If you look up baby sleep requirements in a modern parenting book, you might find a table like this:
Total sleep time required over a 24-hour period
• Newborn.......16-17 hours
• 1-6 months....15-16 hours
• 6-12 months...14 hours
• 1-2 years.....13-14 hours
The tables seem authoritative and concise.
1. What happens when my baby's asleep?
Like you, your baby goes through cycles of types of sleep, from drowsiness to light sleep, then deep sleep followed by dream sleep (REM). She'll come back up again through deep sleep and light sleep to the surface, before going down again.
Between light sleep and deep sleep is a stage called quiet sleep (NREM), during which dreams can also happen. In older children nightmares and sleepwalking often occur in quiet sleep. Though this quiet, non-dream sleep is well formed in newborns, it occurs in shorter bursts than it does in adults.
Babies and adults move through this sleep cycle about five times a night. Your newborn baby's sleep cycle is between 50 minutes and an hour long. This will probably increase once she's three months to the adult amount of one hour 30 minutes.
2. Does my baby dream a lot?
Your baby has more dream sleep than you. It's thought that premature babies spend about 80 percent of their sleep in REM sleep. At full-term, up to 50 per cent of a baby's sleep is REM.
Adult dream sleep only takes up 20 per cent of our total sleep. So while you dream for between one and two hours a night, your newborn baby dreams for up to eight hours. By your baby's first birthday, dream sleep will have reduced to about a third of her sleep.
Your baby will have had REM sleep while she was in your uterus (womb), when you were about six months or seven months pregnant with her. During REM sleep your baby's eyes dart back and forth under her eyelids, while the rest of her body is very still. She will have the occasional twitch, and her breathing will be irregular.
In quiet sleep, your baby will breathe deeply and regularly, sometimes with a big sigh. She will lie still, but may move her arms or legs and make little sucking movements with her mouth, or suddenly give a start. These sudden movements of the whole body are called hypnagogic startles, and are perfectly normal.
After the first month her dream sleep will gradually become more continuous and the startles will disappear.
3. How can I manage my baby's naps?
Between three months and one year your baby will gradually sleep more during the night and less during the day. At three months she will probably sleep twice as long at night as she does during the day.
Daytime naps will gradually become a little longer and less frequent by six months. By then, most babies enjoy about 11 hours of sleep at night, with the odd brief waking, and two daytime naps of about one hour 30 minutes each.
By 12 months your baby may sleep for between 12 hours and 14 hours over the course of 24 hours, including two daytime naps. By about 18 months, naps will reduce to one a day.
Managing your baby's naps is key to developing good sleeping habits. If your baby has a nap late in the day it can interfere with her following night's sleep. Most of us have a less alert time in the early afternoon, and this time is ideal for babies to have their daytime sleep.
4. What are my baby's natural sleep rhythms?
Most babies are physically capable of sleeping through the night from six months, but this doesn't mean that they do!
Sleep-wake cycles are the same for babies and adults. The daily rhythm of feeding, body temperature and hormone release all affect your baby's natural biological cycle (circadian rhythm). Your baby falls asleep as her level of adrenal hormones and body temperature drop, and wakes as they rise again.
It's actually quite difficult to fall asleep when body temperature and hormone levels are high, and equally difficult to wake up if they are low.
5. What about feeding and sleep?
Routines help to regulate feeding and sleep patterns. Babies over three months need to learn to shut down their digestive system at night and wake for their breakfast at roughly the same time each day. And if your baby expects to have a bottle to help her to nod off at night, she'll want one when she wakes in the night.
So begin to separate feeding and sleep at about three months. If you are breastfeeding, try to give your baby her last feed earlier in the evening, or at the start of her bedtime routine.
If your baby is used to breastfeeding or bottle-feeding to sleep in your arms, gently wake her before laying her down in her cot. Or when you see your baby starting to drift off during a feed, end the meal and finish the rest of the bedtime routine before laying her down. Or you could simply make your baby's last feed the start of her bedtime routine.
6. How can I get my baby to go to sleep on her own?
If you are always there when your baby drops off to sleep, she will start to associate you with going to sleep. So she'll want you each time she comes to the surface of her sleep in the night, which is about five times.
So give her a kiss goodnight and leave the room. If necessary just pop in and out with reassuring words and pats until she has finally fallen asleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment