By Taylor Kulik
Most mums who have spent any amount of time on the internet trying to figure out how to make their baby “sleep like a baby” have heard of the EASY routine. It stands for Eat, Activity, Sleep, and You time. Essentially, the routine is as follows: Baby wakes, baby eats, baby does an activity (play), baby sleeps, and then mama has time for herself. Then repeat several times throughout the day. Sounds EASY peasy, right?! If this routine worked perfectly for you, that’s amazing! For many parents, this is not so simple. I personally despise this routine, and I’ll tell you why.
On a personal level, my life revolved around this routine when my daughter was a newborn.
I thought this was THE routine babies are supposed to have, and that something was wrong if I couldn’t get my newborn to adhere to this schedule.
I was SO frustrated when I would have to wake her up after she nursed only to try to get my sleepy baby to play, and then rock my wide-awake baby to sleep! And God forbid I whip out my boob to try to get her to nap because that was just failure. Don’t even get me started on “lay the baby down sleepy, but awake.”
So why doesn’t this routine work? Well, for starters, it goes against the biology of our babies. Babies are not born with bad habits. It is not a mistake that your baby falls blissfully asleep while nursing. This is a normal, physiological response as a result of the hormones that are released through breastfeeding, and we should use it to our advantage because postpartum and motherhood is already hard enough! Why are we torturing ourselves by making this more difficult? Feeding to sleep is the biological norm.
