I often get asked by parents if their baby or their baby’s sleep behaviour is “normal”
My answer is almost always yes.
There is a term that gets tossed around a lot of discussions around infant sleep: “biologically normal”
I hate this term, it makes me cringe. What does it even mean? Everything is biologically normal.
If my baby doesn’t fit into this “normal” category are they “abnormal”? NOOOO
Let’s unpack this.
Anything you do at night is “biologically normal”. Nothing is bad or wrong.
So what are the facts about infant sleep:
FACT- Waking up multiple times at night is expected.
Sleep cycles emerge as early as 12 weeks. They are typically 45 minutes in length and as a child grows they will become longer 90-120 minutes and after 12-16 weeks we can expect a partial or full wake up after each sleep cycle.
So a 45 minute nap is completely normal and a wake up is expected. Every baby and adult moves through many sleep cycles during sleep with many wake ups.
We all experience this and we often don’t notice them as we check out our environment, turn around and go back to sleep.
FACT- Feedings at night are common.
For newborn and younger babies, feedings at night are necessary. As your baby grows older however, they may outgrow the need to feed at night. Parents have a hard time differentiating hunger at night and feeding for comfort.
Formula and breastfed babies can actually sleep the same long stretches, as sleep cycles are exactly the same for all humans. So the myth that breastfed babies wake up more often is nothing but a myth.
What actually happens is that if a baby needs to suck in order to go back to sleep, they will wake up after each sleep cycle and cry out for that sucking, in this case feeding. Babies that can settle back to sleep without the need to suck, “sleep through the night” which actually means we don’t hear them wake up (but they do) and they fall back asleep.
You can still continue to feed at night and have a great little sleeper. The two are not dependent.
FACT - Early wake ups happen!
Consider that your child has been asleep for at least 10 hours by the time we hit 5am. Their bodies are starting to wake them up. Their melatonin levels have dropped, cortisol levels are rising, their bodies are waking.
Being in a light stage of sleep after 3am is very normal, between this time and 6am, they are in lightest stages of sleep and wakefulness.
What happens is that they wake up, inevitably start to make noise and a parent responds. Reinforcing and telling the body that yes this is indeed the time to wake up. This is why, early morning wake ups are so hard to fix. You are not only working against the body’s natural rhythm and light stages of sleep, but it’s often reinforced by a parents response.
Many wake ups in the early morning are a fact but that doesnt mean they can’t be changed.
Now they can also be prevented, as they often happen because a baby is going to sleep overtired (either from short naps, a sleep debt build up or a late bedtime). It could also be happening because a baby is getting too much day sleep (undertired) or the first nap of the day is too close to wake up time.
There are ways to set our biological clocks to wake at the same time every day and this applies to adults as well. The key thing to remember is the zeitgebers- Light, food and social interaction, cue our bodies and signal when it is time to wake up setting sleep wake cycles that will become consistent based on the signal we give at bedtime and wake up times.
FACT - We can change and influence sleep.
There are definitely things we can do to help our babies sleep. Our responsibility as parents is not to MAKE a baby sleep, it is to facilitate sleep and provide the best conditions for sleep. Sleeping is all on them! I can’t tell you how many times I hear this phrase
“I’ve tried everything and I can’t get my baby to sleep”
This phrase is bathed in frustration, feelings of inadequacy, failure and stress.
How we as parents feel transfers very easily to infants, so if we are exhausted and frustrated, that is definitely not going to be a calming environment to induce sleep. It will make it worse in fact.
We can show them how to sleep by providing a calm, consistent and safe environment for learning, by continuing to cue them, communicate with them through repetition and consistency and by comforting when needed. Doing it for them, while may make them sleep for the time being is not supporting their learning or your wellbeing- how dare we think about ourselves! (if you are exhausted from having to “put” them to sleep every few hours).
So I always tell parents control what you can control and help your baby learn by guiding them (if it’s age appropriate-newborns are a different story) but not to your detriment and not in the spirit of obligation.
Yes, sleep is a NEED but it’s also a learnt SKILL and just like learning any skill it’s frustrating (my daughter fell and cried over and over again when learning to walk). Going from AWAKE to DROWSY to ASLEEP without any help is frustrating.
So be patient, keep working at it, have a plan and if you need support ask for it. I’m HERE, I’m your village. Reach out to book a free consultation with me and let me guide YOU, while you guide THEM. So you can all get some rest because it can transform your motherhood experience. I say that because I see it everyday, life is so much brighter and enjoyable when you are rested.
Working on sleep is hard work. But anything that is hard work is worth doing. You don’t have to do this alone.
Normal is nothing, it’s a construct on others opinions. Whatever, you choose for your child IS biologically normal. I personally am okay with being AB-normal because that means I’m human.
