Getting Baby To Sleep

As a new mother, you probably will wonder whether your baby is sleeping enough, or sleeping too much. There are guidelines of what to expect, but of course these can vary from baby to baby. Even if you’ve had children before, each baby will be different.

Newborn babies usually sleep about 16-17 hours in a 24-hour period. Most babies will not sleep through the night until they’re at least 3 months old. There are several reasons why. First of all, their stomachs are very small and they’ll get hungry faster, especially if you’re breastfeeding your baby. Breast milk is much more easily digested than formula, and your baby will need to feed more often, especially in the beginning.

Babies also have shorter sleep cycles than adults do and have shorter dream cycles. In general, though, a newborn baby should sleep about 8 or nine hours during the day and 8 hours or so at night. These won’t be in 8-hour cycles, of course. In the beginning, those sleep times will be very short.

As the baby gets older, up to about 2 years of age, she’ll still be sleeping 13-14 hours, but the amount of daytime sleep will diminish month-by-month. By age 2, your baby should be sleeping through the night with a 2-hour nap during the day. Again, this will vary by child. Your baby might need a slightly longer nap or two short naps. At this age though, try to discourage naps too late in the afternoon, as this can make it harder to get them to sleep a few hours later at bed time.

Once a baby begins to regularly sleep through the night, parents are often dismayed when he/she begins to awaken in the night again. This typically happens at about 6 months of age and is often a normal part of development called separation anxiety, when a baby does not understand that separations are temporary.

Richard Ferber is director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Children’s Hospital in Boston who believes in a “progressive” approach to helping your child fall – and stay – asleep.
Ferber has developed a forward-thinking plan of action to instill consistent and regular sleep patterns in your child. Briefly, he suggests that after a warm, loving pre-bedtime routine such as singing, rocking, or reading a book, you put your child to bed while she’s still awake. According to Ferber, putting your child to bed while still awake is crucial to successfully teaching her to go to sleep on her own.

Once you put her in bed, leave the room. If she cries, don’t check on her until after a specified amount of time has passed. Once you do return to her room, soothe her with your voice but don’t pick her up, rock her, or feed her. Gradually increase the length of time that passes between checks. After about one week, your infant will learn that crying earns nothing more than a brief check from you, and isn’t worth the effort. She’ll learn to fall asleep on her own, without your help.

Ferber says that there are a number of things that may interfere with your child’s sleep. Before you “Ferberize,” you should make sure that feeding habits, pain, stress, or medications are not causing or contributing to your baby’s sleep problems.

Ferber recommends using his method if your baby is 6 months or older. Like most sleep experts, he says that by the time most normal, full-term infants are 3 months old, they no longer need a nighttime feeding. And at 6 months, none do.

Ferber’s method can be modified if you feel it’s too rigid. Stretch out Ferber’s seven-day program over 14 days so that you increase the wait between checks every other night rather than every night.

Besides being the optimal source of nutrition for your baby in her first year, nursing has obvious psychological benefits for both mother and baby. At birth, infants see only 12 to 15 inches, the distance between a nursing baby and its mother’s face. Studies have found that infants as young as 1 week prefer the smell of their own mother’s milk.

Many psychologists believe the nursing baby enjoys a sense of security from the warmth and presence of the mother, especially when there’s skin-to-skin contact during feeding. Parents of bottle-fed babies may be tempted to prop bottles in the baby’s mouth, with no human contact during feeding. But a nursing mother must cuddle her infant closely many times during the day. Nursing becomes more than a way to feed a baby; it’s a source of warmth and comfort.

When the baby is being fed and nurtured in this way, it’s natural for her to fall asleep quickly. When you know how much she can consume in one feeding, try to gently nudge her awake if she falls asleep too soon. You can easily rouse her with a little tickle of the feet. Otherwise, she’ll get hungry sooner and you’ll be feeding her more often.

Breast-feeding is good for new mothers as well as for their babies. There are no bottles to sterilize and no formula to buy, measure and mix. It may be easier for a nursing mother to lose the pounds of pregnancy as well, since nursing uses up extra calories. Lactation also stimulates the uterus to contract back to its original size.

A nursing mother is forced to get needed rest. She must sit down, put her feet up, and relax every few hours to nurse. Nursing at night is easy as well. No one has to stumble to the refrigerator for a bottle and warm it while the baby cries. If she’s lying down, a mother can doze while she nurses.