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When should a baby sleep through the night? A new study offers the answer
When you're a new parent rocking a screaming infant in your arms at 2 a.m., you begin to wonder, Will he ever sleep through the night?
Shutterstock/Andrejs Pidjass
A new study finds that most babies sleep through the night by 2 or 3 months.
A new study indicates that most babies are capable of "sleeping through the night" by three months. (This means they're sleeping between five and eight hours. Anyone find this hard to believe?)
In the past most pediatricians have told parents they should expect their babies to get a full night's sleep by 12 months, so the findings in this study are surprising.
The researchers asked 75 new parents to keep diaries tracking their babies' sleep habits for six days each month for a year. Parents were also invited to shoot time-lapse video of their children's sleep so researchers could monitor the accuracy of the diaries.
The study's purpose was to determine whether new babies could actually sleep through the night. Researchers looked at three different criterion: Sleeping uninterrupted from midnight till 5 a.m., sleeping uninterrupted for eight hours, or sleeping uninterrupted from 10 p.m to 6 a.m. More than half of the infants were able to sleep from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. by five months.
The researchers didn't collect data on whether the infants were breast- or bottle-fed. Nor did they track the specific methods and techniques parents were using to put their children to sleep. Although the researchers did conclude that parents should develop a sleep routine by the time an infant reaches 1 month.
The study was published in the November edition of the journal Pediatrics.
| October 26 2010 at 12:03 PM
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