrounded by woods, so it actually feels like you're in the forest and it can get pretty loud because of all the insects singing at night. I don't know that any white noise machine can effectively drown out the symphony of humming insects on a summer night. Maybe we need to get a few different a few different sound machine devices. You'd think that with all the advances in technology we've seen over the past few decades, we'd have some really efficient baby sleeping machines out there.
There are many books out there on the topic of infant sleeping. These books offer contrasting views on sleep training methods and we probably read all of them when we had our first baby. If you're a parent, how did you sleep train your baby? I know a handful of really lucky parents who had babies that didn't need much sleep training because they naturally fell asleep and stayed asleep effortlessly.
