Sleep
Normal Infant Sleep Development
Sleep is a developmental process, and our sleep needs change throughout our lifetimes.
Newborn babies may sleep for 18 or so hours a day, but often for only for 2-3 hours at a time. During the first year overall sleep duration falls to around 15 hours, and the majority of sleep becomes concentrated during night-time as circadian rhythms? develop.
Night-waking is normal during early infancy and healthy babies experience several awakenings per night at the end of sleep cycles.
Newborn babies have very small stomachs, and need to feed often, so they wake at least every 2-3 hours in order to do so, sometimes more often. As babies grow they are able to last slightly longer between feeds, however human milk is quickly digested, and babies commonly need to feed frequently throughout the day and night-time.
By the time babies are 3 months old some (but not all) begin to start settling (sleeping through a night-time feed for a stretch of up to 5 hours). By the time they are 5 months old half of them may have started to sleep for an eight-hour stretch on some nights. Generally, though, babies do not sleep all night-every night until they are close to a year old. One study investigating infant sleep duration found that 27% of babies had not regularly slept from 10pm to 6am by the age of 1 year. 13% of babies had not regularly slept through for 5 hours or more by the age of 1 year.
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