Sleep, Not Stimulation A New View Who doesn't love a sleeping baby? The sight of a baby, swaddled in a soft blanket, cheeks slightly flushed with sleep, touches us deeply. The baby's complete surrender to sleep reminds us of human vulnerability and tenderness. Our innermost desires to nurture and provide are aroused. In the presence of such innocence, we feel both humbled and strengthened by our duty as adult protectors. As individuals, we appreciate a baby's sleep, but as a culture, we're having trouble getting our babies to sleep well. Sleep difficulties in children are at an all-time high. My experience with new parents strongly suggests widespread, chronic sleep deprivation in babies. Parents who come to my classes describe babies who sleep only twelve or even ten hours a day (far short of the recommended time, which is around sixteen or more hours daily for newborns; see chart below and on page 12. Other parents have babies who spend hours sobbing in their arms before finally nodding off for a short, restless nap. I see babies rubbing their eyes on their mothers' shoulders--even rubbing their eyes on the carpet if they're lying on the floor--while the exhausted parent shakes a brightly colored toy in front of the child and explains, "My baby never seems sleepy!" Many of these parents are unaware that their children are sleep deprived. In 2005, the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) commissioned a nationwide survey of the sleep habits and behaviors of children younger than four years old. Sleep needs vary across the first year, but according to the NSF's pediatric task force, most babies past the Baby's Sleep Distribution* newborn stage need somewhere between thirteen and fifteen hours of sleep in a 24hour period. And that's just a minimum. Some babies thrive on sixteen hours per day, or even more. But according to the NSF study, about half of the nation's babies log only twelve hours or fewer daily. That's a serious problem: A sixmonth- old baby who sleeps twelve hours a day will suffer a cumulative sleep loss of hundreds of hours by the end of his first year of life! The study also showed that days mos mos mos yrs although parents wish their kids could Newborn Infants get more sleep, these parents don't realize *For more information, see the chart on page 12. their kids actually need to sleep more. A Sleep-Deprived Generation Why are our babies missing out on so much sleep? Do parents want to deprive their children of a basic biological need? Of course not. Like the generations of parents before us, we want to give our babies everything they need and then some. As expectant parents, we may try even harder than our own parents did to prepare for our new job: We take classes or read books about breastfeeding, child- proofing, infant cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), and making baby food at home. Yet there are few opportunities to educate ourselves about an infant's sleep. As a society, we tend to assume sleep will take care o



Author Information

Polly Moore received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, where she specialized in sleep research. She continued her research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center, and is now Director of Sleep Research at California Clinical Trials in San Diego. She is a hands-on expert in the subject of baby sleepwith two small children of her ownand gives talks to new parents on the subject. She and her family live in San Diego, California.