Please go to Sleep......
One of the most common exclamations from new parents is “my baby won’t sleep”.
Babies need a lot of sleep because they have so much new information to process and
they are growing and developing at such a fast pace.
Night-time waking
If your baby keeps waking up at night it can become
very tiring. Night waking in the early weeks and months
is normal newborn behaviour. Most babies are unable
to sleep through the night — particularly those younger
than 12 weeks. Young babies have small stomachs so
they need to spread their feeding over a 24-hour period.
However, as babies grow they tend to sleep for longer periods at night. While for adults
about four-fifths of sleep is deep sleep at night; babies spend more time in light sleep.
This means they can wake up more easily than adults.
Understanding day and night
At first, babies don’t know that night-time is for sleep and day-time is for being awake.
They gradually develop this knowledge over the first few months but early on you may
find your baby waking too early or at night. By the age of three to six months, and
sometimes earlier, patterns begin to emerge with day-time naps becoming increasingly
shorter and night-time sleeps longer. Babies’ sleep can also be affected by exposure to
daylight and their body temperature. Time spent in daylight, especially the afternoons,
seems to help babies to sleep longer at night.
Sometimes parents are encouraged to keep their babies awake during the day so that
they will sleep better at night — but the results of this are variable, and difficult to be
sure of, especially as babies change their sleeping and waking patterns as they grow,
whatever you do. Preventing a tired baby from sleeping can be stressful in itself, as they
may cry and fuss, and drop off to sleep anyway!
Bedtime
Most babies will develop a regular sleep pattern over time, although these will continue
to change as they grow. Eventually, you will probably find that they have a regular
bedtime so you can finally get that longed-for night’s sleep.