WTF? Where are my sleepy cues?

When I was just starting my daughter’s sleep training, as new parent, every book 📚 or sleep consultant on social media I checked (at least the ones I saw, and there were a lot) kept talking about baby tired cues or sleepy cues—those magical signs ✨ that your baby is tired enough to go to sleep without putting up much of a fight 💤, and that sounded wonderful! 🌟

Here is the list of some, by the way:

• Red eyebrows 😳

• Averts eyes/looks away 👀

• Decreased movement 🚼

• Blank stare 😐

• Big yawns 🥱

• Rubbing eyes 👶

• Rubbing or pulling on ears 👂

So, knowing what to look for, I was playing with my girl and kept trying to catch any of those slippery cues to help my baby sleep. But you know what? I don’t remember catching any of those cues on time until she turned almost two. Before, she would be slightly yawning (or maybe just silently screaming – A-A-A-A, because her dad keeps staring at her without blinking the whole time…) 😴 and rubbing her eyes (but for a second or a second and a half…) and I would be saying to myself — “Yes, got it, time to go to sleep,” but would end up fighting with her and eventually rocking her to sleep for a while. Or she would have a blank stare, again for a few seconds, some decreased movement (how do you even see that, really, on a baby who is 5 months old and not that active in a first place), and again those very subtle yawns, but that was 30 minutes after waking up… All of this was a mess! 🌀

And that’s what our naps and nights were: either she would fall asleep holding mummy’s breast 🤱, or in a car 🚗, or in my arms when I was rocking her while jumping on a gymnastics ball, slowly singing something (usually repeating some song I heard—“…I came in like a wreeeecking ball…” oh Miley, how did you end up in my mind…) on top of the white noise machine 🎶.

The sleepy cues were simply not working for us because they were very unreliable, and unreadable, so we had to rely mostly on wake windows, plus some random guesswork where my wife would come to me and say—“I think the baby is ready to sleep” or I would do the same when she was playing with our daughter. This evolved into keeping a very strict sleep journal/tracker (the best thing ever!) and allowed us to bring order to naps and night sleep 📝.

Then, when the number of attended baby sleep webinars, courses, and read books increased and I started helping with baby sleep in my local community, I actually saw that most babies do show those sleepy cues; they are easy to spot and you don’t have to turn on your inner Sherlock Holmes to find them. They are just there for you to identify and try to structure your day around them to have a balanced play and sleep ratio ⚖️.

At the end I guess the reason why I told all of this is to let you know that if you are struggling with sleep cues, don’t get obsessed or desperate trying hard to spot them. Or don’t get upset when you spot them, but your baby still doesn’t want to sleep. There is nothing wrong with you or your baby; sometimes, really, those cues are not there or they are there but not at the right time. It is all okay! The fact that you are trying so hard, already shows how fantastic of a parent or guardian you are! Have a minute to notice that your baby has their own thing going on, which is actually awesome!

Just to let you know, if you don't have baby sleep sheduler or a sleep tracker you can download them for free from Free resources section.