The best way to make sure that you have a baby that sleeps well is to develop consistent routines that create good habits as this is the key to successful sleep patterns.
If your baby associates particular activities with sleep such as feeding, bathing and burping at the same times every day then it will become a lot easier for sleep to come naturally as you will be helping to develop the habit of sleep.
Other factors that will help to induce the right sleep patterns are for you to put your baby down for sleep in the same locations each day or night.
This is another way of developing habit patterns and it also makes it easier on the child as they will be in familiar surroundings when they awake each time.
Familiar sounds can also help to induce sleep and you should always make the lead up to sleep a calm and happy time for your baby as the results will be far more effective.
Once you settle on a pattern that seems to be working stick with it and try to improve upon the results that you get rather than jumping from one technique to another to get your baby to sleep as this will only add confusion and make sleep time more difficult.
The more that the same pattern is followed the more effective it will become and the easier it will be to get your baby off to sleep each night or even during the day if you develop patterns for daily naps.
You need to persevere with setting the scene for sleep as it will get easier the more you do it.
While it might seem a bit of an ordeal initially the benefits will far outweigh the time it takes finding the right balance in your child’s pre-sleep regime.