Learn How Much Sleep Your Baby Needs – Log Your Baby’s Sleep

Are you struggling with baby sleep problems in your home? Is your baby waking often at night, even though you know she is capable of sleeping straight through? Is your little guy taking short mini-naps, instead of long and restful ones (or perhaps refusing naps altogether)?

Sleep logging

There are lots of ways to solve these issues, but here’s a first step you may not have considered yet: try keeping a baby sleep log.

Why You Should Bother With Keeping a Baby Sleep Log

Here’s a fact that may be helpful to remember, as you work to understand your baby’s sleeping patterns: the amount of sleep a baby gets in 24 hours will stay relatively constant. However, babies can shift sleep between daytime and nighttime. For example, if your 9 month old baby sleeps 14 total hours, and she takes 3 naps each day that are about an hour each, then you can expect that she will probably sleep about 11 hours at night. But if her naps are extra-long, then her nighttime sleep amount will likely decrease. This won’t always work perfectly, of course, but it should generally remain true.

Keeping a baby sleep log will not only help you keep track of how much overall sleep your baby is getting (which is useful information to have, to help determine if your baby is sleep-deprived); it will also help you see how that sleep is divided up between naps and night, and will help you spot any inconsistencies or problems.

Logging your baby’s sleep will also help you see if there are patterns to your baby’s sleep issues. For example, your sleep log will reveal which naps are consistently shorter, and what times (on average) your baby wakes at night.

Finally, if you keep a log of your baby’s sleep, you can take the average amount of sleep in 24 hours and use that as a guide when adjusting schedules and setting your expectations on wake-times.

by Emily DeJeu in Baby Sleep Patterns