Newborn Sleep Patterns - When Will My Baby Sleep Through the Night?

One of the hardest aspects of parenting a newborn is the exhaustion that inevitably comes with taking care of a baby who needs to feed every 2-4 hours around the clock. People tell first time pregnant women that waking up several times a night during late pregnancy is good preparation for when the baby comes, but the fact is that sitting up for 1-2 hours with your newborn is very different to hopping up for five minutes to go to the bathroom.

Newborn sleep patterns usually include about 18 hours of sleep spread fairly evenly around the clock.

Everyone's heard of those 'good' babies who sleep through the night by six weeks. So why doesn't yours? Well, to begin with, you should know that the medical definition of 'sleeping through the night' is sleeping for five hours between 12 and 6am. It's not sleeping from 7pm to 7am! Secondly, most babies will need to feed at least every four hours throughout the day, for many months. Newborns will frequently need to feed more often than that.

And, don't forget they don't usually feed and then drop off back to sleep instantly. They may spend twenty minutes feeding (but it may only be five minutes and it may be fifty minutes, so don't get too hung up on this), but then they may be wide awake and take another 30-60 minutes to get sleepy again.

Why Will My Baby Only Sleep in the Daytime?

Many newborns have their days and nights turned around, and will want to sleep for longer periods during the day than the night. This is very normal, but there are a few things you can do to help them get this sorted out.

• Use only a red light at night time, to help set your newborn baby's circadian rhythms. Red light doesn't trigger the brain to think it's morning the way white or yellow light does.
• Keep voices quiet and talking to a minimum at night time. Use your baby's daytime waking periods to sing and play with her. Also use less eye contact at night time. Eye contact can be very stimulating for your baby.
• Set a maximum time for your baby to sleep in the day time and ruthlessly wake him up to feed him if he goes beyond this. Most people will tell you 3-4 hours of sleep, or, no more than 4 hours between feeds. But be a little flexible with yourself to begin with. If you have just had a twenty hour labour and your baby hasn't slept for more than 2 hours at a time since, maybe you can let him sleep for five hours this once while you also sleep!Tomorrow or the next day will be soon enough to begin waking him.

Sorry, but there is no easy answer for that. According to Elizabeth Pantley in the No Cry Sleep Solution, some babies really are still hungry in the night right up until they are about the age of twelve months. That doesn't mean your baby will be. It also doesn't mean that those babies are always hungry. They may go through phases of being hungry at 2am and phases of sleeping through till 7am.

Guess what? Most babies who are sleeping through the night by six weeks, have started waking up again some weeks or months later, either when they got sick, or when they started teething, or when they had a growth spurt. Some babies go back to sleeping through the night when the disruption's over, and some don't.

If your baby is under three or four month old, you may just need to wait for her to develop. If she is older than this there may be some things you can do to help her learn to go back to sleep when she briefly wakes up. I highly recommend The No-Cry Sleep Solution and The No-Cry Nap Solution to help you learn to do this. Both books give you a wide range of techniques from which to develop a plan that will suit your family. For a newborn though, that is, a baby under three months, you might want to also read The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer. See the video below for a demonstration of how to swaddle and settle your newborn.

It's by no means fool proof (nothing really is), but it is lovely to watch it in action.