You've got to wonder how mums managed back in the day – when our mothers and grandmothers had their children.
Back when there weren't so many books and blogs and experts and consultants and column inches dedicated to babies and sleep.
Seriously – think about it – getting a baby to sleep has now turned into an entire industry. There are authors and "experts" now making a lot of money telling tired and unravelling new parents how to get their babies to go to sleep. Interesting, isn't it? I mean – how the heck did mums get their babies to sleep before the internet...?
I only really discovered people's obsession with sleep when I had my first baby and everyone started asking: "Is she sleeping for you?" Or: "How is she sleeping?"
I mostly co-slept due to breastfeeding and the fact that co-sleeping was lovely and sort of made sense to me, and while she woke up a few times through the night, I never thought much of it, always just figuring someday she'd probably stop waking up for food. Which, at almost one, she eventually did.
To be fair, she still woke every now and again after turning one too, but we just snuggled a bit and she went back to sleep, and I never really counted how often she woke and tried to analyse it in any way – I just assumed such is life with children. And when my little boy joined the family a few years later, I just repeated this and never really had any drama over sleep – despite the fact that he was probably closer to two before he stopped waking for food or snuggles.
The thing is – I feel like the sleep issue is making parents feel more anxious and stressed than they need to be, mostly because there is this expectation that babies "should" start sleeping through the night from just a few weeks old, making mums and dads feel like they are doing something wrong if this isn't the case.
Adding so, so much stress at a time where you really should just lower those shoulders and just, to an extent at least, go with the flow.
And now
some new research from
McGill University is suggesting the same thing, telling parents that they shouldn't worry if their child doesn't sleep through the night by six months of age or even a year old – it is perfectly normal, and will in almost every single instant sort itself out eventually.
The study, published the medical journal Pediatrics, found a large percentage of developmentally normal, healthy babies don't sleep through the night by a year old, and are not at increased risk for delays in cognitive, language or motor development as a result.
"If there was only one thing I could tell parents it would be, do not worry if your infant does not sleep through the night at six months of age," the study's lead researcher, Marie-Hélène Pennestri told NBC News.
Take that in, parents – stop worrying, try to get some rest when your baby sleeps (even if it means starting to go to bed a lot earlier than you would have before) and just trust the fact that eventually, your baby will get better at sleeping and life will return to a more predictable pattern.
According to Pennestri, s
leeping through the night, also known as consolidating sleep, was defined in the study as six to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. At six months of age, 38 percent of typically developing infants were not yet sleeping six consecutive hours at night, and more than half — 57 percent — weren't sleeping eight hours. At 12 months old, 28 percent of infants weren't yet sleeping six hours straight at night, and 43 percent weren't staying asleep for eight hours.
In other words, if your baby isn't sleeping through the night you are not alone, mama.
One of the biggest takeaways from the study is dispelling the notion that interrupted sleep in the first year could cause developmental problems. "In the present sample of typically developing infants, we were unable to find any significant associations between sleeping through the night at 6 or 12 months of age and variations in mental or psychomotor development," the study concluded.
The researchers gleaned information from a longitudinal birth survey of mothers and their babies and followed the babies until they were three years old.
They looked at surveys of parents of 388 infants aged up to six months, then checked in with 360 of them at 12 months.
While sleep undoubtedly plays a fundamental role in child development, total sleep, including naps, might be more important than getting eight consecutive hours, the researchers wrote.
Take that in, parents – stop worrying, try to get some rest when your baby sleeps (even if it means starting to go to bed a lot earlier than you would have before) and just trust the fact that eventually, your baby will get better at sleeping and life will return to a more predictable pattern.
According to Pennestri, s
