Infant don't sleep

There was an interesting paper and editorial in the BMJ at the weekend (click here) about infant sleeping. It was a paper comparing whether an intensive educational support programme for new mums compared to normal care made any difference to baby sleeping patterns and new mums health and well being.
Some of the data from the paper just confirmed what I thought was pretty obvious. Infants at 12 weeks of age woke on average 9 times a night and at 12 weeks of age the longest period of uninterrupted sleep was 84 minutes. Infants not sleeping is normal and it takes times for infants to develop a normal sleeping pattern.

What new parents need to know is that sleep is a developmental process that is biologically driven to mature during the first years of life, and that sleep behaviour and development vary greatly between individuals.. Their sleep patterns begin to consolidate into a night and day time pattern from about 3 months and their body clock matures between 6 and 12 months. Night waking is a normal characteristic of infant sleep that comes and goes during the first year, irrespective of previous consolidation, and with no clearly consistent pattern.

The paper was testing out whether intensive intervention made any difference to maternal health and well being. It did not, so instead of looking at infant night waking as abnormal that requires treatment we should view it as a normal part of development and we should help parents cope with what is normal

The good news from the paper was that infant night waking gets less as infants get older!.

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