‘Sleeping through’ is a milestone of particular interest to many new parents. The attraction of a good night’s sleep is one obvious reason for this. Broken nights can be utterly exhausting.
But there are other factors at play too. Like the weather, baby sleep is a common conversation starter. ‘Is she a good sleeper?’ well-meaning strangers ask bleary-eyed parents. Anthropologists have argued that a ‘good’ baby in the Western context is one who sleeps a lot – how your baby sleeps can therefore feel like a judgement on your parenting.
There are many ways in the non-baby world to tell if we have done well, from exam grades to job promotions. But as a new parent, it can feel hard to know if you are doing a good job. Because baby sleep is one of the few things which can be ‘measured,’ it is understandable that many parents focus upon it. Sleep is probably the most widely discussed topic in the NCT Early Days groups I run for new mothers.
Baby sleep patterns
Frequent waking in the night is normal newborn behaviour. Young babies have small stomachs and need to feed often. They don’t associate night-time with sleeping or day-time with being awake.
As a baby’s internal body clock develops, patterns begin to emerge with day-time sleep becoming increasingly shorter and night-time sleep longer. Interacting with your baby differently in the day and night can help her learn the difference.
‘Sleeping through’ the night means different things to different people. It is technically defined as a stretch of five hours – which often comes as a surprise when people learn this. Indeed a recent survey among new parents in New Zealand found that most of them disagreed with this definition (a period of sleep from around 8pm to 6.30am was felt to be a better description).
So when do babies sleep through? A research study examining the sleeping patterns of 75 babies found that it was only at 3 months that more than half of the babies were sleeping through in the technical sense, i.e. an uninterrupted stretch of 5 hours sleep. At 4 months, more than half of the babies were sleeping in stretches of 8 hours. But around half were not. And at the age of 12 months, one in eight babies were not regularly sleeping for stretches of 5 or 8 hours.
As in so many other areas of baby development, there is, as one review of the research on baby sleep put it, “a wide variation in normal” when it comes to sleeping patterns. Some babies sleep for longer stretches at night from a relatively young age, others continue to wake up for many months.
Clapham NCT Postnatal Leader Alex Bollen looks at baby sleep patterns`
SLEEPING THROUGH