Okay so this has always perplexed me. It’s not so much a question of why babies need sleep. I understand why everyone needs sleep. Put simply, their bodies grow and repair themselves. However, I’ve been told by many parents that they put their babies to bed at 7:00PM and they are supposed to sleep until around 7:00AM. What I have found, however, is that most of the same parents also complain that their babies are waking up waaay too early. My roommates, specifically, have been dealing with their baby waking up at 4:30AM very consistently.
I have studied the mechanics of sleep (cycles, stages, conditions, etc) on account of my narcolepsy. The science doesn’t add up here, but I am certainly not a pediatrician. To compound the issue, they also put their babies down for naps that are often a couple hours long. Wouldn’t this be counter-intuitive? Babies should have a circadian rhythm, and their bodies should naturally know when they are ready to be awake. Is this really the correct course of action for a baby? Why do babies need so much sleep?
In: Biology
I think you’re missing a few things, both on the practicalities of infants but also the reasons for sleep.
As a practical matter, if you put your baby to bed later, what you get is a crankier baby at 4:30am (or 5am, or 6am). This is annoying as hell, yes. It’s also pretty reliable.
Similarly, if you skip naps, you get “overtired” babies, not ones that sleep better.
Why: Well babies *are not adults* or even older children, and the sleep cycle mechanics you studied don’t necessarily apply to them as neatly. They don’t *have* an established circadian rhythm like adults or older kids do.
As for “why do they need so much sleep,” you actually already answered this: “bodies grow and repair themselves.” Babies are growing a *lot more* than older children or especially adults. So they need a ton more sleep. Don’t ask why babies sleep so much, ask why they’d *ever* wake up. They wake up to eat more, and/or to communicate other issues (mainly by crying). Then they go back to sleep to use all that food to grow. Before too long they start sleeping less and spending more time awake so they can learn more, but little kids still sleep a *lot* more than adults – 10-12 hours compared to the adult 8-ish. Again, this is because they’re growing, and that happens asleep.
Basically, they sleep a lot because they’re growing a lot, and they wake up at annoying random times because their bodies don’t have an established sleep cycle.
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