The amount of variation is also clear if you look at how babies actually sleep. "These slightly different guidelines highlight the fact that even leading experts disagree about infant sleep," Gregory says. Neither body makes specific recommendations for nap versus nighttime sleep amounts. Meanwhile, sleep length recommendations from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine make no recommendations at all for infants under four months old. She points out that it has been recommended by the US's National Sleep Foundation that babies up to three months old should obtain 14-17 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period, but that as few as 11 or as many as 19 hours might be appropriate. "Just as adults differ in terms of their sleep, so do babies," says Alice Gregory, a psychology professor specialising in sleep at Goldsmiths University of London and the author of the book Nodding Off: The Science of Sleep. Short-term randomised controlled trials have found that babies given a memory task did better when they napped and, in findings that will surprise exactly zero parents, that fatigued infants had a harder time dealing with a stressful episode than alert infants.īut while that might mean we shouldn't do anything (such as deliberately forcing a child to stay awake) to inhibit sleep, it doesn't mean that every baby requires 12 hours of unbroken sleep a night and several two-hour naps per day, either. Of course, it's likely that the relationship between sleep and development goes both ways. So, it is difficult to unravel how much of the association may be the reverse: children with ADHD may simply sleep less. This would involve sleep-depriving one group of children over years. The only way to know if a certain amount (or lack) of sleep "causes" a specific condition such as ADHD, as might seem to be suggested by research showing a correlation between children who consistently slept less overnight and ADHD, would be to set up a randomised controlled study. They are also correlations, not causations. Many of these longer-term findings, however, involve school-aged children, not babies. A lack of sleep has been associated with cardiometabolic risk factors, an increased risk of ADHD and low cognitive performance, and with poorer emotional regulation, academic achievement and quality of life. Throughout the following century, although these suggested amounts declined, recommended sleep consistently ran around 37 minutes more than the actual sleep babies were getting, paving the way for decades of concerned parents.Įxperts agree that sleep is crucial for babies and young children (and, for that matter, for adults). The first "scientific" guidelines date as early as 1897, when, in a book on sleep for the London-based Contemporary Science Series, a Russian physician recommended that newborns should sleep 22 hours a day. Worrying about whether babies are getting enough sleep isn't new. "And that affects the way in which we think about what babies should be able to do, and how babies should be treated." (Read more about how sleeping through the night is a relatively new phenomenon, even for adults.) "But that's what people in Western societies have become accustomed to. "The way in which we sleep now in the 21st Century is kind of odd, in an evolutionary sense, because we weren't evolved to sleep like we're dead for an eight-hour period, and not wake up, in total silence and total darkness," says Helen Ball, professor of anthropology at Durham University and the director of the Durham Infancy and Sleep Centre. Taken too far, it can cause a great deal of anxiety and stress for parents – and even be unsafe for the babies themselves. Even some paediatricians warn parents that, if these goals aren't reached, children are less likely to get the sleep they need to grow and thrive.īut not only is this idea of independent, uninterrupted baby sleep far from universal, it is also very different to how human infants have slept through most of our species' history. Particularly in the West, an industry of sleep coaches, books and articles has sprung up, promising to help families achieve what many see as the holy grail: a baby who sleeps in a crib, alone, all night, and has several long naps during the day. Mention you've had a baby, and almost everyone will ask one thing: how is she sleeping?Īfter all, many exhausted parents look forward to the time when their baby finally sleeps through the night.
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