Understanding Newborn Sleep

Your baby is not going to sleep through the night and that’s because they aren’t supposed to!

Its a hard fact to process in a modern society who pursues unnatural infant sleep and feel they have failed when their babies do not reach this parental goal. But you can no more train a baby to sleep all night than you can train them to walk or ride a bike. It is developmentally normal for babies to repeatedly wake at night to breastfeed and to need parental contact and support to return to sleep.

By the time babies are 3 months old, some (but not all) begin to start settling (sleeping through a night-time feed for a stretch of up to 5 hours). By the time they are 5 months old, half of them may have started to sleep for an eight-hour stretch on some nights. Generally, though, babies do not sleep all night-every night until they are close to a year old. One study investigating infant sleep duration found that 27% of babies had not regularly slept from 10pm to 6am by the age of 1 year. 13% of babies had not regularly slept through for 5 hours or more by the age of 1 year. Source

Research using infrared video recording have provided evidence that, although sleep periods lengthen with age, infants continued to wake up during the night during the first year of life. St James-Roberts et al’s (2015) research used video and parental questionnaire data to examine one hundred infants’ sleep patterns at 5 weeks and 3 months of age. They found that a quarter of infants woke and resettled themselves at night, most often without parental awareness. St James-Roberts et al concluded that ‘sleeping through the night’ involves both prolonged bouts of sleep alongside episodes of autonomous resettling. Source