Are they sleeping through yet?

This might be a familiar question, but one research study suggests a more accurate question might be have they ever slept through? 

Sleep might be something you think about a lot. Even if you aren’t too concerned about it, it is often a topic of conversation when you have a baby or young child. You might wonder how much sleep your baby needs, when your toddler should stop napping or if your child should still be waking at night.  

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that, while there are guidelines about the amount of sleep babies, children and adults need, a lot of the answers link to our individual sleep needs and patterns.  

Researchers agree that there is considerable variability between individual babies’ sleep patterns. However, one group of researchers wanted to investigate the variation in babies’ sleep from night to night. They were interested in exploring whether an individual baby would have the same sleep pattern on consecutive nights.  

The results of their research were published in 2020. They looked at how much six-month-old babies slept. The study involved 44 babies and looked at their sleep each night over 13 nights.  

The results of the research might not surprise you, the researchers found that the sleep patterns of six-month-old babies varied between individual babies and for each baby from night to night as well.  

Very few babies, three out of 44, slept through the night every night which in this study was defined as sleeping for between six and eight hours without waking.   

This research shows that sleep is a developmental process and ‘sleeping through’ is not achieved in one step, but, like lots of development, takes time to consolidate. The researchers also suggest that it might be helpful for parents to know that the expectation babies will ‘sleep through’ at six months old is often unrealistic.  

Reference 

Pennestri, M-H., Burdayron, R., Kenny, S. Beliveau, M-J., Dubois-Comtois, K. (2020). Sleeping through the night of through the nights? Sleep Medicine, 76, 98-103. 

For more information about babies’ sleep you can visit Basis online BASIS – Baby Sleep Information Source (basisonline.org.uk)