Sleeping like a baby
Sleeping like a baby
It sounds quite peaceful but most parents are in for a surprise – a remarkable number of babies don’t sleep very peaceful at all. Colic, reflux and getting either too warm or too cold are some of the major culprits. Studies have shown that a newborn, in the first days of life, should spend approximately two-thirds of each twenty-four hour period asleep.
Over the course of a lifetime, the length of sleep decreases until old age, when humans spend only about a quarter of a twenty-four hour period asleep. Over the course of our lifetime we spend about one-third of our time sleeping.
Infants should spend more time asleep than awake during the first 3 years of their life because sleep is important for physical growth, the immune system, brain development, learning, memory, and information processing as well as many other systems of the brain and the human body.
The latest research also shows that the more sleep your baby gets the less likely she is to become obese later on.
On average you baby’s sleep should decrease rapidly from newborn (18 hours of sleep) to 3 years (11 hours of sleep), but remember that every baby is different. Below find a table indicating the amount of sleep that a baby needs:
| Age | Approximate amount of sleep needed: |
| Newborn | 16 to 18 hours per day |
| 3 weeks | 15 to 18 hours per day |
| 6 weeks | 15 to 16 hours per day |
| 4 months | 9 to 12 hours plus two nas (2 to 3 hours each) |
| 6 months | 10 to 11 hours plus two naps (2 to 3 hours each) |
| 9 months | 10 to 12 hours plus two naps (1 to 2 hours each) |
| 12 months | 10 to 11 hours plus one to two naps (1 to 2 hours each) |
| 18 months | 10 to 12 hours plus usually one nap 91 to 2 hours) |
| 2 years | 11 to 12 hours plus one nap (1 to 2 hours) |
| 3 years | 10 to 11 hours plus possible one nap (2 hours) |
