Sleep Totals for Babies
“Is my baby sleeping enough?!”
Any respectable sleep consultant will make GENERIC recommendations for wake times and number of naps, but those are based on averages and experience. They are NOT evidence based.
Which can leave parents feeling confused and unsure about what their baby needs.
When we discuss sleep totals for babies, we only have one real evidence based source for recommendations for optimal health. And when I share that, you’ll see that there is a very wide range for each age they have grouped together.
So let me repeat myself: there is a WIDE range of normal and your child will fall somewhere on the spectrum, but it won’t be the same as EVERY single child. Just like weight and height percentiles, there has to be someone at the high end and someone at the low end or else we wouldn’t have percentiles.
It’s not good/bad, better/worse to be one or the other. It just IS. It’s just one single data point.
If you’re ever really wondering if your baby is sleeping enough, consider their mood and their appetite. Well rested kids will be mostly content (I mean, we all have days where we aren’t in our best form haha) and will have a generally good appetite (remember, look at intake over a week’s time vs day to day).
First, here are some resources for you:
Our one source for sleep recommendations comes from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Here’s their chart.
Please take note:
This is recommended on a regular basis so if there are days where they sleep more or less, it’s fine
This includes naps (though not every kid naps, so you’d want that sleep total to be overnight)
Recommendations for infants younger than 4 months are not included due to the wide range of normal variation in duration and patterns of sleep, and insufficient evidence for associations with health outcomes.
If you’re really struggling with sleep and can’t seem to hit those sleep totals on a regular basis, check out the 1:1 packages to improving sleep!
