Baby Sleep And Wake Periods
In my 20 years as a pediatrician, I've only heard one mother complain that her baby slept too much and I always worried about her
. Ralph Waldo Emerson's practice must have been similar to mine since he said, "There never was a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep." There's no question that mothers need to have their babies sleep long hours, especially if they're the right hours. The question is, What do babies need? The answer is, Not as much as we've all been led to believe. Nor only were the old estimates of babies' sleep requirements way over the mark, but we now know that babies' sleep needs differ considerably one from another. From closely watching newborns in the hospital nursery, we've learned that newborns spend from 10.5 to 23 hours per day sleeping, the average being 16.6 hours per day.
More rime is spent asleep than awake during most of infancy, but exactly how the hours are divided varies tremendously from infant to infant. In this age of bottom lines, however, the bottom line for most parents is whether or not the baby is sleeping through the night. And if not, why not? When you're evaluating your baby's sleeping habits, the first fact you should be aware of is this: It's always somebody else's baby who sleeps through, not only the first night home, but also every other night until the end of time. Accept this as a given and don't allow yourself to be disappointed by your baby so soon after she's born. There's time for that later. We've learned by videotaping babies in their cribs at home that slightly less than half of all two-months-olds either sleep soundly or barely awaken through the night. The proportion of these solid sleepers increases to almost four fifths by the time they're nine months old. But here's the rub. According to parents, these figures are too low.
When we add up the answers from parents who have completed questionnaires on the subject, we find that many more than half of their two-months-olds are sleeping through the night. Why this discrepancy? The answer is probably either that pride makes parents exaggerate the quality of their babies' sleeping habits, or that fatigue prevents them from hearing their babies' cries and they truly think their babies sleep through the night. Either way, it doesn't really matter. No matter how we test babies' sleeping habits, we find that the distinctions between sleepers and nonsleepers disappear as half of the "good sleepers" become "bad sleepers" and vice versa before their first birthdays.
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