One thing that I think would totally change parents’ perception of their child’s sleep and help them more deeply understand it is a concept called “sleep totals” or “sleep needs”. Basically, how much sleep does your child actually need in a 24 hour period? Because that number is going to be different for every single child.
Most of the time, when parents are struggling with sleep, they’re looking at bedtime, or naps, or night waking, and trying to fix those things individually, but they’re not really looking at how much sleep their child is getting (and how much sleep they actually need) across a full 24-hour period, and that piece is usually what everything else is built on.
The National Sleep Foundation has a chart that breaks down sleep ranges by age, and when you look at it, the ranges are really wide. For example, for newborns, the recommended total sleep in a 24-hour period is 14 to 17 hours, but they also include what may still be appropriate for some children, which is 11 to 13 hours on the lower end and 18 to 19 hours on the higher end.
So you could have one newborn sleeping 11 or 12 hours in a full day (and this being totally normal and appropriate for them), and another sleeping 18 or 19, and both of those babies are considered within a normal range.
Even if you just stay inside that 14 to 17 hour range, you’re still looking at a three-hour difference between one baby and another, and that’s where I think parents don’t always pause and think about what that actually looks like in real life. From the parent’s perspective, that’s three extra hours in your day where your baby might be awake and needing you, compared to someone else whose baby is asleep during that same time! That is a huge difference, and the kicker is this:
We have absolutely no control over how much sleep our baby needs.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine also uses ranges instead of exact numbers for this reason because sleep needs are individual and a lot of that comes down to genetics and temperament.
What we can do, though, is start paying attention to what our own child is doing. Start paying attention: over the course of several days or weeks, what does your child’s sleep actually look like in a full 24-hour period, and where do they tend to land most of the time? How many hours of sleep do they generally get and need in a 24 hour period? Even though sleep can vary day to day, most children have a general range that they fall into.
Many parents are confused when their baby is only sleeping for 12 hours in a 24 hour period, thinking they need more than this, and these parents often think they aren’t getting enough sleep. But you can be pretty confident your child is getting plenty of sleep if they are generally content and happy during the day. It’s likely this is just their unique “sleep needs”.
This is where I see a lot of frustration come up for parents, especially when they’re trying to follow sleep schedules they find online. The problem is that a lot of those schedules are built around children who have higher sleep needs, so when a parent of a lower sleep needs child tries to follow that same schedule, it just doesn’t work. Instead of thinking, “maybe my child just needs less sleep,” they start wondering what they’re doing wrong, or why their child isn’t “following” the schedule.
I see this a lot with toddlers, especially as they get closer to two and are on one nap. According to the National Sleep Foundation, toddlers between one and two years old typically need 11 to 14 hours of sleep in a 24-hour period, with some children falling outside of that range. What I often see is a child taking a two-hour nap during the day, and then the parent is expecting something like a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. night. But if that child only needs around 11 or 12 hours total, and they’ve already gotten two of those hours during the day, there’s only about 9 to 10 hours left for nighttime sleep. So either that child isn’t going to fall asleep at 7 p.m., or they will fall asleep and then wake up early, because they’ve already gotten the amount of sleep their body needs. This is usually the point where things start to feel really frustrating, because parents’ expectations for how much sleep their toddler should be getting are just too high.
What’s actually happening is that the schedule doesn’t match the child.
So if you realize your child is on the lower end of sleep needs and only needs around 11 hours in a 24-hour period, you have a couple of options. You can shorten the nap a bit so there’s more room for nighttime sleep, or you can keep the nap and move bedtime later. A lot of families with children in this stage end up keeping the nap and shifting bedtime to 8 or 9 for a while, because most of those children still need that daytime sleep.
This is where I think it’s helpful for parents to start doing that “mom math” in their head, where you’re looking at how much sleep your child is getting during the day, how much they actually seem to need overall, and then building a schedule that fits that, instead of trying to fit your child into a sleep schedule that wasn’t really designed for them.
The reality is that many children don’t fall into that 12-14 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period that’s discussed so often. There are a lot of children who just naturally need less sleep, and those are usually the families who end up feeling the most frustrated, because nothing they try seems to “work.”
When you can adjust your expectations for your child according to their unique sleep needs, I think you will feel immense relief and everybody in the family will be less frustrated with sleep.
If you’ve ruled out infant sleep red flags, and you are wanting support shift sleep patterns that no longer work for your family, grab one of my comprehensive eCourses, such as The Infant Sleep Foundations eCourse or the Toddler Sleep Foundations eCourse. If you’d prefer 1:1 support, you can book a call or support package.
