As a new parent, the most talked about topic when it comes to your baby is sleep!
How much sleep are they getting? Why won’t they sleep? Do I need to wake my baby up? And how do I understand my baby’s sleep patterns?…
These are all common questions and topics of conversation amongst new parents.
Throw in the comments of strangers asking, ‘Is he good?’ (Meaning: ‘Does he sleep?’) and it’s no wonder that you can feel the pressure when your baby isn’t sleeping ‘through the night’.
Sleep seems to be the number one talked about baby issue, yet it is poorly understood. This means that expectations can be a little off and as a parent, you can find themselves comparing your baby to others, wondering whether you are doing something wrong, or considering sleep training as a resort to helping your child sleep better.
We know the reasons why we talk about sleep, but why is sleep so important?
Babies need sleep to grow, to develop and to process everything that they learn on a day-to-day basis. This is the time when their brain is developing the most.
Without sleep, babies and children become irritable and overtired, making it difficult to feed them or to get them to fall asleep in the first place! For older children, they can struggle with their emotions when they become overtired, ending in tantrums and challenging behaviour.
For new parents, they need to sleep because without it they may struggle to function. It’s easy to lack patience and focus when tired.
New mums need sleep in order to recover from childbirth, help with the production of breast milk and to be able to care for yourself and your newborn.
So when does a baby sleep through the night? When will a parent start to be able to get their sleep back?
Managing sleep expectations can be hard. Especially when every child and every circumstance is different. Just because one baby is sleeping through the night doesn’t mean that every baby will do. This can be tricky to hear, but did you know that adults don’t even sleep through the night. So how are we expecting babies to do so?
All babies are different. Some are born prematurely, some have extra medical issues, such as reflux to consider, some don’t feed so easily, and all develop differently and at different times!
If we understand how sleep works, why people (meaning everyone) wake in the night and the reasons behind it, then we may just start relaxing a little on our expectations around sleep.
Understanding sleep should also help you to figure out how to support your child’s sleep and the reasons behind their wakings. It is from there that you can then set routines or plan routines to help aid your baby’s sleep.
Did you know that most 3-6 month olds still wake on average two times a night? Also ‘sleeping through’ the night doesn’t mean a full 12 hours of solid sleep! Even most sleep experts would consider ‘sleeping through’ to be between 10/11pm - 5-7am!
It is important to understand how sleep works before you can adapt a routine, understand sleep problems and know how much sleep a child should get. Sleep problems can be created by not fully understanding how a baby or a child’s sleep works.
By having this basic knowledge, should mean that you can lay down the foundations of good and healthy sleep associations and teach your baby to learn how to settle which will help link sleep cycles early on to then create better sleep overall.
It is important to know what a sleep cycle is, because a moan, cry or movement can be a signal that your baby is moving from one cycle to the next. If a parent does not understand this, then you could easily rush to your baby’s side or pick them up assuming they are unsettled or hungry, often creating sleep problems without realising.
If your baby seems distressed in any way, then of course you will need to comfort them by picking them up and seeing to their needs. These loud, distressed cries are different to the possible noises, cries or moans in between sleep cycles. By watching your baby, you should quickly learn to distinguish when your child fully wakes from their sleep and needs you to feed, wind, change or comfort them, or whether they are just making a sound or movement between sleep cycles.
Babies need to sleep through more than one sleep cycle at a time to help get into good sleep habits, grow, develop and help establish a good routine. A baby who does not sleep through more than one cycle will have difficulties not only with weight gain and growth, but will also become irritable, often struggling to settle and to feed. This will have a knock-on affect and be an on-going problem throughout their childhood, creating sleep problems and the possible need to sleep train when they are older.
There are two different parts to each sleep cycle.
REM sleep is characterised by ‘rapid-eye-movement’. This is a light sleep where you will notice a child’s breathing may become more rapid, they will have jerky, body movements and their eyes will flutter under their eyelids. This is where they do all their dreaming, growth and development.
Newborn babies spend around 50% of their sleep in the REM stage, compared to only 30% by the time they reach 1-2 years and 20% by the time they reach 5 years of age. This shows how important sleep is for a young baby and how much their brain grows and develops during sleep.
This is the deep part of a person’s sleep where the muscles relax and the breathing becomes slower and the heart rate goes down.
From 3-4 months onwards, the non-REM stages of sleep are broken down into 4 different stages. Stages 1 and 2 are a light sleep where a child is starting to fall asleep and will become drowsy and show twitching movements. Any loud noises or sudden movements will wake them. They then go into two separate stages of deep sleep (stages 3 and 4) where it will be difficult to arouse them.
The length of a sleep cycle and the amount of REM sleep varies depending on the age of a child. What we are looking to achieve is that at the end of each cycle, the child will arouse slightly, move or even cry out, but they should be encouraged to self settle into their next cycle to learn how to connect their cycles and sleep for longer periods of time.
For premature and newborn babies they will start their sleep in REM, spending roughly 20 minutes in it and then going into their deeper sleep after(again of roughly 20 minutes, making a newborn’s sleep cycles around 30-40 minutes in length). This usually makes it easier for a newborn to wake after 20 minute naps if something disturbs them (like a noise, a wet nappy, a change in environment etc). As disruptive as this can be, it is a way to help prevent SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) occurring in a baby. We should however, try to use this time to establish healthy sleep habits for newborns.
A child’s sleep cycle will start to mimic that of an adults around the age of 8-12 weeks, where they will start in a light sleep, fall into their deep sleep and then end with the REM sleep. It coincides with the baby establishing their circadian rhythms and should also mean that the baby doesn’t wake as much, as they are sleeping in a deeper sleep for longer.
A circadian rhythm is your internal body clock based on 24 hour periods. It is what helps a baby create the difference between day and night. A newborn baby does not have an established circadian rhythm and it can take up to 6 months to fully establish itself.
There are steps you can take to help establish the rhythm:
This does mean that babies wake often during the night, whether it is to feed, for comfort, or a change, but this is normal behaviour.
Trying to teach a young baby to link their sleep cycles together can be a little tricky. Establishing some healthy sleep habits from the start can really help your baby to link their sleep cycles together.
Start with:
Also make sure your baby is well fed, winded and put down to sleep comfortably.
It may be that you need to time your baby’s cycles first so that you can see the pattern to their wakings. You can try a stop watch whilst watching your baby sleep, so that you can see their movements and understand the exact length of your baby’s sleep cycle.
When you have this knowledge, you can go to your baby a few minutes before they are due to end one sleep cycle and you can help them into continuing into the next one. Here you can try to replicate how they fell asleep in the first place (by rocking them gently, using a dummy, or putting the white noise back on). Or you can simply try a ‘ahhhh’ sound or hand on their tummy and a gentle pat as a way of comforting them.
Do not underestimate the power of a routine! Babies thrive when they know when to expect food, sleep and activity.
Having a baby in a routine doesn’t mean that you need to be strict or move away from how you wish to bring up your baby. What it does do, is help to establish healthy, natural patterns based on your own baby’s cues and needs. Routine will help make sure that your baby feeds well, which in turn helps them with their sleep. It also helps babies to develop healthy habits and less need to consider options like sleep training further down the line. Even those ‘sleep regressions’ that you may have heard of become easier when you have a pattern to your baby’s day.
We hope that by understanding your baby’s sleep a little better, it will relax you and help you to enjoy these first months with your newborn.
