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How much Sleep Is Enough for Your Baby?

How much sleep is enough for your baby? There are two ways to answer this question:

Look at your baby (useful checks below)

Compare average baby sleep hours (listed below)

A combination of these two will give you the best idea about your baby's sleep hours.

The first option, even though subjective, is usually the most reliable. Your baby's behaviour and sleep are the best signs of how much sleep is enough because perfectly tailored to her.

Checking the average hours of sleep at different ages can be a useful, objective, indicator. Of course it's important to take the numbers for what they are: averages. That means there is a lot of room for variation ...

Is my baby sleeping enough?

By paying attention to your baby and her behaviour, you can find out is she is sleeping enough, or too little.

How is your baby?

Is she happy, alert and nicely active most of the time?
Is she healthy and does she feed well?
Does she wake up refreshed after a nap or in the morning?
Does she settle for sleep and wake up at regular times, without you waking her up?

When you answer yes to these questions, your baby is quite probably getting enough sleep. Keep coming back to these questions if you are in doubt in the future.

Of course it is normal for a baby to be fussy and cranky from time to time, but if it is most of the time, then she may not sleep enough.

If she often crashes while playing time or at moments where she wouldn't normally sleep, that may also indicate too little sleep.

If she's paler than usual and easily falls ill, that may also be due to not enough sleep.

If needed, help your baby sleep more. The best way is to start at the basics: install a bedtime routine and a regular sleep schedule that fits her age and is flexible enough for baby's needs.

She's not tired ...

A baby who does not sleep enough will be overtired. Overtiredness is not always easy to recognise because it doesn't necessarily show as sleepiness. On the contrary: an overtired baby or toddler may be very active, bouncing up and down till long past bedtime ...

Being overtired is also a sleep disturber: it makes it much more difficult to settle for sleep.

And that makes it a very common sleep myth: parents with a baby who does not fall asleep before say 10pm at night, often wrongly think that she is not tired. In most cases though, the reason is overtiredness.

Shifting to an earlier bedtime - sometimes drastic - is the solution: baby will almost certainly settle better and sleep longer too.

How much sleep is enough, theoretically?

A very easy way to check whether your baby is sleeping enough: note down for a couple of days how much she sleeps during the day and at night. Then compare to the numbers below. Too easy, unfortunately: the numbers only show how an average baby might sleep.

But it is not a very reliable indicator for how much sleep is enough for your baby. So use the numbers as a soft guideline only, and focus on assessing your baby as above.

About the numbers

The numbers shown, anywhere, for how much sleep a baby needs are always average sleep hours. They are not based on what would be best for a baby, but on how a given group of babies sleep, on average. The numbers are also regional and culture dependent.^[1]

Please do look at them that way and remember that they are not absolute.

An average of 17 hours of sleep a day, means that there are also newborns who sleep 23 hours a day and others who sleep no more than 11 hours.

I can testify: at 1 month my son slept a total of 12 hours during the 'night', zero during the day...

If you do worry about your baby sleeping too much or too little, do not hesitate to consult your doctor.

On average, a newborn baby sleeps 17 hours per day. They wake up about every four hours. This is the same during the day and at night.

From 1 to 3 months old, an average baby will sleep about 7,5 hours during the day and 7,5 hours during the night in total but not without waking in between.

Between 3 and 6 months old, daytime sleep decreases to about 6 hours (2 or 3 naps). Nights become a bit longer with 9 hours on average, with fewer awakenings than before.

Between 6 months old and 1 year, 2 naps on average give 4 hours of daytime sleep. Nighttime sleep is 10 hours on average of which on average 6 hours non-stop.

Between 1 and 4 years old, total average sleep decreases to about 12 hours a day. Between the age of 3 and 6, daytime naps will disappear (naps are very regional and culture dependent and often related to (pre)school age).

Comparing with other babies

A third option to answer the How much sleep is enough? question we all use at some point is comparing with other babies sleeping. Interesting as this may be, it is mostly unreliable, because all babies are so different to begin with.

Worse, it can be quite frustrating to hear your friend's baby sleeps about double the hours as yours ... If that happens, go through the checks above and you may find you are still "OK" and there is nothing wrong with your baby.

However, you can try to help her sleep more, starting with the basics discussed in the baby sleeping through the night pages.

[1] Sleep Duration From Infancy to Adolescence: Reference Values and General Trends Ivo Iglowstein, Oskar G. Jenni, Luciano Molinari and Remo H. Largo Pediatrics, 2003;111;302-307 doi: 10.1542/peds.111.2.302

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