Why tracking your child’s patterns can be a game-changer for their sleep

Kensey Butkevich of Sleep Easy Clinic is a Certified Child Sleep Consultant and Board Certified Behavior Analyst. She uses a developmental approach in supporting your child’s sleep and behavior needs based on evidence-based strategies. She offered to share a clinical perspective on the importance of tracking baby’s daily patterns for improving sleep and health. Thanks, Kensey!

Can you remember what you ate for dinner yesterday? What about a week ago? How about a month ago? If you answered no, you’re not alone. The reality is our memory of events fades fairly quickly, especially when we’re sleep-deprived. 

Going to the doctor for wellness checks can be overwhelming. With the number of questions they ask you, your days can blend together and you forget what your child’s typical patterns really are. We use apps to help track our own daily behavior such as weight, sleep, exercise, daily use of our phone (i.e., Fitbit, Apple watch, etc.) which can aid us to know if we need to change what we’re doing to support ourselves. Likewise, tracking our infant’s sleep, nutrition, and diapers helps provide us information that we may otherwise forget or miss. It can help guide the decisions we make for our baby and the decisions our healthcare providers make for our baby as well.

As parents, we have an ever-growing to-do list; remembering what time the last feeding was or what time the baby went to sleep can be easily lost. Parent mental load is real and taxing.

Our baby’s daily patterns are important to determine if they are receiving enough nutrition as well as knowing if how we’re supporting their sleep is working for them or not. With the chaos of parenthood, we can get caught up in what’s coming up and what we haven’t done yet; knowing how many urines and bowel movement outputs may not be our top priority, but it is important.  

The benefits of tracking:

• Sleep: 

  • You can determine if the supports you are providing are working or not

  • You can see patterns to know when they’re typically going down for sleep and waking

  • You can see when sleep starts to change due to progressions or stressors (i.e., medication, illness, siblings, etc.)

  • You can see their sleeping information live when others are watching them - yes, mama, you must have your time!

  • Help to know if you need to adjust wake windows based on length of sleep

• Nutrition

  • Track how long and often they are feeding

  • See how often when they wake at night they are feeding 

  • See how many outputs to know if they are getting enough ounces for food

• Other

  • Medication - know when medication was administered

Tracking our infant’s behavior helps us to see relationships between what we’re doing and how our infant may respond. It helps guide us in making significant decisions, such as increasing the number of feedings or reaching out to our doctor or sleep consultant. Also, tracking can help make you more confident in your decisions knowing what is working and what is not. With the Talli, you’re just pushing a button - that’s it! The Talli does everything else for you such as inputting the information immediately and graphing it so you can easily see patterns within seconds. You can show this information to your healthcare provider and team and have peace of mind knowing that their information is accurate and provides a correct portrayal of what is happening with your infant.

Tracking information for your infant does not have to be difficult, but it is important to help guide us and give us peace of mind that what we’re doing is working or allowing us to know more quickly when we need to reach out for support.