Cara Dumaplin explains why rigid baby sleep schedules backfire. Waking a baby after exactly one hour because a schedule says so ignores what the child actually needs. She recommends treating schedules as flexible guides that adapt to your baby's rhythms, not rules to follow strictly.
Can I tell you why I hate sleep schedules? For so long I was resistant to putting any on my blog, but parents are like, Cara, please, we just want sample schedules, give us sample schedules. So I put them there, but let me tell you why I hate them. Because I try to make them realistic. Like, okay, in this example, this baby napped for 1 hour. Okay, so now parents are going in and waking their baby up after an hour because that's what the schedule said. The schedules are there to guide you, but they aren't a prescription to follow exactly. What I'd rather you do is use the guidelines in each blog and then look at the sample schedule and go, "Oh, Cara took these guidelines and built it into a sample schedule. Okay, I know how to do that for my baby." We want to flex and flow to meet your baby's needs, not some arbitrary written schedule that we found on the internet. It's about meeting your baby right where they are.
