How to Improve Your Child’s Sleep with a Sleep Diary

16th February 2024 0 Comments

Understanding and Improving Your Child’s Sleep Patterns

Do you know when and how long your baby or child sleeps both during the day and at night? Are you aware of the factors that influence or interfere with your child’s sleep patterns? Do these patterns repeat consistently over days or weeks?

These might seem like straightforward questions, but many parents struggle to answer them accurately, especially when they are busy and overtired. However, gathering this basic information is crucial to determining whether your child has a sleep problem and identifying the best course of action.

Keeping a Sleep Diary

One of the most effective ways to record your child’s sleep patterns is by maintaining a sleep diary for two weeks. It can be a simple document, but the data it provides can help address a wide range of sleep issues.

When to Start?

The best time to start keeping a sleep diary is today. Even if you haven’t decided on a specific approach to managing your child’s sleep, any information you gather now will give you a head start in determining the best strategy. Additionally, noting your aims on the diary page can keep you focused on your goals, especially when tiredness and emotions threaten to derail your efforts.

Benefits of a Sleep Diary

A simple daily diary can teach you a lot and guide your child towards better sleep.

Here’s how a sleep diary can help:

Assess Sleep Adequacy: Determine if your child is getting enough sleep and if it’s occurring at the best times.
Track Progress: Whether you’re introducing a structured sleep program or making small adjustments to meal and nap times, a diary helps you see the impact of these changes.
Objectivity: With the bare facts, it’s easier to spot patterns and address them quickly, minimizing emotional bias.
Identify External Influences: See how activities outside sleep times affect your child’s sleep.
Evaluate Responses: Understand how your responses to your child’s sleep habits may help or hinder the situation.
Baseline Information: Use this data to assess changes in your child’s behaviour and your management of those changes.
Consistency: Helps you maintain consistency, which is crucial for establishing a routine.
Motivation: Small improvements in sleep habits can increase your motivation to continue with changes.
Professional Consultation: Provides valuable information for health professionals if you seek their advice.

Starting a sleep diary today can make a significant difference in understanding and improving your child’s sleep patterns.

This simple tool can provide insights, track progress, and help you remain objective and consistent in your approach, ultimately guiding your child towards better sleep and a healthier routine.

Written by Mandy Gurney RGN.RM.DipHV

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When feeling overwhelmed by tiredness and in need of real sleep help, Millpond’s ‘Teach Your Child to Sleep’ is a much welcomed, well researched resource. This is an easy read with a practical nurturing approach that walks you and your child through to a good night sleep.
Rozanne Hay, UK Representative and Director for Continuing Education IACSC International Association Of Child Sleep consultants
The Millpond approach is non-prescriptive and [their] book offers lots of choices for parents to match their own goals and parenting styles. I would heartily recommend it for anyone already experiencing problems with sleep or to set up good sleep habits proactively.
Melissa Hood, founder of The Parent Practice
This baby and child sleep guide is the perfect combination of accessible science, Mandy’s years of experience and a mother’s warmth. I love the way things fall into place with Mandy’s clear and thorough explanations!
Diana Hill, co founder of Essential Parent
Millpond’s brilliant blend of commonsense, encouragement and understanding – plus a highly logical strategy that is easy to implement – changed hell into heaven literally overnight. My entire family is thus indebted to Mandy and her team.
Freya North, Author
I am a GP and would recommend Millpond to any sleep deprived parents; you cannot put a price on sleep. Thank you so much. I only wish I hadn’t waited 19 months.
Vanessa, GP
We are so happy that we put our trust in you to help us with what has been a huge problem for our family for almost 2 years. We are finding time to relax and time for each other and I did not realise how much we missed this time.
Ben
As a family, we were sleep deprived. The tailored plan for our son made it personal. I am really pleased with what we’ve achieved during the programme and I am thankful to Juliet and Millpond.
Evrim.
We were at rock bottom. Our son has a neurological condition, so I was nervous and and wanted a sleep clinic who had experience of this and would adapt to the needs of our son. Our lives literally changed overnight!
Shurron
Within weeks our son was waking only once a night. The investment we made into Millpond was one of the best we’ve ever made. It gave my son a solid night sleep and consistency. It gave me and my husband our sanity back.
Shurron
I am delighted. I was aiming to go from 6+ wakes at night and feeding to sleep 100% of the time to 1-2 wake ups and some ability to self-settle. After doing the plan for less than 6 weeks my daughter started sleeping through the night.
Katie
My daughter is now having quite a bit more than the average sleep for her age and it’s lovely to see her waking up naturally. I’m also waking up naturally and feeling much more refreshed for having a regular sleep routine myself!
Louise
We are so happy we could jump for joy, we wish we had spoken to you ages ago. Using Millpond has built our confidence and made us feel on top of it at last. You really gave us some life back!
Sarah
I live in Switzerland so it is really quite remarkable that Millpond was able to help me over the phone and by email. When you have slept you can deal with anything!!
Melanie
We still can’t believe that such small changes have made such a difference to us and Alice. She has even slept through while on holiday in a travel cot.
Louise
We are just so sorry we did not get in touch sooner as we went through 18 months of no sleep.
Ann Marie
Thank you, thank you, thank you!! We never thought life could be improved so greatly. You showed us the light. Luka is much happier and loving his sleep now.!
Diane
Alex is sleeping beautifully again and is now quite happy to lay in his cot singing until 7.30/745 am ( Godsend!) and sleeps very happily through the night again. Thank you so much!
Sandy
Very happy to say that Joshua, who you helped us with, is now sleeping a regular 11 hours a night uninterrupted. In fact, getting him up some mornings is a real challenge!
John
Mandy has been an absolute saviour at a time which was starting to feel quite bleak in terms of our little one’s sleep. The personalised advice and guidance has been invaluable.
Mary
“My husband and I reached out to the Millpond Sleep Clinic when our son was 10 months old. We had spent months in vain trying a variety of sleep training tips that we had picked up online, in a desperate attempt to get our son to sleep for more than 2 hour stretches! Nothing seemed to work. I remember crying whilst breastfeeding for the 5th time one evening, desperately begging my little one to sleep. We felt like we had been failing for a long time, as my circle of mum friends had all got their babies sleeping through so much earlier. I needed to get more sleep, with the return to work looming ever closer.

When we called Millpond, we were quickly introduced to Juliet who immediately took the pressure off us by providing a detailed “plan of action” based on what she had heard about our son’s sleep routine. After just a few nights, we already started to see big sleep improvements, and we worked confidently towards reducing our son’s night wakings and the duration of his night feeds. After a couple of weeks we had gone from 4-5 night wakings to just 1… and a few weeks later, our son started to sleep through! The biggest relief ever.

Throughout the whole process Juliet had been knowledgeable, kind, reassuring and made herself available to answer our questions over email between our sessions. Her experience as a mother herself, and highly trained sleep professional shone through. We can’t thank you enough for helping us through a rough time – and seeing us through to better days (and importantly, nights!!)
Cheryl