Understanding how and why babies sleep differently than adults can help parents and other caregivers ensure better sleep for the whole family. Sleep is a key part of both mental and physical health for everyone. But for many parents, ensuring their baby is getting good sleep can be frustrating and elusive. But sleep is important because it restores you physically and also restores you mentally. sleep is probably important in learning, that people who study for a test and then get a good night’s sleep are much more likely to recall all the facts and do better on the test than somebody who stays up all night and crams. There’s lots of theories and questions, and we certainly don’t fully understand exactly what it does. What purpose does dreaming serve? Some people feel it’s your way to work through emotions and things. It’s clear that sleep serves a major restorative function Particularly newborns don’t sleep like the rest of us. As an older child or an adult, you go through sleeping, you move into the lighter stages of sleep and eventually get to deeper stages of sleep and then into REM sleep or dream sleep. Newborns move immediately into REM sleep. Their neurological systems are not mature enough that they have prolonged sleep the way we do. The typical newborns have like seven or eight cycles through the day of wake and sleep. They sleep in little, little cat naps through the 24 hour cycle, rather than one single long-term block of sleep that you do as an adult. That matures over the first three to six months. Usually by three to four months, they’re starting to sleep the majority of the night. You get a good five or six hour block where you get sleep, and usually by six or seven months, they’re basically sleeping through the night. co-sleeping where the baby’s actually in the bed with you. My big issue actually with them having them in the same room is it’s very convenient for mom and dad, but sometimes mom and dad are disrupting the kids’ sleep. If somebody is a loud snorer, or has something like sleep apnea and is making loud noises and they’re disrupting the child’s sleep. So that becomes a component of trying to get them to sleep through the night, if their parents are actually contributing to the disruption.
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Friday, June 27, 2025