Sleeping

New babies sleep exactly the amount that their personal physiology tells them to sleep. There is nothing that you can do to make your baby sleep more than this amount and nothing that the baby can do to sleep less. Unless he is ill, in pain, or extremely uncomfortable he will do his sleeping wherever he finds himself and under almost any circumstances. So your power over his actual hours of sleep is very limited. By making him comfortable you can ensure that he sleeps as much as he wants to, but you cannot put him to sleep. On the other hand, if you are somewhere where you cannot make him very comfortable – in a car, for example – you need not worry about him being kept awake. If he stays awake, it is because he does not need to sleep.

The Biology of Newborn Sleep

During the early months of your baby’s life, he sleeps when he is tired, it is really that simple. You can do very little to force a new baby to sleep when he doesn’t want to sleep, and conversely, you can do little to wake him up when he is sleeping soundly.

A very important point to understand about newborn babies is that they have very, very tiny tummies. New babies grow rapidly, their diet is liquid, and it digests quickly. Formula digests quickly and breast milk digests even more rapidly. Although it would be nice to lay your little bundle down at a predetermined bedtime and not hear a peep from him until morning, even the most naive among us know that this is not a realistic goal for a tiny baby. Newborns need to be fed every two to four hours – and sometimes more.

During those early months, your baby will have tremendous growth spurts that affect not only daytime, but also nighttime feeding as well, sometimes pushing that two- to four-hour schedule to a one- to two-hour schedule around the clock.

Separating Sleep from Wakefulness

At the very beginning of life the baby often drifts so gradually from being awake to being asleep that it is difficult to tell which state he is in at any given moment. He may start a feeding wide awake and ravenous, suck himself into a blissful trance so that only his occasional bursts of sucking tell you that he is still at least a little awake, and then drift into sleep so deep that nothing you do will wake him.

This kind of drifting does not matter at all from his point of view. He is simply doing what he needs to do when he needs to do it. But from your point of view it is a good idea to help him gradually to make a more complete difference between being awake and being asleep. It will be much easier for you to organize your life later on if you know that the baby is either awake (and therefore bound to need some attention and company), or asleep (and therefore unlikely to need anything at all for a while). Babies who do learn early to be either fully awake or fully asleep are likely to be the ones who sleep for reasonably long periods at night, too.

So, rather than letting him drift and doze on somebody’s lap, it is a good idea to start from the very beginning to “put him to bed” when he needs to sleep and to “get him up” when he is awake. If he is always put into his carriage or crib when he is really sleepy, he will soon come to associate those places with being asleep. If he is always taken into whatever company is available when he is awake, he will make that association too.

Sleeping “Through the Night”

You have probably heard that babies should start “sleeping through the night” at about two to four months of age. What you must understand is that, for a new baby, a five-hour stretch is a full night. Many (but nowhere near all) babies at this age can sleep uninterrupted from midnight to 5 a.m. (Not that they always do.) A far cry from what you may have thought “sleeping through the night” meant!

Here we pause while the shock sinks in for those of you who have a baby who sleeps through the night but didn’t know it.

What’s more, while the scientific definition of, sleeping through the night is five hours, most of us wouldn’t consider that anywhere near a full night’s sleep for ourselves. Also, some of these sleep-through-the-nighters will suddenly begin waking more frequently, and it’s often a full year or even two until your little one will settle into a mature, all-night, every night sleep pattern.

Disturbances to Sleep

A sleeping baby need not mean a hushed household. Ordinary sounds and activities will not disturb him at this early age. But if everybody creeps about and talks in whispers while he is asleep, there may come a time when he cannot sleep unless they do. It is therefore important to let him sleep through whatever sound level is normal for your household so that he does not come to expect a quietness that will make all your lives a misery.

At this stage he will be disturbed most often by internal stimuli. Hunger will disturb him; being cold may disturb him if he is not in a very deep sleep; pain will wake him and so may passing a bowel movement or burping. Sometimes the jerks and twitches of his body as it relaxes toward deep sleep will disturb him too.

Of course, outside stimuli can disturb the baby, but when they do it will usually be because they change very suddenly. He may drop off to sleep quite happily with the television set on, but wake up when it is switched off. A toddler playing around the room will not keep him awake but one coming in may wake him.

Waking for Night Feedings

Many pediatricians recommend that parents shouldn’t let a newborn sleep longer than three or four hours without feeding, and the vast majority of babies wake far more frequently than that. (There are a few exceptional babies who can go longer.) No matter what, your baby will wake up during the night. The key is to learn when you should pick him up for a night feeding and when you can let him go back to sleep on his own.

This is a time when you need to focus your instincts and intuition. This is when you should try very hard to learn how to read your baby’s signals. Here’s a tip that is critically important for you to know. Babies make many sleeping sounds, from grunts to whimpers to outright cries, and these noises don’t always signal awakening. These are what they call sleeping noises, and your baby is nearly or even totally asleep during these episodes.

You need to listen and watch your baby carefully. Learn to differentiate between these sleeping sounds and awake and hungry sounds. If he is awake and hungry, you will want to feed him as quickly as possible. If you respond immediately when he is hungry, he will most likely go back to sleep quickly. But, if you let him cry escalate, he will wake himself up totally, and it will be harder and take longer for him to go back to sleep. Not to mention that you will then be wide awake, too!

Helping your Baby to Separate Night from Day

Although human beings are mainly diurnal creatures, sleeping by night and active by day, babies do not seem to have a clear and inbuilt mechanism instructing them accordingly. They start off sleeping and waking randomly through the 24 hours. It takes time and sensible handling to persuade them to do most of their sleeping at night and most of their being awake in the daytime. The majority learn to adopt this pattern fairly rapidly, if not as rapidly as their exhausted parents would choose!

A newborn baby sleeps about sixteen to eighteen hours per day, and this sleep is distributed evenly over six to seven brief sleep periods. You can help your baby distinguish between nighttime sleep and daytime sleep, and thus help him sleep longer periods at night.

Begin by having your baby take his daytime naps in a lit room where he can hear the noises of the day, perhaps a bassinet or cradle located in the main area of your home. Make nighttime sleep dark and quiet. You can also help your baby differentiate day naps from night sleep by using a nightly bath and a change into sleeping pajamas to signal the difference between the two.

Take extra trouble to make the baby comfortable.

If you are merely putting him to bed for a daytime nap, it may not matter very much to you if a burp wakes him a little while later. When it is night, try to ensure that he has finished with burping and that nothing that you can foresee is going to disturb him.

Wrap the baby up securely.

In the daytime it does not matter if his own movements bring him fully awake as soon as his sleep lightens. At night you want him so securely wrapped that he will not wake even during the normal periods of light sleep which intersperse heavy slumber.

Darken the room sufficiently to make it seem different from daytime,

and to ensure that when he opens his eyes (as all babies do from time to time during the night) his attention is not caught by anything brightly lit or clearly visible. But leave a dim (15 watt) light on so that you can attend to him during the night without switching on more lights.

Make sure the room is warm and that it stays warm.

Getting chilly will wake him if it happens when he is in light sleep, and can be risky if it happens while he is in deep sleep.

Keep night feedings as sleepy and as brief as possible.

The baby is bound to wake up because he cannot yet get through the night without food and drink, but the less completely he awakens, the better. Make sure, before you leave him, that everything you will need during the night is gathered together. You don’t want to have to carry him around while you search for a dry diaper.

When he cries, go to him immediately so that he has no time to get into a wakeful misery. Don’t play and talk while you feed him; concentrate on soothing cuddles instead. Daytime feedings are social playtimes, but night feedings are for sustenance only.

Watch for Signs of Tiredness

One way to encourage good sleep is to get familiar with your baby’s sleepy signals and put him down to sleep as soon as he seems tired. A baby cannot put himself to sleep, nor can he understand his own sleepy signs. Yet a baby who is encouraged to stay awake when his body is craving sleep is typically an unhappy baby. Over time, this pattern develops into sleep deprivation, which further complicates your baby’s developing sleep maturity. Learn to read your baby’s sleepy signs and put him to bed when that window of opportunity presents itself.

Helping Yourselves to Get Enough Sleep

Lack of sleep, more especially, broken sleep is the very worst part of parenting for many people. It is not just new babies who wake because they have to be fed; all babies wake from time to time and most of them insist on adult company and comfort when they do. You can cross your fingers for the kind of baby who sleeps all night, every night, from six weeks of age, but don’t hold your breath. There are a great many parents who have not managed to share a single unbroken period of seven hours sleep by the time their child is three. . . .

There are two very different approaches to this problem-area and it is worth trying to decide which will suit you, so that you start out as you mean to go on. The first approach is a basic acceptance of this small new person not just into your life but into your nightlife and your bed. A “family bed” will not stop your baby from waking up and it will not save you from night feedings in the first weeks. But if he is sharing your bed with you, your baby’s awakenings and his feeding will disturb you far less than they will if you have to go to him. And, because he is where he best likes to be – close against you – he will go back to sleep far more quickly and easily. Sharing beds is not dangerous. You will not smother the baby yourself and your pillows can easily be kept out of his way.

Babies who sleep in “family beds” from early on often wake much less than other babies as they get older. As they get older still, they may wake but find it unnecessary to wake you. After all a toddler who is with you in bed does not need to cry for a cuddle because he is already having it or can just snuggle up.

But “family beds” do have snags and it’s sensible to foresee them if you can. Once you start having your baby in bed with you, or at least once he has had a few months of this way of sleeping, you are very unlikely to be able to persuade him, without a long and miserable fight, that a separate crib in a separate room is nicer. And however much you enjoy sharing a bed with your six-week-old baby, you may find that you change your mind later on. A baby or toddler in your bed does cut down your privacy, and being with him by night as well as by day can make you as an individual feel totally submerged.

The second approach welcomes the baby into your life but determinedly excludes him from your nightlife and your bed. It means doing everything you can to help him sleep happily alone. It means going to him whenever he cries for you but never taking him in with you or letting him come to you when he is older. It leaves you much freer when he sleeps well but it may condemn you to endless visits to his cribside when his teeth are bothering him or he has bad dreams and, later still, it may mean returning him to his bed night after night.

Nobody can make this choice for you. You may not able to make it either: even once you have decided on the second approach, a bad week may find you taking your baby into bed with you at 3am after all because nothing seems to matter except being allowed to get your head down. Try to be aware of the choice and think about it, though. Your worst option is an attempt to compromise, sometimes letting him sleep with you and sometimes trying to insist that he stay alone.

If you plan to aim for separate beds, there are a few steps which you can take to maximize your own sleeping hours even during these early weeks of night-feeding:

Wake the baby for a late-night feeding at your bedtime.

If you wait for him to wake, you will be losing sleeping time. If you go to sleep for an hour and then he wakes, you’ve been disturbed an unnecessary time. It will not hurt him to be fed before he knows he is hungry.

Think of your own small-hours comfort.

If you are bottle-feeding, leaving the bottle ready in the refrigerator and a thermos filled with hot water to warm it will cut down your work. If a hot drink helps you get back to sleep, leave that ready in a thermos, too. If cold feet keep you awake after feedings, you could think about an electric blanket. . . .

Feed the baby as soon as crying begins.

If you “leave him to cry,” he may indeed cry himself back to sleep, if he was not very hungry. But he will keep you awake while he is crying and then wake again, extremely hungry, just as you have gotten back to sleep yourself. If you “make him wait a bit,” he will keep you awake with his crying and when you finally feed him he may be too tired and upset to take a full feeding. He will wake you again sooner than he might have done if you had fed him promptly. If you “give him sugar water,” the sucking and thirst-quenching may put him back to sleep. But once again the peace will not last; his stomach will soon remind him that you fooled him.

Discipline yourself to sleep the moment the baby is settled.

It is easy to lie awake wondering if he is going to need another burp or another ounce. If he does need you, he will soon let you know. If he does not, waiting for him to cry will lose you yet another piece of sleeping tme.

Move the baby out of your room as soon as possible.

His small snifflings and movements at your bedside may disturb you more than you realize. If they mean that you peep into the crib every half hour you may actually disturb him. Of course you must be sure that you will hear even the smallest cry, but you will get far more rest if you cannot hear anything quieter and less urgent than that.

Decide whether one or both parents are going to cope.

Although the very early night feedings seem part of the excitement of having a baby and you may both want to be involved, there is a long stint of too little sleep ahead of you. There is not really much point in both of you waking for every feeding unless doing it together makes it all much quicker. Breast-feeding mothers usually decide that a snack and a chat is not enough compensation for having a husband who is exhausted too. Most of them prefer to manage alone and perhaps get paid back with afternoon naps on the weekends. Bottle-feeding parents sometimes work out a sharing system, with one parent doing one night and the other the next. But for many couples even that does not really work because the mother finds that she wakes up anyway. If she cannot get back to sleep until she knows the baby is settled again, she might as well give the feeding herself.

Make Yourself Comfortable

I have not yet to hear a parent tell me that she loves getting up throughout the night to tend to a baby’s needs. As much as we adore our little bundles, it is tough when you are woken up over and over again, night after night. Since it is a fact that your baby will be waking you up, you may as well make yourself as comfortable as possible. The first step is to learn to relax about night wakings right now. Being stressed or frustrated about having to get up will not change a thing. The situation will improve day by day; and before you know it, your little newborn will not be so little anymore – he will be walking and talking and getting into everything in sight during the day, and sleeping peacefully all night long.