Your baby will sleep a lot during her first year. This starts with about sixteen or seventeen hours a day during her first month, and gradually decreases to about fourteen hours by her first birthday. So even when she is a year old, your baby will likely be spending more than half of each day sleeping.

Not all of that sleeping will be at night, though. Early on, instead of long stretches of sleep, your newborn will probably have regular cycles of eating, sleeping, and waking each day. Although there may be one longer stretch of four or five hours, most of these cycles will be just two or three hours. Over the next three or four months, your baby's sleep patterns should become more organized. She will still be sleeping a lot (about fifteen hours at four months) but there will be more sleep at night, longer periods of wakefulness during the day, and more regular nap times.

Just as your baby's sleep patterns change over this first year, sleep advice also changes. It is important to realize that much of the advice for older children — letting them fall asleep on their own, not letting them fall asleep while feeding, and perhaps letting them cry it out — doesn't apply to your newborn or younger infant. Your newborn probably will fall asleep breastfeeding or drinking a bottle or may need to be rocked to sleep. Helping your child get to sleep in these first few months doesn't mean that you are creating problems for later.

As your baby gets older, you may have to work a little more at preventing and fixing sleep problems that develop so that all family members can get a healthful amount of sleep. However, for many babies, whether or not they sleep well is just part of who they are naturally. It is possible to create good and bad sleepers, but sometimes you just have to wait and adjust to your child's natural sleep schedule until things work themselves out as the child gets older.