The sleep of their offspring is often a source of worry for parents of a newborn baby – and also the source of many shortened nights. If they expect their babies to start a full night’s sleep at six months, a study published in the December 2018 issue of Pediatrics shows that a large number of healthy babies do not reach this threshold in six months, but in a year. We will therefore have to wait a little longer before hoping to find long moments without interruption in the arms of Morpheus.
Healthy babies
The goal of the team of researchers at McGill University (Canada) was to examine whether infants who did not sleep for six or eight consecutive hours a night were more likely to develop psychomotor and mental problems. So they looked at sleep data from 388 six-month-old babies and 369 one-year-old babies. In the end, according to the mothers’ responses, 38% of infants did not sleep yet six consecutive hours at six months. By 12 months of age, 28% of infants were not yet getting six hours of sleep at night and 43% were not getting eight hours of sleep.
Even more, the researchers found no correlation between the infant’s waking up at night and its mother’s postnatal mood. But they found that babies who didn’t finish the night all at once had significantly higher breastfeeding rates. A physical phenomenon that has many benefits for babies and mothers.
Sleep at six months, the gold standard
“Sleeping at night, between six and twelve months, is generally considered the ‘gold standard’ in Western countries”, write scientists. Marie-Hélène Pennestri, a researcher in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at McGill University, hopes these findings will allay parents’ concerns: ” [ils] could benefit from more education on the normal development – and great variability – of the sleep-wake cycles of infants instead of focusing only on methods and interventions, especially for those who feel stressed about such methods as the delayed response to crying “.
According to a British study by the mattress brand Ergoflex, during the first year after the birth of their little dormouse, young parents lost an average of 44 days of sleep.
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