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.
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