How Long Do Newborns Sleep? 16 Hours A Day For The First 3 Months
How Long Do Newborns Sleep – For the first three months of its life, a baby will sleep 16 to 17 hours a day. Giving birth and raising kids is one of the most rewarding of human experiences. At the same time, having a baby is also one of the most disruptive and stressful events a woman can go through. Having to care for a newborn baby is doubly stressful without the benefit of experience. That’s why a woman’s first pregnancy, however joyful it may be, is also a time of great fear and anxiety, understandably. A brand new mom might constantly second-guess herself and her ability to properly care for her newborn infant. There is simply no shortage of concerns a first-time mom will ponder. Her newborn’s sleep pattern is surely one of those.
In the womb, a baby is awake only about 90 to 95 percent of the day. The rest of the time, the fetus is in deep REM sleep as opposed to non-REM, the easily roused state of light sleep. Even in the womb, REM sleep for babies in the womb is no different from adults. Their little eyes move around rapidly back and forth [1].
The mother’s movement throughout the day will lull the fetus in her womb to sleep. At night, when the mother is sleeping and stationary, that’s usually when the baby is awake. This might explain how a newborn baby’s inverse circadian rhythm or sleep patterns occur, where they are asleep during the day and most active at nights. It started in the womb [2].
For the first three months of its life, a baby will sleep 16 to 17 hours a day. That’s a lot of time spent sleeping! The opposite can be said about the hapless new mom and dad. Sleep deprivation amongst new parents is common because while an infant will be asleep for most of the day, they may be awake for most of the night. Sleep deprivation is especially true for exclusively breastfeeding moms. While an infant might not need a lot of milk — their stomachs are still so tiny — they will need to be fed quite often, around eight to twelve times in the course of the day [3]. Formula-fed babies will afford their mothers more time to sleep and rest because they can share feeding duties with the dad or other care givers. Although, many breastfeeding mothers can successfully pump breast milk ahead of time and store for feeding time.