Understanding and Accepting Sleep Needs in Babies

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Understanding and Accepting Sleep Needs in Babies. How knowing what your child’s sleep needs are will help you be a better mom.

 

Understanding and Accepting Sleep Needs in Babies. How knowing what your child's sleep needs are will help you be a better mom.

 

Whenever you read about how long your child should be sleeping, you will notice there is a range given. Night sleep should be 10-12 hours. Naps should be 1.5-2.5 hours long (unless it is a catnap, and then it may be only 30 minutes). Despite that range being given, moms tend to fixate on the larger number. 

 

I often get concerned questions from moms because their child is “only” sleeping ten hours at night and they can’t figure out how to get to that 12 hour mark. I always remind them, ten is in the normal range. Ten may be enough for your individual baby. 

 

Of my four children, two have been low sleep needs and two have been high sleep needs. Understanding and accepting that there are different sleep needs is very freeing to you as a parent. Once you realize your child has low sleep needs and doesn’t need as much sleep at night nor as long of naps in the day as a high sleep needs baby, you will be able to relax and just enjoy motherhood so much more. 

 

How To Decipher Sleep Needs in Your Baby or Child

To finish on our big Babywise week all about sleep, Emily from Journey of Parenthood is talking about how to tell your baby’s sleep needs. She is discussing common traits of high sleep needs babies and common traits of low sleep needs babies. Emily says,

When I think back to my first child as an infant I wish I’d known about high sleep needs and low sleep needs. I wish I’d been able to tell myself that Kye wasn’t sleeping because his body simply didn’t need the sleep.

Both types of sleep needs children still NEED sleep, but high sleep needs babies tend to be on the higher end of the sleep spectrum whereas low sleep needs one tend to be on the lower end of that sleep spectrum. Babywise even accounts for this as it provides a range of what is an appropriate amount of sleep at a given age. 

I took me until my THIRD child to FINALLY realize and recognize the differences between a high sleep needs and low sleep needs baby. Having that knowledge has made a WORLD of difference.

Head on over to Journey of Parenthood to read all about How to Tell If You Have a High Sleep Needs or Low Sleep Needs Baby. To read more on this blog about sleep needs and how to get great sleep, see these posts:

 

I hope you enjoyed all of these posts from the Babywise Friendly Blog Network this week! As a reminder, here are the links to all of the posts that went up this week:

Understanding and Accepting Sleep Needs in Babies. How knowing what your child's sleep needs are will help you be a better mom.

 

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