How Much Newborn Babies Sleep
Every new mom gets this question at least a dozen times from well-meaning friends and relatives in the early months postpartum: “Does your baby sleep through the night yet?”
This phrase can be misleading. According to experts, “sleeping through the night” is defined by a baby sleeping six hours at a stretch. That means if you put your baby to bed at 8 p.m., and he wakes up at 2 a.m., technically, he's slept through the night.
Keep that in mind when you hear or read experts say that your baby should sleep through the night by three or four months of age. Sure, technically your baby's sleep might be meeting the “through the night” criteria, but it sure won't feel like it to you!
Why He Wakes Up
A baby's stomach is very small, and doesn't hold enough milk to keep him satisfied for long. In fact, if you have a premature or very sleepy baby, you may actually have to wake him up every three to four hours to eat. It can be dangerous for small babies to routinely go longer between feedings. Newborns don't understand that night is for sleeping, and that day is for playing and eating. They only know that it's been a few hours since they last ate, and they're hungry.
The good news is that newborn babies do sleep a lot: up to sixteen hours a day, just not all at once. Biologically, a young infant is programmed to wake up and eat, sometimes as often as every two hours (or sometimes even more often). This is normal and natural, and not a sign that your baby is “spoiled” or “a bad sleeper.”
Essential
Keeping your baby awake when he's tired during the day in the hopes that he'll sleep better at night may backfire: babies need to nap, and research shows that an overtired baby might have an even more difficult time winding down at the end of the day.
Baby's the Boss
In these early months, trying to control your baby's feeding or sleeping habits is an exercise in futility: it probably won't work, and if it does, it will cause you and your baby plenty of grief along the way.
Leaving a baby to “cry it out” at this young age is not only cruel to the baby, who is hungry and doesn't understand why nobody is feeding him, but is also heart-wrenching for mothers.
As your baby grows, he'll start to go longer between feedings, increase his time spent sleeping at a stretch, and become more receptive to you directing his sleeping and eating habits.
