Newborn Sleep Cycles: what to expect.
Babies are not miniature adults.
Sometimes we expect an awful lot of these immature little humans whose brains take 25 years to fully mature. And probably the area we have the least realistic expectation is how we think they should sleep.
To hear some people talk about sleep in infancy, you would think that sleep was a behavioural problem and parents need to take control and correct the habits of their child whose waking is manipulative and intentional!
Reality check: adults cannot control their own sleep, let alone their baby’s!
Let’s have a look at how sleep works:
An adult has a typical sleep cycle of 90 minutes. Each cycle transitions through different stages of sleep:
REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep is Active sleep where dreaming occurs. Quiet sleep is the restorative stage of sleep when our body and brain are effectively recharging. During the 90 minute sleep cycle, we move from Active sleep to Quiet sleep. Sleep cycles have progressively more Active Sleep and less Quiet sleep through the night. Waking in the morning with dreams fresh in our mind happens because we have woken immediately after an Active sleep stage. Adults experience around 75% of our sleep as Quiet sleep and 25% as Active sleep. Each time we enter Active sleep, we can easily be disturbed by environmental stimulus like a snoring partner or feeling cold but we probably won’t recall cursing them or pulling the blanket up in the morning. Even getting up to go to the toilet or get a glass of water can be forgotten and we believe we have slept all night.
Infant sleep looks very different. They have a sleep cycle of around 20-50 minutes. Around half of their time asleep is in Active sleep, when they are easily woken by disturbance. This is the sleep they need for brain development. The rest of their sleep is Quiet sleep, including a period of deep sleep - this is the stage when you can transfer them with less chance of waking.
Babies will naturally wake as each sleep cycle comes to an end. Sometimes they will need parental support to return to sleep and very occasionally, they will simply doze back to sleep again. Parents might be surprised to learn their babies spend some time awake without signalling they need physical support. They quietly return to sleep without disturbing their sleeping parents.
The idea of babies “sleeping through the night” has its origins in research published in 1957. It makes fascinating reading! The language used to describe “The Problem” is the first hint that this document, which has dictated parental and professional expectations of infant sleep for more than six decades, is biased to the needs of the parents being most important! However, it is the definition of “sleeping through the night” which is most significant.
“In the end we confined our attention to cases where the baby woke and cried or fussed between midnight and 5am at least once a week.”
Most modern parents with an expectation of their baby “sleeping through the night” would probably NOT consider this definition to be their goal! And they might well be startled by the conclusion, which found that HALF of those babies who were sleeping from midnight to 5am at three months started waking again between 5 and 9 months anyway!
Summary
Of 160 infants whose mothers were seen at intervals from birth, about 70% had ceased night waking (between midnight and 5 a.m.) by the age of 3 months, and 83% by 6 months. Ten per cent never started sleeping regularly through the night for as long as four weeks during the first year.
Of those who settled, about one-half had subsequent spells of night waking of more than four weeks' duration. The majority of these fresh disturbances had their onset between the ages of 5 and 9 months.
At least they were able to determine what was to blame for this Problem of parents being disturbed by the wakeful babies … oh, it was the parents fault! (Although, this was the 1950s, so really they mean the Mother!). Or it was birth trauma or maybe the baby was at fault?
Research into infant sleep has come a long way since the 1950s! Technology now allows accurate collection of data about the time babies and their mothers are actually asleep, which often differs to what parents believe to have happened. You can learn more about real infant sleep in the first year of life at basisonline.org.uk. Or watch this excellent documentary:
