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Home › Articles › Feeding Baby › On a Schedule

On a Schedule

Does Baby Need Structure or Freedom?

By Shannon McKelden

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

Training a child to wait for gratification can begin at about 6 months, says Lyons. "But it doesn't have to include scheduling a child's life," she says. "I'm not saying that children should never be allowed to wait, but I'm saying that babies are smarter than adults, with the adults' learned disregard for their bodies' needs and cycles. If a baby cries for food or falls asleep, that is the chosen and needed cycle the baby should follow."

What Does the Expert Say?
"Scheduling is not an either/or proposition but more a question of finding balance between a baby's needs, their temperament and your lifestyle," says Lisa Speigel, co-director of Soho Parenting in New York City. "Your baby will have different needs as she grows over the first year. This developmental perspective is a helpful guide in making decisions about how much structure your baby needs."

Spiegel, who wrote A Mother's Circle: An Intimate Dialogue on Becoming a Mother (The Soho Parenting Center, 2004) with her Soho Parenting co-director, Jean Kunhardt, says in the first two months, some babies will wake up after three hours like clockwork and be hungry. "Some babies are more irregular; they eat, sleep, poop and cry with no seeming rhythm or rhyme," she says."Most babies have elements of both. In the early weeks your baby is just getting used to being out of the womb and needing to regulate such important processes as eating, handling stimulation and sleep." Following Baby's lead will make him as comfortable as possible.


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