While your nightstand may be overflowing with books about pregnancy and birth, you may want to add a baby sleep book to that stack, too. Getting the sleep facts of life before your baby arrives on the scene can help you to be a more rested new parent. Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

Top Seven Strategies for Preventing Baby Sleep Problems

1. Try to get your newborn to bed when he is sleepy but not overtired.
2. Use the power of daylight to reset your newborn’s sleep-wake clock.
3. Provide your newborn with a sleep environment that is sleep enhancing, not sleep inhibiting. Make sure your newborn’s sleep environment is safe, too.
4. Start thinking about how you’re gradually going to teach your baby self-soothing skills. (You want to start teaching your baby these skills by the time he is three- to four-months of age—the time when babies are capable of learning about sleep associations.)
5. Think about how you’re going to ease your newborn into a more regular sleep and nap schedule. (Pay attention to his evolving sleep-wake rhythms and you’ll start to see patterns start to emerge.)
6. Avoid highly stimulating forms of activity right before bedtime or your newborn may be too wound up to go to sleep.
7. Don’t forget to practice good sleep habits (don’t overdo it with the caffeine or the alcohol, particularly close to bedtime; and make sure you’re getting enough physical activity to be physically tired at the end of the day) and make sleep a priority for yourself, too.

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Your baby didn’t come packaged with an owner’s manual, but her body language can tell you plenty, including what she wants and needs from you. Some of those early body signals are hard-wired—more instinctual than intentional—but as grows little older she’ll use her body language to communicate a whole lot more. Here’s a quick guide to baby body language.

“One moment my one month old will be almost asleep. Then suddenly, for no reason at all, she’ll fling her arms and legs out and start wailing.”

Your baby is startling in response to a noise or a movement. Try blocking out some of the background noise (a white noise machine works amazingly well) and swaddling your baby in a light-weight blanket so she’ll be less likely to startle herself awake. By the time your baby is five or six months old, your baby will have outgrown this particular reflex and sleeping more soundly.

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