Don’t worry if your infant doesn’t sleep all night, study finds
A new study by researchers at McGill University should ease the concerns of new parents who often worry when their babies don’t sleep through the night. The expectation of most parents is that by around six months of age, their baby should be able to get six to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep per night, according to the study to be published in the December edition of the medical journal Pediatrics. However, the researchers discovered that a large percentage of babies don’t reach that milestone by six months, or even at a year old. The study also found infants who were unable to sleep through the night were not at increased risk of delays in their mental development or psychomotor skills. “It’s a beautiful period but it’s also a vulnerable time,” Marie-Hélène Pennestri, lead author of the study, said of the first year of a child’s life. “So you don’t need to be worried on top of that. My goal with this study is really to reassure parents and to relieve them of that anxiety, which is not necessary.” Part of that anxiety stems from some pediatricians who have counselled parents to try to “consolidate” their child’s sleep into eight uninterrupted hours rather than accepting the child’s natural progression. In addition, some websites are to blame for misleading information. For the McGill study, researchers gleaned information from a longitudinal birth survey of mothers and their babies from obstetric clinics in Montreal, Quebec City and Hamilton, Ont. At six months of age, 38 per cent of infants were not yet sleeping at least six consecutive hours at night, and 57 per cent weren’t sleeping eight hours, the study noted. At 12 months old, most babies were found to sleep through the night. But researchers nonetheless observed that 28 per cent of infants were not yet sleeping six hours straight at night, and 43 per cent weren’t sleeping for eight hours without waking up. The researchers also discovered a difference in the sleep patterns between boys and girls. At six months of age, 48 per cent of girls slept eight hours straight compared with 39 per cent of boys. One of the main takeaways from the McGill study is dispelling the notion that fragmented or interrupted sleep in the first year of an infant’s life could cause developmental problems. “In the present sample of typically developing infants, we were unable to find any significant associations between sleeping through the night or not at 6 and 12 months of age and variations in mental or psychomotor development,” the study concluded. “Whereas the beneficial effects of sufficient total sleep duration in childhood and adolescence are well known, the associations between sleep-wake cycle patterns and development are much less straightforward during the first year of life.”