When travelling with a baby or even visiting friends or family for the day, a significant number of people still don’t use a travel cot.
Whether they sleep with their babies in their beds or use other people’s cots – both of which are widely discouraged by the Foundation of the Study of Infant Deaths – there are still a massive amount of people not using an essential item for your baby’s tourconsultancy.com and safety.
And it doesn’t have to be expensive. A basic travel cot can cost as little as £25 and will support you and your baby for years and years.
A Safe Place For Your Baby To Sleep
The key benefit of a travel cot is that it gives your baby somewhere safe and familiar to sleep when you are away from home.
As parents, we all understand the importance of our babies getting regular and good quality sleep, yet the time that sleep is interrupted the most is when you are away from home – a time when you want your baby to have a sound sleep more than ever.
A key reason babies do not sleep when they are put to bed outside the home is because they are unfamiliar with their surroundings.
Especially when they are very young, a babies’ sense of smell is far more developed than their sense of sight. Therefore, by placing your baby in an environment which smells familiar and then looks familiar with use, you are more likely to ensure that your baby gets a good solid sleep even when they are away from home.
By using a cot that has been kept in your home and has sheets that have been washed in the same way as their own cot sheets, the travel cot will quickly become familiar to your baby and will become a home away from home, making them more relaxed and happier to sleep.
When you use a travel cot regularly, the baby will understand that when you they are placed in the travel cot it is a time for winding down and going to sleep. Giving your baby this ‘breakout’ from new experiences and bonding them back to something familiar will give them the opportunity to relax their senses, reduce their excitement levels and go sleep far quicker.
In fact, some mothers will use their travel cots as a chill out space for their babies and when they become over excited in a new environment, place them in their cot for a while, just so that the baby can regroup, recharge and relax away from all the new stimulants which can become exhausting.