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Baby Sleep: Your Infant’s Normal Patterns
All babies have sleeping and waking cycles. If you’re like most new
parents, your goal is to get your baby to do his longest sleeping at night
and be most awake during the day.
But, exactly how long should your baby sleep? On average, babies
snooze fourteen to eighteen hours in a twenty-four-hour period. That
might sound like a lot but it’s broken up into little snippets, slipped
between short stretches of wakefulness. In effect, it’s like being given a
thousand dollars—in pennies!
As you can see in the sleep pattern graph, during your baby’s first
weeks of life two-thirds of each day will be spent asleep (gray areas).
The average infant takes naps lasting two to three hours alternating with
hour-long awake-breaks (white areas) for feeding, fussing, and some
alert time. Initially, your baby’s longest stretch of sleep will probably be
about four hours.
By three months, your baby will still sleep fourteen to eighteen hours
a day, but the awake time (white areas) will join into longer periods of
wakefulness, and sleeping (gray areas) may extend for up to six to eight
hours.

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During these initial months, your baby’s brain gets better and better at
dividing the twenty-four hours of the day into three main activities:
Awake time—to eat and learn about the world
Active (REM) sleep—to dream and “file away” the day’s
lessons
Quiet sleep—to rest and recover from all the day’s efforts
Both babies and adults have two different types of sleep (and I don’t
mean too little and none). Quiet sleep makes up fifty percent of your
baby’s slumber. It’s when he’s out like a log, his breathing easy and
regular, his face still and angelic. During quiet sleep your baby’s muscles
are actually a little tensed; he’s not floppy like a rag doll.
The other fifty percent of your baby’s snoozing consists of active sleep.
This sleep is characterized by sudden bursts of brain activity called REM
(Rapid Eye Movement), and it occurs between periods of quiet sleep.
REM sleep is when your baby’s dreams are spun and his deep memory
centers organize all his new experiences of the day. In active sleep, your
baby has irregular breathing, sudden twitches, limp dangling limbs that
feel like overcooked spaghetti, and, most spectacularly, he makes tiny
heart-melting smiles. Contrary to myth, these grins are not caused by
gas; rather, your baby is practicing what will soon become his most
charming and powerful social tool—his smile.
Adults enjoy a full two hours of REM when we sleep. By comparison,
your new baby revels in almost eight hours of REM every day. Why do
babies have so much more REM than we do? No one knows for sure, but

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one theory posits that they need much more time to review the day
because so many experiences are new to them. It’s as if their brains are
saying, “Wow! So much new stuff today, and I want to remember
everything!” By comparison, most of an adult’s day is so routine that our
brains fast-forward through this period of review, as if to say, “I can skip
all that. I know it already.”
Sleeping obviously is not a time of alertness, but it’s not “coma” time
either. You are aware of many things around you while you snooze. For
example, you probably have no trouble hearing the phone ring in the
middle of the night and even when you sleep on the edge of the bed you
rarely fall out of it.
Babies, too, receive a constant flow of information from the world
around them while they slumber. That’s why your baby may experience
their still bed and the extreme quiet of your home as disturbing
understimulation.
The waves of quiet and active sleep that your infant moves through
take place within larger cycles of deep and light sleep. These repeat, like
the tides, over and over again, all night long. Your baby cycles between
deep and light sleep about every sixty minutes. Infants with good state
control and mellow temperaments can often stay asleep during their
lightest sleep, and even if they wake up, they usually fall right back to
sleep. However, babies with poor self-calming abilities and challenging
temperaments often have trouble staying asleep when they enter their
light-sleep periods. During this phase of sleep, they may be so close to
wakefulness that the added stimulation of hunger, gas, noise, or startle
may be enough to rouse them to alertness or even agitated crying.

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