About
Why Siestina exists
Because at 3 a.m. you are not looking for a method. You are trying to understand what is happening.
Who is behind Siestina
Baptiste S.
Father of two, aged 2 months and 4 years. Creator of Siestina.
I have two children. The eldest is 4, the little one 2 months — so I am right in the middle of it as I write this. With the first, I tried more or less everything out there: the gentle methods, the less gentle ones, the contradictory advice from everyone around us, the apps at £10 a month.
What eventually worked comes down to one thing nobody had explained to me: understanding what actually happens in the head of a baby falling asleep. The day I understood you had to wait twenty minutes before putting him down, the nights changed. Not thanks to a method — thanks to a piece of information.
Siestina is the tool I wish I had had when the first one was born. Free, no account, no method waiting to be sold at the end. Just the information, shown clearly.
One important point: I am not a doctor, a paediatrician or a sleep consultant. I am a parent who has read a great deal. Everything Siestina shows comes from the paediatric literature, and the sources are cited at the bottom of every page. For anything that worries you about your child, your doctor comes before this website.
What I learned too late
With my first, I spent months doing the same thing every evening: getting him to sleep in my arms, laying him gently in his cot, and watching his eyes open within a second. I thought I was doing it wrong. That I was too clumsy. That my son was "a difficult sleeper".
In reality, I was simply putting him down too soon. A baby who has just fallen asleep is not really asleep yet: they first go through a fragile phase of fifteen to twenty minutes, during which the smallest transfer wakes them. Deep sleep, the one where you can put them down safely, only comes afterwards.
Nobody had told me. Not at the hospital, not in the books I had bought, not in the apps I had tried — and yet it is all over the paediatric literature.
Why a tool and not another book
There is already plenty of content about baby sleep. The problem is that it demands time and attention — two things the parent of a newborn does not have. An exhausted parent does not need a chapter: they need to see, in three seconds, where their baby is and what they can do right now.
Hence the format: you enter the age and the time they fell asleep, and you see it. The night appears hour by hour, with the zone where you must not put them down, and what is normal at that age. Nothing to read if you do not want to.
What Siestina will never do
- Sell you a method. There is nothing to buy, no £25 ebook, no 7-day programme. The tool is free and will stay free.
- Ask you for an account. No sign-up, no email address. The calculations happen in your browser, and the times you enter are not stored anywhere.
- Make you feel guilty. The figures shown are averages. A child who falls outside them does not have a problem: they are just a child.
- Replace your doctor. Siestina explains; it does not diagnose.
How the site is funded
By advertising, shown outside the tool’s flow and never before the results. That is what keeps the tool entirely free, for everyone, in every language.
Where the figures come from
The sleep durations, cycle lengths, phase distributions and settling times shown by the tool come from the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations, publications from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the National Sleep Foundation’s recommended sleep durations, and the reference literature on infant sleep cycles. The links are at the bottom of every page.
If you spot an error or an imprecision, write to me: I will correct it.
One idea a month, no more
What I learn as I keep digging into the subject, once a month. Nothing to sell, one-click unsubscribe.
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