Using baby blackout blinds as the evenings get lighter will help your baby produce melatonin. Melatonin plays a huge role in helping your baby get better sleep. It’s the sleepy hormone produced naturally by our bodies when the sun goes down and it sends messages to the body to sleep, so it’s super important to help our kids produce lots of this lovely natural hormone at bedtime. That’s why a dark environment will help your little one fall asleep more easily and stay asleep for longer. As summer approaches and the evenings get lighter it can add a new challenge to settling babies down for their sleeps. Below we discuss four easy ways to help babies produce melatonin at bedtime – the lovely (and very helpful!) sleepy hormone.
Four easy ways to help babies produce melatonin for a better night’s sleep
1. Get outside for at least an hour a day: Getting enough daytime light exposure helps set the body’s sleep clock and regulate the flow of hormones. Sunlight will help your baby produce melanin, which our bodies use in the evening to create melatonin.
2. Limit blue light exposure: Avoiding ‘blue’ light before bedtime is important as this disrupts the natural production of melatonin. Blue light includes screens from phones, televisions, tablets etc. And also, importantly, the sun itself, which gives off blue light.
3. Keep it dark: Ideally prepare a dark and sleepy environment for your baby for the hour before bedtime. As we move into summer in the UK and the evenings are getting lighter, using blackout blinds to block out the daylight is a great way to help your baby produce lots of melatonin when the sun’s still shining at bedtime. Eliminate all other forms of blue light and use dim lighting in their bedroom before sleep.
4. Evening breastmilk: Another natural source of melatonin is evening breastmilk, which contains small amounts of this bedtime hormone to help signal to babies that a night of long sleep is coming. It can therefore be helpful for breastfeeding mothers to maximise their own production of melatonin before bedtime – the more the mother has in their system the more can be passed into the milk. If you’re feeding your baby pre-pumped milk at night it’s best to use milk which was expressed on another evening as this will ensure it’s a lovely sleep-inducing milk.
But beware – conventional baby blackout blinds are toxic and contribute to indoor air pollution
Traditional baby blackout blinds are usually made from toxic PVC. Unfortunately, these have been found to give off thousands of harmful gases which contaminate your indoor air with dangerous chemicals like phthalates and vinyl chloride (to name just two!). This gets even worse when the blinds are heated up in a sunny window as PVC releases the most amount of toxins when hot.
To help keep your baby’s bedroom air clean and healthy, but also nice and dark, Pure Earth Collection designed organic blackout blinds which are the first totally natural blackout blinds on the market. Made without any PVC or toxic coatings, the fabric is 100% GOTS-certified organic cotton so they won’t leach chemicals into the air.
Pure Earth Collection organic blackout blinds
Super easy to put up and take down, they stick for days/weeks at a time without losing suction and they come in a handy travel bag for all your holidays and adventures. They’re used by thousands of happy customers around the world and have won multiple awards for design and functionality.
