I am a night owl about to have a baby

[tilda0]

My partner and I are both night owls and freelancers. We never manage to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier. I am a bit concerned because I don't baby to be dragged into this bad routine. Is he going to impose his routine and help us into an earlier routine? I know it will be hectic in the first place but I hope we won't be able to go to bed as late as now.

Also, we currently live in the North of Europe where the daylight is weird: very light in the winter and a lot of light in the summer. Could this affect the baby? (I am not from there and it does affect my sleeping pattern)

Thanks for your input!

Initially you'll likely be too exhausted to care (assuming you aren't working and don't have to stick to those hours, if your partner is and they disrupt your sleep, you might have to sleep apart for a bit). When I had my first, within a few days I was going to sleep at 7pm every night (normally would have gone to bed 10-11pm), waking at 10 for a feed, and then back to bed, and getting up at 6am. I did probably normally get up by 7am ish (at the time I worked from home, but I wasn't someone who usually slept past about 8am, maybe 9am even on the weekends). Babies tend to wake early, so if you're sensible and you value your sanity, you will adjust to get as much sleep as you can. It completely changes your schedule.

I found it was quite an adjustment at first, but it becomes the new normal. I do have friends who tended to keep their babies up with them until 10-11pm and then go to bed and sleep later. But in the long run, I think the problem with that (and they eventually really struggled with it) is that you then never get adult time together. So while you may get to sleep in until 8-9am in the morning, your baby is always with you and you don't have time to devote to each other. I really valued my evenings (not the least when you go back to work and you freelance because you need that time), so an early bedtime has always been a priority. I was willing to go to bed a bit earlier and get up earlier if it meant we carved out 2 hours alone most nights.

Well first of all, I think it's only a bad routine if it doesn't work for you! Nothing wrong with being a night owl.

Well certainly the first few months you may be taking all the opportunity possible to sleep, so you may find yourself going to bed earlier than now. It depends a lot on your baby's sleep patterns, and how much you are going to want and are able to influence them. Many parents swear by a strict routine, you'll quickly find yourself going to bed earlier if you're up at 6 everyday! You might find though your baby is also a night owl, mine definitely is. She's 16 months and she's never gone to bed earlier than 9.

I've known people get their children into extremely variable sleep routines and they've all survived. There's usually some difficulty with most of them. The early to bed ones struggle to get kids to sleep on summer evenings. The late to bed ones struggle to adjust when school comes around. I think it's easiest to fit roughly into local convention as otherwise your social life suffers, but that depends on the child.

Newborns have their own way anyway.

Newborns don't know day from night anyway, it's just a question Health Visitors ask to see how close you are to hitting the next person who asks if the baby sleeps well😁. You only really need to worry when they start having their own demands, so say if they are in nursery and have to be there at 8 then they will need an earlier night.

You won't have a routine for a while, just an endless repeating cycle of feed-burp-change-sleep. You'll sleep whenever you get a chance (which is unlikely to be very often - if you're getting four to six broken hours out of twenty four then you're doing ok).

I like to stay up late and sleep late too. We have to get up for work at 5:30, which means 16mo DS gets up at around 6:30-7 at weekends as well as on weekdays. It's fine, we've adjusted. But TBH if we put him down later, he'd sleep later, and during school holidays he sometimes sleeps til 9. I don't know if that's what other babies are like.

It's all good, you'll manage, but it's really down to the baby

I'm a night owl and my DD ended up being a night owl too (I tried to get her into a normal baby routine, didn't work, she was naturally a night owl) which was fine when she was a baby and toddler but not so great when she needed to actually be up in the mornings but she has gradually adjusted (although switches back to her normal night owl state when it's the holidays if I let her)

I'm in the North of Europe too and the light does affect things, much harder to get her to sleep in the summer and easier in the winter.

My sister is like this, my DNephew and DNeice both go to bed late and get up late, always have. In fact nephew just slept all the time, I remember having him overnight at about 9 months and he slept from 9pm to 9am...

For babies as long as they’re getting enough sleep it doesn’t matter when. They don’t know night and day or the social conventions that say when you’re meant to sleep. As long as you’re all happy it doesn’t matter. Once you get to nursery/school age you might all have to adjust though.