Putting your baby to bed in a dark, silent room seems like a good thing for helping her to go to sleep and stay asleep. As discussed earlier, putting her to bed in a quiet, darkened room signals to her that it's time to go to sleep.

But actually there's a paradox at work here: If you expect your baby to sleep in the midst of all the light and sound and activity of a bustling house, she's going to have an increasingly tough time of it as she gets older. If you put her in for nighttime sleep and for naps in a totally darkened, totally hushed atmosphere, the first time there's a disruption of this pattern or at least the first time she's old enough to be aware of the sounds and hubbub, she's not going to handle it very well.

Of course, the degree of quiet your baby will get used to depends to a great extent on the layout of your house and the circumstances of your life.

• Do you live in an apartment or a one-story house, where the baby's room (whether he has his own room or sleeps in yours or shares with a sibling) is near everything else or is his room upstairs and away from the noise of much of your day-to-day living?

• Do you have one or more other kids, who are likely to be noisy at times when the baby is supposed to be sleeping?

• Do you have a resident grandparent or other relative living with you?

• Do you live on a quiet street, or is there a lot of street noise?

• Do you have noisy neighbors or quiet ones?

New circumstances can suddenly bring an unaccustomed level of noise or a change in light conditions to your baby's room. They include:

• A member of the family moving in with you

• A houseguest coming for a visit

• Your other child, whose room your baby shares, is sick in bed and confined to the room and doing a lot of sneezing, coughing, and calling loudly and often for you

• Holding a party or other gathering at which there are noisy guests or simply enough guests to raise the noise level

• Construction or other noisy work taking place outside your house or in the apartment of a neighbor during the baby's nap hours or possibly still ongoing at the hour when he would normally go to bed for the night

• Moving to a new home, where the ambient noise level is louder or even where the noises are simply different

• Going away on vacation as a family and keeping the baby in your room while you are traveling, or having him stay in his cousin's room while you're visiting your sister, or simply having new noises or a different noise level and different things to look at as he stays in a room all by himself while you're visiting at Grandma's

There is no one easy solution to the problem. There are, however, a few things you can do to minimize the hassle.