Ever since Clarisse was born, I always wondered whether she has enough sleep. Or is she sleeping too much. Here’s some rough guidelines I’ve gathered of what to expect, but of course these may differs from baby to baby. Even if you’ve had children before, each baby will be different. So don’t expect them to follow a strict pattern.

Newborns generally sleep approximately 16-17 hours in a 24-hour period. Most babies will not sleep through the night until they’re at least 3 months old. There are several reasons why. First of all, their stomachs are very small and they will easily get hungry, especially if you’re breastfeeding your baby. Breast milk is much more easily digested than formula, and your baby will need to feed more often, especially in the beginning.

Babies also have shorter sleep cycles than adults do and have shorter dream cycles. Generally, a newborn baby should sleep around 8 or 9 hours during the day and approximately 8 hours at night. Well, these usually will not be in 8-hour cycles. In the early stage, those sleep times will be very short.

When the baby gets older, up to around 2 years of age, she will still be sleeping 13-14 hours, but the duration of daytime sleep will getting less month-by-month. Your baby should be sleeping through the night by the age of 2 and a 2-hour nap during the day is needed. Again, every child have different sleeping pattern.  As for baby Clarisse, the total hours she sleep each day is between 12-13 hours.  During day time, baby Clarisse will take around 1 to 2 hours of nap depending how early she wake up in the morning.  Well, usually your child might need a slightly longer nap or two short naps and very much depend how early they wake up in the morning. At this age though, try to discourage naps too late in the afternoon, as this can cause it more difficult to make them to sleep a few hours later at bed time.

Once a baby begins to regularly sleep through the night, parents are often disappointed when he/she starts to awake in the night again. This commonly happens at about 6 months of age and is usually a normal part of growing called separation anxiety, when a baby does not understand that separations are just temporary.