Myth or Fact? Babies Must be Taught to Sleep Through the Night

Myth: Babies will have poor sleep quality for life if they are not taught to sleep through in infancy.

First of all, let’s define what it means to “sleep through the night”. Some sleep experts consider sleeping through the night to mean sleeping a specified number of hours without waking or signaling a caregiver. The problem with this definition is that most adults don’t sleep through the night.

Sleep cycles go like this: Drift off to sleep, fall into deeper, and deeper, and deeper sleep, then REM (light) sleep. During this REM stage our brain does a body scan asking, “Am I hungry, thirsty, lonely, afraid, uncomfortable, etc?”. If the answer is no, we drift back into a deeper sleep. If the answer is yes, we wake up, and as adults we can, ideally, take care of the issue. Since adult sleep cycles are around 90 minutes in length, an average 8 hour night would allow for 5 opportunities for an adult to wake. Most of the time these wakeful states are uneventful and brief; we don’t remember them. Did I wake and readjust my blanket last night? Did I take a sip of water then go back to sleep? Did I get up to use the bathroom? Probably… but I don’t remember.

Since a baby’s sleep cycle is much shorter, typically closer to 45-60 minutes in length, they have more opportunities to wake. Additionally, when they do enter REM sleep and their brain detects an unmet need, like hunger, discomfort, etc. their way of taking care of the issue is to signal a caregiver that something is wrong.

Further, babies’ brains are not developmentally ready to connect their short sleep cycles from birth. The ability to do so comes with time. Often, newborns will wake after every sleep cycle. This is because humans are born with relatively immature brains. We are born with our survival brain, or brainstem, as the most highly developed part of our brain. Our emotional brain is developed from birth through age three and beyond. During that development infants need nurturing from a caregiver to work through stressful situations. The brainstem controls systems like breathing, heart rate, sleep, blood oxygen, blood glucose, and more. Being in close physical contact, like skin to skin, can help to regulate all of those systems. As babies are exposed to this type of nurturing, they will learn regulation skills including linking sleep cycles.

While sleeping through the night cannot be taught there are a few things caregivers can do to help babies feel secure during the night. Unconditional physical contact helps to regulate infants’ brainstems and therefore systems like breathing, heartrate, sleep, and so much more.

Fact: All babies will sleep through when they are ready

Babies who are not taught to sleep through the night will grow up to have normal sleep as an adult. Sleeping through the night without signaling a caregiver is not a skill to be taught or a right of passage at any age. Babies will sleep without caregiver support when they are developmentally ready. That stage, just like all developmental stages like crawling or walking, has a huge range of what is acceptable as “normal”.

References:

DeMaster D, Bick J, Johnson U, Montroy JJ, Landry S, Duncan AF. Nurturing the preterm infant brain: leveraging neuroplasticity to improve neurobehavioral outcomes. Pediatr Res. 2019 Jan;85(2):166-175. doi: 10.1038/s41390-018-0203-9. Epub 2018 Oct 16. PMID: 30531968.

Mount CW, Monje M. Wrapped to Adapt: Experience-Dependent Myelination. Neuron. 2017 Aug 16;95(4):743-756. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2017.07.009. PMID: 28817797; PMCID: PMC5667660.