Babies who are 0 -2 1/2 months old do not differentiate between night and day very well as they do not have enough melatonin in their systems. Infants at this age require frequent feedings since there stomachs are very small and they cannot eat enough to allow them not to get hungry after 3 - 4 hours. The simple fact is that developmentally they are not ready to sleep more than 3 - 4 hours at a time.
Therefore sleep "coaching" or "training" cannot be accomplished until around 3 - 4 months of age when an infant is capable of sleeping through the night. Now there is one other reason a baby may not be sleeping through the night at this age and that is if he is breastfeeding. Why is that? Well, breast milk is actually digested more rapidly than formula so the breastfed baby gets hungry more frequently than the formula fed infant. This is important to keep in mind when trying to coach your infant to sleep through the night. Just because he now is developmentally capable of doing so, if he is hungry he will awaken and need a feeding. I will discuss this night feeding in a later blog.
So sometime during this developmental stage parents can expect that their baby will sleep for longer periods of time and hopefully that will be at night!
Coming next .... how to establish a consistent sleep pattern for your baby!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment