Alexis Dubief writes Troublesome Tots, a website about ending bedtime drama for babies. She was excited to share four tips for parents of multiples to help everyone get a better night sleep.
Four tips to a better night’s sleep for twins
Read up on preemies. Since multiples tend to be born a bit early, neurologically they may be a little undeveloped at birth. Thus, they respond REALLY well to swaddling and mimicking a womb-like environment. They may need to be swaddled all the time for the first few weeks and that is TOTALLY OK to do.
Find a schedule that suits your family. Generally, with multiples, the concept of “on demand” feeding needs to go out the window pretty quickly. The babies will need to learn how to eat and sleep at the same time for you and your partner to stay sane. After about 2-4 weeks of feeding them on demand, work toward getting them on the same page. Baby #1 seems hungry, then baby #2 is offered a meal too. The same goes true for naps and sleeping. In the long run, syncing their schedules will be worth it.
Use two baby swings. I recommend the Fisher Price Papasan swings to my clients. Having one baby who wakes frequently at night is rough but when you have two you could literally never get any sleep. I’ve worked with moms of nine month old twins who were quivering bowls of jello from the night time shuffle. Baby swings can be powerful tools to help get babies on the same nap schedule and to minimize night wakings. Here is more information about swings as a baby sleep aid. Multiples tend to do especially well with swings since preemies often thrive on motion.
[Editor's note: We believe in borrowing equipment like swings until you know if it works for your baby, so put your credit card away and ask your Facebook friends and neighbors if anyone has an infant swing you can test for the first six weeks.]
Turn on the white noise. Loud white noise (50 db) will go a long way towards helping to keep them from waking each other up at night. Most twins do share a room and they do just great.
I found a great article on sleep training twins based on my favorite sleep guru Dr. Marc Weissbluth (author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Twins: A Step-by-Step Program for Sleep-Training Your Multiples), but it didn’t really address the issue of crying twins waking each other in the same crib or bedroom.
If you’re already beyond the first four to six months of twin parenting, how did you sleep train two babies in the same crib or in the same room?
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Thanks to Alexis Dubief for participating in Twins Week with her advice for sleepy parents. After two sleepless babies put her through the wringer, she used her professional skills as a researcher to pull the most current medical and academic research on newborns, babies, and sleep to provide evidence-based practical solutions to tired families.
[photo by Sarah Hubbell of Water Water Everywhere]
There are many of the early days that I forget but I can’t forget the sleep stuff! These are great tips. (The sound machine was a brilliant invention.) Some to add from my memory bank:
* We started sleep training at 4 months when after the night when we were up every hour with one or the other. Pacifiers were popping out, swaddles were no longer working. We moved to a) halo sleep blankets for each boy b) dropped the pacifiers c) fortified our bedtime routine (specific elements, very consistent) and endured one challenging night. We used both the Ferber book and the Weissbluth book. I am grateful to report I’ve got happy, healthy 7 year olds who still share a room and sleep like champs.
* We used one of the Graco portable cribs for separating the boys during naps. One got his bed, the other got the portable in our bedroom.
* Black-out shades were critical (and remain so) for keeping the room really dark.
* I’m sure there were folks (relatives we visited, etc.) who thought we were obsessive about the sleep routine. We were really committed to being consistent and in some ways, having twins made it easier to pass on events that well-meaning relatives wanted us to do, etc. We could just say “Oh, you know, gotta get those boys to bed!” It would have been harder to resist with a singleton. But Weissbluth makes great points about the importance of sleep (and that sleep begets sleep) and our boys have — at least anecdotally — proven that to be true.
Lastly, there were some rough moments in the early months and much of it was due to sleep deprivation. A parent of a singleton introduced me to the concept of setting 15 minute intervals for goals. And sometimes, 15 minutes was about as far out as I could think or imagine without getting overwhelmed. And if you string enough 15 minute intervals together, you’ve got a whole new day.
Good luck!
My babies were not premies…oh my gosh, they would have stayed in there forever, they were huge! 6 and 6.5 lbs. at 37 weeks. Regardless, the nurses in the hospital made sure they were on a schedule before we left, so when we got home, it was easy to keep them eating and sleeping at the same time.
We also followed Dr. Weisbluth (I did the same with my 1st two children), and we woke them to eat together, put them down at the same time. Of course, like tonight, one was tired earlier, so we kept the other one up, but for the most part, they do everything at the same time. Thank God…on the days they are off schedule, which trust me, is few and far between, it’s a nightmare!
Always, always, always sleep them and feed them at the same time from the minute they are born. Some flexibility is OK…you have to do what works for each baby, but the important thing is to keep them scheduled. I wasn’t a big believer in schedules until we put my 1st born on one, and I learned why it is so important, for both the babies and us!
Oh, and funny thing is that my boys don’t like to be touched. I was so surprised by this…we kept them together thinking they would sleep better, but when we finally put them in their own cribs at 3 months, they slept through the night…it was crazy! Even now, they don’t like the other to touch, so we have to keep them separated. It’s so funny.
Another great book is the Happiest Baby on the Block, which she talks about a lot of the same tips above: 5 S’s: Suck, Swaddle, Swing, Shhhh, I always forget the 5th.
Good luck new twin mamas!
One more thing, we cannot check in too often to let the babies learn the new skills to be independent.
I’m convinced that the person who said “never wake a sleeping baby” didn’t have multiples! For close to the first year, if one of my boys woke for a feed, I woke and fed the other one too. I’d always, always put them both down for a nap at the same time, too. They shared a cot from around 3 months until around 7 months, and they seemed to really enjoy it – after every nap/sleep, I’d find they had both wriggled into the middle of the cot and were snuggling up to each other
My twins are 11 months old. I read all the books and tried anything to get them to sleep (and me some sleep).
The truth is some of that stuff helps but it eventually comes together on its own. My boys BOTH sleep through the night now.
We do have a bedtime song we sing WHENEVER it’s time to sleep and they do sleep better in their own cribs than anywhere else.
Good luck!
My twin girls are 18 months old (today!) and still sleep together in the same crib.
My oldest is 15, and my youngest was nearly 6 when the twins were born, so I was hardly a Rookie Mom. . .however the twins sent me right back into Rookie Momdom!
What I did know, was that sleep training just does not work for my kids. I know that they nurse, they nurse well, they nurse a lot and then never sleep through the night in the first year.
Strangely, that was comforting. I was not shocked when the twins were up a lot. I never woke a sleeping twin. I had the luxury of being a full time stay at home mom with my older kids in school during the day. I could catch cat naps in the day. The twins rarely napped at the same time that first year, and that was OK too. . .I had time to bond with each one alone.
That being said, all six of my kids have great sleep habits now. At 18 months the girls take a 2-3 hour nap together every afternoon and then they go to bed promptly at 7 with no drama and sleep for 12 or more hours. Yes, I could have worked on getting that schedule sooner, but it would have been a lot more pressure for me. By keeping things flexible I was able to exclusively breastfeed both babies, never have to pump, and they nursed for 17 months. I think scheduling twins can be the death knell of breastfeeding relationships. It just gets to be too hard.
I know that not everyone has the luxury of being home with the twins in that first year, but not working outside the house really took the pressure off!
I’ve written a few blog posts about twins and sleep. I write a weekly feature called My Life With Twins, and twin mamas can, and should come and link up every week.
This is about my journey towards my current sleep practices :http://dakotapam.com/2010/10/15/mom-skills-doing-twins-need-sleep/
This is a more recent blog post about twins and co-bedding. http://dakotapam.com/2011/06/27/life-twins-sleeping-arrangements-linky/
I’m enjoying twins week! Thanks!
@DakotaPam
Everybody should read the links up there. The first (I’ll relink here):
http://dakotapam.com/2010/10/15/mom-skills-doing-twins-need-sleep/
And the co-bedding pictures on the second link are FANTASTIC
Alexis
What a great post! I agree that it’s especially important to swaddle when you have multiples. Many of them are preemies, as you mention, and quality sleep is especially necessary for premature babies and their parents… and it can be harder to come by when you have twins! I have found an awesome product for swaddling—TrueWomb. http://www.TrueWomb.com Instead of wrapping your baby up like a burrito, this swaddle allows your babies to position themselves exactly like they were in the womb! Its arm pouches let them move their little arms up and down, but not out, and its leg pouch is small and stretchy. Babies can kick out and the pouch returns their feet to the fetal position. It soothes and comforts them in the most natural way possible—by mimicking the womb! Love it!!!
We have twin girls who are turning 14 weeks this Wednesday and let me say that things do get easier. My husband and I read most of Dr. Weisbluth’s book and also read a book called Babywise (generally the premise is you feed baby, spend wake time with baby and then put baby down for sleep each cycle). Our girls started sleeping through the night (i.e. 6 hours) around 10 weeks and around 11 to 12 weeks they started giving us between 7 to 9 hours a night. I cannot stress enough how much keeping to a schedule helped us as well as keeping both girls on the same schedule. I also think that there is just some pure luck involved as well in that we were blessed with really good girls!
Thanks for the “twin week” information! Loving it!
I wrote about getting my twins to sleep on my blog, here:
http://www.multiplerealitiesblog.com/2012/09/sleep.html
For us, it wasn’t just “sleep when the babies sleep” because I also had a two-year-old when my twins were infants, and my older daughter needed me to be awake during the day.
For all the twin parents out there… it keeps getting better! Hang in there!
Jenn, multiple realities blog