Daytime Sleep: 4-5 times totaling 8-9 Hours
Nighttime Sleep: Waking up every 2-3 hours totaling 8-9 Hours
Wakefulness Period: 40-60 min.
Total Sleep: 16-18 Hours
Babies start growing and developing at an extraordinary speed from the moment they come into the world. This means they have a serious energy requirement. They sleep a lot to find this energy and want to feed every time they are awake. Since their stomachs are still very small, they cannot take in the necessary nutrients all at once.
After feeding for about 20-30 minutes and satisfying their hunger, they stay awake for a maximum of 15-20 minutes and then sleep again, and this cycle of feeding, staying awake, and sleeping continues throughout the day. Since they are still developing biologically, it wouldn’t be correct to expect a routine regarding their daytime naps. It’s sufficient for them to nap when they need to.
At night, they can sleep uninterrupted for up to 3-5 hours. In fact, especially in the early days, even if they don’t wake up at night, it’s very important for their development and your milk production that you wake them up every 3 hours to feed them.
The most important thing you can do during this period regarding their sleep is to engage in behaviours that relax them and make them feel safe. You can do this by adapting the environment as much as possible to the womb.
In the first few months, babies still think they are in the womb, so providing similar conditions will relax them and make it easier for them to fall asleep. Let’s look at some tips together to establish a sleep routine for your baby during this period!
Tips for Better Baby Sleep
- Safe Sleep Environment: The first thing you need to do is to provide a safe sleep environment for your baby. For this, you should lay your baby on their back in a firm, tight bed without using a pillow, blankets, quilts, or toys that could obstruct your baby’s airway.
- Keeping a Journal: After your baby is born, the first few days will pass in a cycle of feeding, burping, changing diapers, and putting them to sleep. During this process, keeping a journal will help you understand your baby’s habits and their own routine without the need to remember everything. If you do this for every step you take with your baby, you will see how beneficial it will be to establish their routine in the coming days, not just for sleep but for every aspect of their care.
- Teaching Day-Night Difference: Babies don’t know the difference between day and night when they are born. They can sleep for long periods during the day and wake up very often at night. In this case, you can help them understand the difference between day and night and establish a sleep routine by making them sleep in a bright and noisy environment during the day and in a dark and quiet environment at night.
- Regulating Sleep Durations: If your baby sleeps for more than 2 hours during the day, you can gently wake them up and feed them. This way, you’ll not only ensure they get the amount of food they need but also encourage them to sleep shorter during the day and longer at night. Intervening with a sleeping baby in such situations will be very beneficial for establishing a regular sleep pattern later on.
- Engaging in Different Activities at Night and Day: Another important thing to do to avoid day-night confusion is to separate activities. You can play fun and cheerful games during the day and include more calming activities to prepare for sleep at night. While feeding and changing their diaper during the day, you can sing songs and talk to them. When they wake up at night, you should feed them, change their nappy quietly without turning on the lights, and put them back to bed.
- Ensuring Fullness: For babies to sleep for long periods, they need to have consumed the required calories. However, because they are still very weak, they can fall asleep while feeding. If they fall asleep without breastfeeding for even 10 minutes in the early days, you should gently wake them up and make them continue. Even though we may not want to wake them up, being full will help your baby sleep long enough during both day and night.
- Swaddling: Babies still think they are in the womb during the first 3-4 months. Therefore, the closer you create an environment to the womb in the outside world, the easier it will be for them to fall asleep. Swaddling not only provides your baby with a feeling of tightness and warmth similar to the womb but also prevents uncontrolled hand-arm movements that they sometimes make while sleeping and sometimes wake them up. Since these uncontrolled hand-arm movements end around the 3rd-4th month, you can use swaddling for sleep until this period. The important point to note is that you should swaddle your baby’s arms only, not their whole body, in a half-swaddle.
- Trying a Pacifier: Babies have a natural sucking reflex that relaxes them. They often do this even when they are in the womb. Therefore, after your baby gets used to breastfeeding well, towards the end of the first month, you can try giving your baby a pacifier for relaxation. This way, your baby will satisfy the sucking reflex they need with the pacifier instead of with you. However, you should only give the pacifier at sleep times and should not force it if your baby doesn’t like it.
- Benefitting from White Noise: The womb is a noisy environment for babies. They hear all the outside sounds as a hum. Even if it is completely silent outside, the sounds of the mother’s organs and the flow of blood in the veins make babies feel like they are in a loud environment. Therefore, providing a silent environment after birth will not relax them but rather worry them. To make them feel safe, they need sounds similar to those they heard in the womb. White noise sounds are the biggest helper in this regard. White noise sounds you play during sleep time will both relax your baby by giving them the feeling of being in the womb and facilitate their transition to sleep by suppressing external noises.
- Make Sure to Rest: Whenever your baby sleeps, try to sleep, or at least rest. The more you rest in the early days, the more stamina and patience you will have in the coming days. Also, keep in mind that hormones that increase breast milk are released during sleep. So, by resting, you not only get the energy you need and increase your milk supply but also spend more productive time with your baby.
