4 FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT HOW BABIES SLEEP
By: Emley Amber
Tags: Newbie, Baby, Newborn, Baby Boomers, Babysitting

4 FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT HOW BABIES SLEEP

4 Fascinating Facts About How Babies Sleep? When people use the phrase “sleeping sort of a baby”, they’re probably not being literal, and that’s because new parents are usually tired and exhausted trying to seek out the simplest strategies for getting their little ones to sleep. Emley Amber Mar 3, 2020·4 min read

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While we can’t erase the exhaustion that comes with taking care of a baby, we will assist you to worry a touchless and take some comfort within the incontrovertible fact that some of your baby’s sleep habits aren’t a cause for alarm, but are literally markers of excellent health. These are:

#1 Baby Sleep Style Are Different from Adult Sleep Style.

We adults depend upon circadian rhythms to manage our sleep patterns — that’s, the timing and duration of sleeping hours — but babies aren’t born with a built-in biological clock already ticking.

The rhythm takes time to develop, which is why new child sleep schedules are so erratic and unpredictable. A normal infant won’t have a daily sleep pattern till they’re about 3 to six months old.

Moreover, even after sleep patterns are established, babies will still sleep differently, because they don’t undergo the stages of sleep an equivalent way adults do. We undergo one sleep cycle — from light sleep to paradoxical sleep — every 90 minutes approximately. For babies, it only takes about 50 minutes, and that they don’t catch up to the adult standard until they reach their toddler years.

#2 Babies Are Light Sleepers

You probably know this already, but have you ever asked yourself why?

For one, it’s to try to with those shorter sleep cycles. Infants, particularly newborns, may very well awaken between full cycles, so it’s not such a lot of light sleeping because it is really learning the way to sleep properly.

On top of this, babies spend about the same amount of time in both non-REM (quiet) and REM (active) sleep; compared to adults that spend only about 20% of their slumber in REM sleep.

Deep sleep actually occurs right before paradoxical sleep and is that the last of the three stages of NREM — the opposite two being a part of light sleep.

What does this all mean?

Not only is that the infant sleep cycle shorter, but it also includes a lower percentage of deep sleep.

It can take up to twenty minutes of sunshine sleep before your baby sleeps into a deep slumber, and even then, paradoxical sleep ensues shortly after. This is a part of why they have to sleep so often.

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#3 when it involves Daytime Naps, Every Baby Is Different

Let’s settle this, before doctors and other health professionals get into an uproar. Yes, there are ideal numbers: an honest nap is usually considered to be a minimum of about an hour and a half long. There also are commonly prescribed amounts of naps per day, counting on age range — three to four naps from three to 5 months, two to 3 naps from six to nine months, and up to 2 thereafter and into the toddler ages. Newborns don’t nap, the maximum amount as they need short windows of waking moments, in between sleeping periods of two to four hours at a time throughout the whole day.

Your baby’s actual sleep habits could also be on the brink of this, or completely different — depending on factors like temperament, environment, daily routine, and more.

If your baby’s naps are unusually short, but they nap more often or sleep through the night with relative ease — waking only to feed — that’s fine.

If your baby naps for quite an hour and a half but takes fewer naps overall, that’s fine, too.

What’s most important is the total number of hours spent sleeping in a day — about 11 to 18 hours, depending on the baby’s age.

The point is that your baby hasn’t read the baby books you have, and they don’t understand what their pediatrician says during checkups.

As long as they’re happy and healthy, deviating from standard daytime sleep habits isn’t such an enormous deal.

#4 Babies Process Information and Gain Even During Sleep.

Contrary to what some may believe, babies get tons of sleep. This is good news because sleep influences learning and memory; and if that’s true for adults that spend one-third of their lives asleep, what more for babies that spend up to 75% of their time in slumber? From training themselves to acknowledge their parent’s voices to deciding working non-verbal cues to precise feelings like hunger or pain — and far, much, more — babies learn and test the limits of their environment continuously when they’re awake.

What they examine is then consolidated and bolstered by periods of sleep in between their waking moments. And even though there’s no conclusive proof that learning while sleeping works with adults — most studies on this actually refer to memory reactivation, which requires previous learning while awake — it can actually work with toddlers.

If you battle with your kids sleeping through the night. And would like to know how to get your LO to persistently sleep through the night…

Click here for a short free video that can help point you in the right direction, because it can change and or save your life.