When does a newborn baby sleep regularly?
Newborn babies often sleep for long periods of the day. You may reach more than seventeen hours per day. But these hours are not continuous or at specific times, especially in the first weeks of childbirth. We find some children sleep an hour or two and then wake up. Others may sleep four hours straight during the day or more and wake up at night. This causes stress on the mother.
But in most cases, infants during the first six weeks of birth sleep more hours at night and wake up intermittently during the day. By the time the child reaches six to eight months, it becomes normal for the child to sleep about 12 hours a day continuously, especially at night. Therefore, it can be said that the regularity of the infant's sleep starts from the age of six months. Although a large number of children sleep regularly at the age of less than six weeks or eight weeks.
Causes of interrupted sleep in infants:
We explained earlier that a newborn baby may suffer from irregular sleep in the first weeks and months of birth. Also, many infants do not sleep continuously for a large number of hours. Rather, most of them sleep intermittently lightly. However, there are reasons that lead to a lack of sleep in newborns, and among these reasons is what is related to the environment surrounding the child during sleep. Also, some of them are related to the presence of disorders in the child’s body, and among the reasons for lack of sleep in the infant are the following:
- Noise and loud sound next to the child during sleep leads to increased anxiety and irregular sleep.
- The strong lights shining on the child and his eyes when sleeping reduce his calmness and the stability of his sleep.
- The child feels hungry and the stomach is not full.
- The infant cannot differentiate between day and night in the first weeks of birth. Especially since he came out of the mother's dark womb. The child needs time for his biological clock to regulate and to be able to differentiate between day and night.
- Too much petting and petting the child right before bed. This leads to increased neural activity in the child's brain. And thus reduces his feeling of relaxation during sleep.
- The child's lack of adequate heating and his feeling of cold during sleep are among the reasons for his awakening. The child's feeling of heat and high temperature also leads to sleep disturbance. Therefore, it was important to provide good ventilation for the place where the infant sleeps.
- Some organic diseases may cause the child to wake up from sleep, such as ear infection, which children often suffer from in the first months, and the child's feeling of colic and intestinal bloating leads to his awakening from sleep.
