The dream of human beings is the subject of great research. What happens since we close our eyes at night until we open them the next morning is an enigma that we are slowly discovering.
Without a doubt, one of the biggest concerns of those who are parents is baby's sleep during the first year of life, in which it is estimated that parents lose about 700 hours of sleep. Normal to worry.
When we sleep, we all go through different phases of sleep, but The sleep phases of a baby are not the same as those of an adult. It is very interesting for parents to know how sleep works in babies to better understand their sleep pattern, why night wakes and why sleep training is misguided.
The phases of sleep in the baby
An adult goes through five phases of sleep, four subphases of non-REM sleep (non-rapid eye movement) divided into light sleep and deep sleep, and a REM phase (rapid eye movement), a very light type of sleep.
In contrast, the baby's sleep pattern is very different from that of an adult. A newborn baby has only two of the five phases. They are: deep sleep and REM phase.
The why is very simple. A newborn needs to wake up several times to feed. If I had five phases I would need much more time to sleep and could not feed as many times as I have to.
They spend more time in REM sleep, less deep and more receptive to environmental changes. Then it enters a phase of deep sleep (not REM) from which they can easily wake up. And so all night alternate both phases.
The baby's sleep pattern is very different from that of an adult. A newborn baby has only two of the five phases
In Babies and more How to help your baby sleep at nightPerhaps there is the key to many misunderstandings. It is absolutely natural and normal for a baby to wake up at night. He does it so that "someone", usually his mother, satisfies his need to eat. That's why babies wake up crying. It is his way of calling mom to feed him or simply to shelter him in his arms, which, like eating, is a basic need of the newborn.
I think that understanding this is basic to understand why it is not healthy to try to modify the children's sleep pattern. Because it goes against its own nature. It is also understood why those who defend the colecho (sleeping with the baby) argue that it is more natural than any other way to make the baby sleep.
Because as soon as he wakes up hungry he has his mother close to feed (there are times when the baby sucks and neither he nor the mother finds out) and because he also wakes up less at night, because when he is close he does not feel the need to cry To look for its heat You will have noticed that sometimes the baby wakes up crying, breast five seconds and falls asleep. He was not looking for food, but contact with his mother.
The pattern of infant sleep in the first year of the baby
The dream appears in the prenatal stage. From the sixth month of pregnancy the baby already experiences a phase of active REM (Rapid Eye Movement) movement within the womb, where he sleeps most of the time.
When they are born they sleep most of the day, between 18 hours and 20 hours, without differentiating the day from the night. The periods of sleep are shortening as the first months pass and the baby needs to know more about the stimuli that come from his environment.
After three months, between the fourth and approximately the eighth month, a very special period occurs. The baby acquires the rest of the sleep phases. But like everything, it takes time to learn to "use them." A period of adaptation begins in which the child practices how to sleep, so to speak.
In Babies and more, why does the baby wake up at night more than before?You already recognize the difference between day and night. Sleep more hours at night and during the day surely take one or two naps, the most sleepy maybe three. There will be nights that you wake up many times, sometimes less and maybe some, around half a year, less, sleep at a stretch.
But at this stage baby's sleep becomes very unstable, with very frequent awakenings, even more than when I was a newborn baby. And this happens because their sleep phases are changing.
Around the year, the child begins to have micro wake up, that is, small periods of awakening that are an innate response of the human being to be constantly alert. If we add the night fears, nightmares and other nighttime milestones that occur in childhood to micro-awakenings, they are around three or four years in which the constant waking at night is absolutely normal.
As parents, we have to accompany them and comfort them in their interrupted nights.
In Babies and more, what do I do? He slept well and now he wakes up several times
