Newborn Babies and Sleep

Congratulations on the birth of your new baby. This is a glorious time in your life. Whether this is your first baby or your fifth, you will find this a time of recovery, adjustment, sometimes confusion and frustration, but -- most wonderfully -- of falling in love.

Babies younger than four months old have very different sleep needs than older babies. This article will help you understand your newborn baby’s developing sleep patterns, and will help you develop reasonable expectations when it comes to your baby and sleep.

The Biology of Newborn Sleep

During the early months of babies’ lives, they sleep when they’re tired. It’s really that simple. You can do very little to force a new baby to sleep. You can do little to wake a new baby up when sleeping soundly.

A very important point to understand about newborn babies is that they have very, very tiny tummies. New babies grow rapidly. Their diet is liquid, and it digests quickly. Although it would be nice to lay your little bundle down at a predetermined bedtime and not hear a peep until morning, even the most naïve among us know that this is not a realistic goal for a tiny baby. Newborns need to be fed every two to four hours -- and sometimes more.

During those early months, your baby will have tremendous growth spurts that affect daytime and nighttime feeding, sometimes pushing that two- to four-hour schedule to a one- to two-hour schedule around the clock.

Sleeping "Through the Night"

You have probably heard that babies should start "sleeping through the night" at about two to four months of age. What you must understand is that, for a new baby, a five-hour stretch is a full night. Many (but nowhere near all) babies at this age can sleep from midnight to 5 a.m. (Not that they always do.) A far cry from what you may have thought "sleeping through the night" meant!

Here we pause while the shock sinks in for those of you who have a baby who sleeps through the night, but didn’t know it.

While the scientific definition of "sleeping through the night" is five hours, most of us wouldn’t consider that anywhere near a full night’s sleep for ourselves. Also, some of these sleep-through-the-nighters will suddenly begin waking more frequently, and it’s often a full year or even two until your little one will settle into a mature, all-night, every-night sleep pattern.

Falling Asleep at the Breast or Bottle