1. Sleeping too much during the day will keep baby up at night.
Not likely, except in extreme cases. Unless your little one is sleeping practically all day and up all night, don’t focus too much on the length of their naps. Newborns especially require approximately 18-20hrs of sleep. In fact, up until about 6 months, I don’t recommend that your little one be awake for more than about 2 – 21/2 hours at a time. For newborns, that number is closer to 45 minutes to an hour.
What keeps babies awake at night, more than anything else, is overtiredness. You might think that an exhausted baby is more likely to conk out for a full night than one who slept all day, but it’s actually just the opposite. The reason we refer to it as being “overtired” is because the baby has passed the “tired” phase and now their bodies start to kick up cortisol levels instead of melatonin, which keeps them from falling and staying asleep. A baby who has gotten a decent amount of sleep during the day is far less likely to miss the sleep window.
There are substantial variations depending on baby’s age and the length of their naps, but up to that 6-month mark, it’s really not uncommon for baby to be sleeping around 5 hours a day outside of nighttime sleep, so if your little one is still within those guidelines, let them snooze.
2. Sleeping is an instinctual development and can’t be taught.
Sleeping is natural, an innate trait that all living animals do. Humans wake up and fall back to sleep multiple times a night, regardless of their age. So no, you can’t teach a child to be sleepy. What can be taught, however, is the ability to fallback to sleep independently without props or assistance. You can also teach cues to recognize when to sleep at the proper time. These things can be taught and babies are looking to use to teach them these tools.
A common statement you hear a lot from parents is “my baby is just a bad sleeper and just constantly wakes up and wont go back to sleep” and yes that might be true but what you don’t hear them say is what they do to get the child to sleep in the first place. The reason they keep waking up and wont go back down is because they have been conditioned to be dependent on outside assistance to get to sleep. Once your little one has figured out how to get to sleep without assistance from outside sources, they start stringing those sleep cycles together effortlessly, and that’s the secret to “sleeping through the night” as most parents understand it.
3. Babies will naturally dictate their own sleep schedule.
Babies need us, they need us to nurture, love, and support them. Helping them regulate sleep cycles is just as important. They are looking to us to track those wake windows, the time awake between sleep, and keep them from missing their natural sleep cycle. These windows are very finicky and if kept up for even as little as a half hour later, those cortisol levels increase which causes a surge in energy. In laymen terms, baby meltdowns. So as much as I wish babies could just fall asleep when they’re tired, it simply doesn’t work that way, at least for a large percentage of babies.
4. Sleep training is stressful for the baby and can affect the parent-child attachment.
This fear based thought around sleep training was started by Dr. James Mckenna who supports baby led sleep and also supports bed-sharing. His claims are baseless and there is no true data to support this. Now are there different methods to sleep training that can be more harsh than others? Yes, and some of those can have their own consequences but you are not a bad parent if you sleep train your child. American Academy of Pediatrics supports sleep training to give your baby a good start with healthy sleep habits. In 2016 a study conducted by eight of the top researchers, behavioral intervention, (A.K.A Sleep training) “provide(s) significant sleep benefits above control, yet convey(s) no adverse stress responses or long-term effects on parent-child attachment or child emotions and behavior.” In short, if you sleep train your child they are not going to hate you or feel less about you or be in therapy for PTSD due to it.
5. Babies are not “designed” to sleep through the night.
Putting aside our religious beliefs for a moment, I think we can all agree that, even if babies were “designed” somehow, whoever did the designing left plenty of room for some upgrades. Trusting your child’s physiology to dictate their sleep schedule, their eating habits, their behavior, or just about any other aspect of their upbringing is a recipe for disaster.
Is your toddler designed to eat three pounds of gummi bears? Surely not. Will they if you don’t intervene. Without a doubt.
Little ones need our expertise and authority to guide them through their early years, and probably will well up into adolescent years . This is especially true when it comes to their sleep. Some babies are naturally gifted sleepers, but don’t rely on the advice of those who tell you that babies should dictate their schedules. You’re in charge because you know best, even if it may not feel like it sometimes.
There are obviously plenty more myths and misconceptions surrounding babies and their sleep habits, but these are some of the most important to get the facts on.
Google scholar is a great place to find peer-reviewed scientific study on all things baby-related, and trusted sources like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Institutes of Health, Britain’s National Health Service, Canada’s Hospital for Sick Children, the World Health Organization, and other national children’s health organizations are excellent sources of information you can feel confident about using to answer questions about your baby’s health.
If you want more information about the benefits of sleep, I will be happy to talk further on the issue. You can also email me at contactsoundsleep4bubbies@gmail.com. Be sure to signup for our curated monthly developmental emails. These are sent monthly to help you be aware for current changes and other developmental leaps your little one will be experiencing.