Sleep Patterns & Changes

Every exhausted parent dreams of a child that sleeps soundly all through the night. But in fact, sleeping that long is not normal until babies reach about three to four months of age. Adjusting to an infant's sleeping habits is one of the most difficult aspects of bringing a new member into the household, and is certainly one of the first that new parents have to grapple with.

"Kids cry. They cry around the clock, when they are awake and when they are asleep and when you are asleep," warns Brett Kuhn, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who specializes in behavioral pediatrics. "That's just their way of communicating with us. It's a fact of life."

According to Kuhn, infants sleep some 16 to 17 hours per day, which drops to about 14 hours by the time they reach their first birthday. A more significant change is when they sleep, as they also learn to consolidate sleeping into longer chunks during the night. But that doesn't happen for several months. "A newborn will wake up every two to four hours, regularly," he said. "Their stomachs will wake them up because they are hungry. Infants have a huge need for caloric intake at that age."

As babies become better at consuming larger meals, they can go longer between feedings. That's when it becomes the parents job to teach kids when to sleep, and how to sleep.

One of the first tasks is to make a clear distinction between night and day. Babies will notice that sometimes it's dark and sometimes the house is bright. Parents should reinforce this by dimming the lights at night, putting toys away, shifting to less energetic activities and in general showing that nighttime is when people wind down to rest.

Children must also be taught how to fall asleep - it's not an innate skill. Kuhn recommends that babies be placed in their crib or bassinet while drowsy, but still awake. "If the only way children ever learn how to fall asleep is if their parents feed them, rock them or cuddle with them until they are fast asleep, that's the only way the will ever know how to sleep," he said. "When they wake up in the middle of the night, they will expect the same pattern of behavior to go back to sleep and they will cry until they get it."

While kids start off with a 24-hour sleep and nap pattern, they soon shift to longer sleeping cycles at night, punctuated with brief feeding breaks. At four to six months, most kids are taking about three naps during the daytime, lasting from one to two hours. By their first birthday, most will cut back to two naps, ranging from about 90 minutes to two hours. Shifting to one nap per day can happen anywhere from 18 months to two years, and the final nap may remain until the child is five years old.

Some parents try to keep babies awake longer during the day or force them to skip naps, hoping the child will become especially tired and fall asleep easily. Kuhn said the exact opposite will happen. "That's a common mistake, but what you really end up with is a cranky, sleep-deprived child that is wired on stress hormones and will be even harder to put to sleep," he said. "As a general rule of thumb, good sleep during the daytime will produce good sleep at night."