How to stick to SIDS advice and not go to bed at 7pm every night?!

[FlissyFloo]

I'm really confused by this and was hoping to hear how other people have approached this...
My ten week old DD has a bedtime routine which we start at 8.30pm so she's in bed at 9pm, which means DH and I go to bed then too! We would like to start moving this closer to 7pm, but honestly can't understand how people do this while sticking to the advice about baby sleeping in the same room as us. Surely if we keep her downstairs with us while we're eating/tidying up/watching TV then we can't keep things dark and quiet for her?!
What do you do/what did you do? Are we missing something obvious?!

I'm another who had ds sleeping in a cot in his own room from about 8 weeks. In the first few weeks he slept in his basket downstairs till we went to bed. However, after me not being able to sleep for dh snoring, ds snoring & the cat snoring he went in his own room.

If the situation had been different, him not been overcooked & born at the very last minute, good weight gain, a son of smokers etc etc, my decision may have been different.

Maybe, but cot death rates reduced by something massive like 75% when Back to Sleep came in. So I don't think that's one I'd personally mess around with.

bertiebotts
back to sleep did indeed have a huge effect,
because
HV s were empowered to stop people overheating their babies
and on their backs, even tiny babies can kick covers off

( when DS was tiny, I carried him around in a sling wearing only a vest during a heatwave. There were babies at the clinic in tights and bootees and hats and mittens - the poor things were broiling but the mums were obsessed with 'keeping the baby warm' .... as were their mums )

still never persuaded me to put either of my two on their backs

We put our twins to bed at around 6:30pm with a bedtime routine from around 6 weeks. They slept upstairs in cots in our bedroom for night and day sleeps. We had movement sensor monitors. I would go to bed around 8pm anyway so I could get some sleep to do the night feeds.

I think the whole sharing a room thing isn't just so you can hear them breathing (which obviously you can on a monitor) - I thought the point was the your own movement in bed would disturb the baby and stop them falling into too deep a sleep?

Sharing a room with your baby means they regulate their breathing to yours during the night.

Always put your baby feet to foot. When the human body stops breathing the instinct is to kick out. Connecting a foot to something shocks the body into breathing again.

You have to do what you feel is right.. baby monitors are a decent thing to have going.

Movement sensors and baby monitors won't stop your baby dying of SIDS. They should be in the same room as you for all naps and night time sleep.

100s of babies still die of SIDS every year - 70% of them have been left to sleep in a room on their own.

My nephew died of SIDS when he was 6 days old. The grief and horror of his death still affects me nearly a decade later. I wasn't prepared to take unnecessary risks with my own DDs life. The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths, the NHS and health visitors don't make up their guidelines for fun. They exist to prevent other babies dying needlessly. It's lovely some people ignored these guidelines and their babies came to no harm but it's not long to keep your little one close and safe in the grand scheme of things.

Kitty - I am very sorry for you loss, but fear you are being overly sensational here. SIDS has also affected co-sleepers and those sharing rooms with their dcs. It is also quite rare. Talkinpeace above was talking much sense when she identified what the risk factors really are. Like everything else in life, you have to balance risk with practicality. Scaremongering helps no-one.

I always understood that the feet to foot thing was that the baby couldn't get under the covers.

At the end of the day the best you can do is try to gather the information and make your own judgement.

You have to make decisions which suit your lifestyle while keeping your baby's safety at the centre of what you do.

We did a bedtime (bath, bottle, bed) from 4 weeks old purely for ourselves. It helped that dd was a very routine baby. However, we put her down in her Moses basket on the floor in the sitting room. She went down no problem and never woke as a result of the tv or light. She had meds and a bottle at about 10:30 then we would all go to bed. We did this until she was 5 months old when she no longer needed meds at night then she went straight into her cot.

I also had her in the Moses basket with me for naps during the day.

She slept through from ridiculously young but struggles to nap anywhere but in a very dark room. So a lot of the advice about teaching day and night and learning to sleep through noise doesn't necessarily follow.

Some babies simply won't sleep where there is light and noise. This is not the parents' fault and I don't believe it is possible (or fair) to try to train them to be able to.

The fact that 70% of cot death victims were in a room by themselves could simply be because 70% of ALL babies are put to bed in a room by themselves.

My baby won't sleep where there's noise and light and people doing things (unless she's being pushed in a pram or in a moving vehicle!!)
Since putting her upstairs to sleep at 7/8ish she sleeps so well and I have a much happier baby in the daytime!

It doesn't need to be dark and quiet , you are building a rod for your own back. Just keep her downstairs with you as normal.

Ours were usually in my or dh's arms, having been bf to sleep by me, or in the moses basket in the living room, until we went to bed, then they went into their bedside cot (i.e. one side open and joined on to our bed, which met all conditions for safe co-sleeping). We didn't do routines or dark silent rooms for baby sleep. (I also bf them to sleep until they were substantially over 2... they had a book first and eventually this did happen at more or less the same time every night, but that was as far as the fabled 'routine' went really).

I agree with MrsOakenshield - I do think that the closeness-to-a-parent thing is about some kind of symbiosis the baby enters even when asleep with whoever is near it (this, obviously, was usually me) and that it helps the baby's sleep to keep sufficiently light (mine has remained ridiculously light since those now far-off bf days, mind you ).

both my babies were 'flicky' in that just as they settled into sleep, all of their limbs would 'flick' and they would wake themselves up.
Once sleeping on fronts those flicks were into the matress and no longer woke them up.

The "foot to sleep" is indeed to stop them wiggling down under the covers.

Once poverty and maternal genetics factors have ben taken into account, overheating is THE risk factor ...

people my age grew up in houses without central heating and so were used to wrapping up more than we are today.
unlearning that habit was hard ....

Kitty : SIDS is indeed awful for the families involved but please read the data sets before leaping on one of the 49 criteria.
SADS is pretty awful too and even less understood.

soontobe seriously she won't sleep when there's things going on around her, she sleeps but constantly stirs. If she stirs and there's things going on, she wakes up (she's incredibly curious). If she stirs and there's nothing going on (light, noise, people) then she falls back to sleep. How is that making a rod for my own back?

We kept them downstairs until about 5 months. That was when the noise/ light started to keep them awake. From 5-6m we put we put them upstairs but we religiously checked them every 10 minutes. Like going into the room and putting hand in chest to check breathing until they were 6 months! Or some nights one of us would just stay in the room with them and watch the iPad.

Sorry to be blunt, but Talkinpeace is talking rubbish. Very little of the significant risk factors has to do with overheating - it's not actually known whether overheating is a risk factor for, or a consequence of, SIDS. Pretty much every point made is incorrect. For a potted history of our knowledge of sids risks (wrt sleep environment) see here.

SIDS is very rare, but it may be worth bearing in mind that SIDS risk factors have at least been scientifically established - unlike the 'need' to teach babies how to sleep, which is entirely anecdotal.

We accidentally left the Moses basket in front of the sub woofer speaker for the telly when dd was tiny. She slept right through incredibly loud bangs and crashes and the telly flashing away.

However, now she will only sleep in the dark. The basis we gave her when tiny made no difference so no rod there.

Passmethecrisps
read www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1052037/
and then apologise.

Me? Eh?

Um - are you talking to me Talkin? I have read that, and can't see anything to back up your argument sorry.
And no I won't be apologising - It has been my job to know this stuff for over a decade, and therefore I have read (and understood) the majority of relevant literature on the subject.

Overheating may be a risk factor, but as I say it's certainly not the most important, and causality is not established.

I rarely chip into these threads but the sheer level of misinformation in your posts spurred me into action. Parents need to make informed choices, and I would hate for parents to make their decisions based on such incorrect and ignorant advice.

And while you're looking up links from the '80s, I'd love to see the paper in which risks were ranked as per your earlier post "the top ten risk factors are ALL to do with poverty
the next five are to do with maternal age and nutrition
if I remember right, sleeping on back or front was around risk factor 29".

My son was cluster feeding every evening until he was approx 3 months so he was with us downstairs till about 9pm then he would go to bed with me.

Once he started following a routine he would go to bed in his cot at about 7.30pm and I would then follow him and sleep with him at 9pm.

We also had a video monitor. When he was about 4/5 months I would start the night with him and then go into the main bedroom with my partner halfway through the night. Slowly that became all night so he never realised I was missing.

He is a beautiful sleeper.

Because now you will always have to be quiet/ in the dark when she needs to sleep. If babies are used to noise from newborn they will sleep.
It's fine if you are happy to be in the dark / quiet but it sounds like you are looking for solutions.