Explore & Develop pairs up with Tresillian to safeguard sleep for little ones

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) provider Explore & Develop recently engaged Tresillian’s Professional Practice and Innovation Centre to deliver ‘Safe Sleep and Responsive Settling for Infants and Toddlers’ training to educators.

Conducted by Tresillian Clinical Nurse Specialist Janice Wright, the session built on the highly regarded reputation of Tresiilian as the ‘go to’ place for specialist parenting advice, offering guidance to parents  on baby’s sleep and settling, feeding and toddler/preschooler behaviour, along with supporting parental mental health.

Central to the training was developing educator awareness of tired signs, which when attuned to allow for a baby to be settled gently to sleep before they become overtired. Once a baby is overtired they can be unsettled and not feed well or enjoy play and social times. 

Looking for tired signs can be confusing for educators and parents alike, because they can easily be mixed up with ‘I just need a break’ cues. If this happens, new parents or less experienced educators can accidentally put the baby to bed when they’re not ready, which can then cause problems settling them.

As noted in Tresilian guide The First Three Months when educators or parents mix up baby’s state of consciousness, it risks interrupting their sleep by getting them up to feed or socialise when they aren’t ready. The result can be that the baby comes physiologically disorganised. When that happens, the baby’s behaviour becomes disorganised as well and they’ll show this by becoming tired, grumpy and may not feed well.

Critical to the success of the training programme was also the development of educator understanding of infant and toddler development which is used along with the Tresillian Sleep Formula and baby’s non-verbal cues to determine whether a baby is tired and ready for bed.

To contextualise this learning for the recent ‘Safe Sleep and Responsive Settling for Infants and Toddlers’ workshop and the world of ECEC Ms Wright focused on: 

• Current recommended practices in safe sleep and responsive settling for infants and toddlers
• Re-thinking tired signs, responsive settling strategies and when and how to intervene with sleep difficulties.

To learn more about safe sleep in ECEC please see here.