The Perfect Baby Sleep Environment: 7 Foundational Tips Every Parent Should Know

Your baby's sleep environment has a HUGE impact on their sleep and sets them up for sleep success. Even more than this, it should be considered carefully for optimal safety. 

If you're pregnant, these 7 tips will help you set up your baby's environment from the get go, but if your wonderful (but sleepless) little bundle is already earthside, keep reading to see if any of these could be adjusted…

1. Check the safety of their sleep space. 

There are SO many sleep products that are marketed for babies but unfortunately they are not all safe or SIDS recommended. Nests, pods, cocoons, bouncers, inclined sleepers, infant pillows, cot bumpers, sleep wedges and hammocks are all deemed unsafe. The safest place for your newborn to sleep is in their own clear, flat and firm sleep space, on their back, in the form of their own bassinet/crib or cot. Room sharing is recommended but not bed sharing. 

For more information on safe sleep space and SIDS, read my blog post here. You can also read about my top low tox products for children’s bedrooms here. 

2. Keep their sleep environment dark. 

In the very early weeks, your baby will likely be able to sleep anywhere, even under bright lights due to the lingering maternal melatonin from the placenta. From around 3 weeks, however, babies start to wake up as this wears off. To optimise their own production of melatonin, avoid excessively bright lights from sundown, even in their living spaces, bathroom etc. When putting them down for the night, the space should be as dark as possible, with just enough light to see each other. If you are waking in the middle of the night to feed, keep the space dim and clear of blue light. For day naps, use blackout blinds, or at the minimum, blinds down. My favorite lights to use are blockbluelight.com. Furthermore, even a small amount of sunlight creeping in in the early hours of the morning may cause your baby to start waking up excessively early, so black out blinds are also a great option.

3. Keep the room temperature between 18-20 degrees Celsius (65-68 Fahrenheit). 

If your baby is too hot or cold this will greatly challenge their sleep — think how you feel with suffocatingly hot blankets or clothing, or being shivery cold in the night. Having inconsistent temperatures also can make it hard to know what to dress your baby in or how many layers to use. If you don't have a set room temperature, just being able to take the temperature of the room will help to guide you with what sleeping bags/swaddles to use (*generally babies need one more layer than adults do.) 

4. Use white noise. 

Your baby went from being in the womb where there was constant and loud noise so it is unsettling to then start sleeping in silence. White noise masks the sounds of older children, dishes clanking or loud sudden noises, and also creates a strong sleep association that can also be taken from the bedroom to the car to the pram. 

Play the white noise as loud as you need to if your baby is crying, in order to match the pitch, and adjust the noise down as they settle. Once settled, the noise should be about as loud as a running shower. 

5. Ideally, don't use a baby monitor.

Baby monitors can emit extreme amounts of electromagnetic fields and often they are placed very close to their heads. The effect of EMFs on children's developing brains is not a new concept, but one that is hard to validate due to limitations and ethics in research. It is however known that high amounts of EMF’S are linked to not only poorer sleep outcomes, but impaired cognition, development and even cancer.

If you must use a monitor, keep it as far away from your baby as possible, use it on the lowest setting and choose one that is deemed as low EMF as possible (but beware of clever marketing). 

Some studies on this topic can be found here, here, here, and here.

6. Create a consistent bedtime routine.

Calming and consistent bedtime routines help all of our sleep and we all tend to develop them. For babies and small children, it's the message that it's ‘time’ to calm down and settle. 

An ideal bedtime routine consists of dinner, followed by a bath or shower, followed by story time, and another feed if your baby is still breast or bottle feeding. 

I suggest doing the reading in the bedroom so it's an easy shift from here into the bed, and the space is already dimmed and free of distractions. Keep the room free of screens to avoid the blue light exposure and noise stimulation. Putting on the white noise softly, even while reading will further cue your baby into settling and sleep. 

7. Turn your wifi modem off at night. 

Do this especially if anyone's bedroom is close to the modem. Remember, distance matters. Ideally, keep the modem in the garage, as this means less distance for everyone, but even then, to reduce the frequency down to an absolute zero, it needs to be turned off. 

The IGNIR (International Guidelines on Non-Ionising Radiation 2021) recommend an exposure of <100 microwatts per square metre (uW/m2) for day and <10 uW/m2 for night.

To put this into context, we had a building biologist come to our house for a full electromagnetic audit. The wifi modem, which is in our garage, yielded 48 uW/m2. When the wifi was off and all devices were off or on flight mode (note the devices are not in our bedroom), the reading was 0.07uW/m2. So with wifi on, we are outside the recommendations for sleep, but with wifi off, we are fine. Our master bedroom is approximately 12-15 metres from the modem. 

Compare this to the readings in the garage with the wifi on, of 9085 uW/m2 (extreme!!!!). The kitchen, which is the closest room to the wifi modem, was 870.

So now, whenever possible and especially at night try to reduce this load wherever possible and enable our bodies to repair optimally throughout the night. 

For more information on wifi and EMF’S:

https://buildingbiologyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/EMR_Factsheet_v2.0r.pdf