One area that has huge implications on parental well-being is sleep, particularly newborn sleep💤 From the moment they are born you start obsessing over sleep, and get asked about it constantly, including that dreaded question:
‘Is your baby sleeping through the night yet?’😣
Parents often blame themselves when their baby isn’t a ‘good’ sleeper. But what does the research say is normal for a newborn…
A baby’s sleep evolves rapidly during their first year of life. A newborn does not have an established circadian rhythm ⏰ Rather, newborn sleep is distributed throughout the 24 hour period in short stints. This is partly because newborns need to feed regularly👨🍼(1) Circadian rhythms only begin to emerge around 10-12 weeks, and night sleep generally starts to lengthen over time from there.(2)
Parents typically judge their baby’s sleep on 1️⃣duration of sleep over the 24 hours, 2️⃣night wakings, and 3️⃣longest sleep periods at night.(3) A 2012 meta-analysis(4) combined the data of 34 studies and found huge variations on what is normal for these factors📊:
👶The duration of sleep each 24-hour period for newborns aged 0 to 2 months was between 9 and 20 hours (average: 15 hours).
👶The number of night wakings for newborns aged 0 to 2 months was between 0 and 3.4 night wakings* (average: 1.7).
👶The longest sleep period for a baby’s aged 0 to 5 months was between 2 and 10 hours (average: 6 hours).
*A limitation of this research is that the studies relied on parental report. It is likely babies were waking up more, but the parents may not have been aware of it. These figures therefore likely underestimate the number of night wakings.
The above represents huge variations in what is considered normal for a newborn. This also does not account for all the time parents spend getting their baby to sleep in the first place 🤷♀️
Regardless, ‘sleeping through the night’ is not the norm for a newborn, and likely reserved only for a lucky few🍀
References
1. Davis et al. 2004. J Pediatr Health Care
2. Sheldon et al. 2002. Sleep medicine
3. Palmstierna et al. 2008. Acta Paediatrica
4. Galland et al. 2012 Sleep Medicine Reviews
