Help Your Newborn with “The Witching Hour”
The early days with a newborn can be a big adjustment for everyone but have you ever noticed that the evenings are often the most difficult time of day?
You may have thought your child would need to go to bed at 7 or 8 only to find yourself rocking, bouncing, cuddling, feeding, and walking all evening only to have your baby finally fall asleep at 11 or 12.
If this sounds familiar, you may have been experiencing "the witching hour".
Fortunately, you can start implementing some strategies right away to make things better. Let's go over what can be done to avoid the witching hour and make evenings with your baby more peaceful.
What Is the Witching Hour?
The witching hour is the period of time from 5:00pm to almost midnight when your infant is cranky. Often it can involve your baby resisting sleep and, despite the name, it typically lasts longer than an "hour"!
First of all, the witching hour is normal.
It does not mean your baby has colic or reflux or gas. It does not mean you are failing as a parent.
Evening fussiness and irritability is often part of the newborn experience and, while there are things we can do to help (see below), we can’t always make it go away completely. Developmentally, there are a lot of changes happening in their little body—so let’s cut them some slack and acknowledge the learning curve here for both parents and child.
Here’s what to do to lessen the hardship of the witching hour.
step 1. Avoid Overtiredness
As our baby's tiredness accumulates throughout the day, they can become inconsolable and un-put-down-able by dinner time.
The problem is newborns may not always look tired, but they have very limited stamina and before you know it, it’s time for their next nap. Newborns need to nap every 30-60 minutes (and yes, that includes feeding time)!
Your baby may often fall asleep while feeding (especially if they’re overtired or if you feed for longer than 15 minutes) but those feeds will be fuller and naps will be longer, if you make sure feeds are part of your baby’s awake time.
step 2. focus on morning naps
All day long you’ll cycle through awake times that involve feeds, diaper changes, and playtime before you offer them a nap. Repeat until bedtime. By offering naps regularly throughout the day and honoring awake windows, the evenings will be much smoother.
The most important naps of the day are the first few so focus on giving your baby good morning naps, ideally in your baby’s bed.
If you’d like to learn more about how to help your newborn sleep well in their own bed, check out the Newborn Sleep Shaping Guide to give you the steps to make sleep easy for your new baby.
When the going gets tough later in the day, use your tools! Rocking, patting, pacifiers, swaddling, etc and you can always resort to naps on-the-go in the stroller, car seat, carrier or infant swing later in the day.
STEP 3: START A BEDTIME ROUTINE
The third step to conquering the witching hour with your newborn is to implement a bedtime routine. It’s never too early to establish a simple routine to cue your baby that sleep time is coming soon.
Everybody loves to know what’s expected of them, including your newborn!
A great bedtime routine for a newborn could look like this:
IDEAL NEWBORN BEDTIME ROUTINE
Bath or wipe down (5 minutes)
Diaper change, massage, PJs (5 minutes)
Feeding (10-15 minutes)
Book (2 minutes)
Into bassinet or crib
From the start of their life, a bedtime routine for your newborn is incredibly powerful because it teaches them these steps in this order mean bedtime is next.
Once this routine is established you might find that the bath begins to have more of a calming effect than it used to. A good routine allows all of us to relax and go with the flow a little more.
If you want to be proactive with your new baby’s sleep and even avoid the need to sleep train later on, be sure to check out my newborn program here so that you and your newborn can both get the rest you need.
Your Pediatric Sleep Consultant,
Sierra