Newborn Babies and Sleep

Congratulations on the birth of your new baby! Whether this is your first baby or your fifth, you will find this a time of recovery, adjustment, sometimes confusion and frustration, but—most wonderfully—of falling in love.

Babies younger than four months old have very different sleep needs than older babies. Once you learn your newborn baby’s developing sleep patterns, you can develop reasonable expectations when it comes to your baby and sleep.

Read, Learn, and Beware of Bad Advice

Everyone has an opinion about how you should handle sleep issues with your new baby. The danger to a new parent is that these tidbits of misguided advice (no matter how well-intentioned) can truly have a negative effect on our parenting skills and, by extension, our babies’ development—if we are not aware of the facts. The more knowledge you have, the less likely that other people will make you doubt your parenting decisions.

When you have your facts straight, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to those who are well-meaning but offering contrary or incorrect advice. So, your first step is to get educated! Know what you are doing and know why you are doing it.

The Biology of Newborn Sleep

During the early months of your baby's life, he sleeps when he is tired—it really is that simple. You can do very little to force a new baby to sleep when he doesn’t want to sleep, and conversely, you can do little to wake him up when he is sleeping soundly.

An important point to understand about newborn babies is that they have very, very tiny tummies. New babies grow rapidly, their diet is liquid, and it digests quickly. Formula digests quickly and breast milk digests even more rapidly. Although it would be nice to lay your little bundle down at a predetermined bedtime and not hear a peep from him until morning, even the most naïve among us know that this is not a realistic goal for a tiny baby. Newborns need to be fed every two to four hours—and sometimes more.

During those early months, your baby will have tremendous growth spurts that affect not only daytime, but also nighttime feeding as well, sometimes pushing that two- to four-hour schedule to a one- to two-hour schedule around the clock.

Sleeping through the Night

You have probably heard that babies should start "sleeping through the night" at about two to four months of age. What you should understand is that for a new baby, a five-hour stretch is a full night. Many (but nowhere near all) babies at this age can sleep uninterrupted from midnight to 5AM. (Not that they always do.) A far cry from what you may have thought "sleeping through the night" meant!

Here we pause while the shock sinks in for those of you who have a baby who sleeps through the night but didn’t know it.

What's more, while the scientific definition of “sleeping through the night” is five hours, most of us wouldn’t consider that anywhere near a full night’s sleep for ourselves. Also, some of these sleep-through-the-nighters will suddenly begin waking more frequently, and it’s often a full year or even two until your little one will settle into a mature, all-night, every night sleep pattern.