How old should a baby be before you should start implementing a routine?
You can start that right from the moment you get home. Just don’t expect it to be perfect for a while. You can overlay your routine, but it will be a long many years before the child reliably cooperates. Some kids are easier than others, but that doesn’t mean you should have a consistent routine. I know my experience was different from most mom’s, as I had a terribly ill infant. We started giving her a routine right from the start. Bedtime was being fed, a warm bath, warm clean jammies, a story and bed, right from the beginning. Because my child had a combination of being deathly sick and being incredibly hard-headed, it was three years before I could count on actual sleep following that routine. I didn’t find out until she was almost two that she had terrible reflux, as a consequence of her stroke, and that she was in terrible pain every time we laid her down. So most nights she slept on my chest while I sat up in a chair. It was three years before she began to sleep reliably in a bed
