The news tired parents need to hear

“When will my baby sleep through the night?” It’s a question I ask my sleep-deprived self often. 

If you’re like me and you have a baby who prefers to party at 2 am rather than sleep, the good news is you’re not alone. 

And the even better news is that it’s completely normal.

In fact, a study from McGill University found it’s perfectly healthy for a baby NOT to sleep through the night in the first year.

“If there was only one thing I could tell parents, it would be to not worry if your infant does not sleep through the night at six months of age,” the study’s lead researcher, Marie-Hélène Pennestri told NBC News.

Researchers surveyed the parents of 388 infants aged up to six months about their sleep, development, and mum’s mood. They then touched base again with 360 of them at the age of one year and three years old.

The results show that it was quite normal for a baby to wake up during the night, and there was no effect on development or mum’s mood (more on this later). 

“The results of this study indicate that by using a commonly accepted definition (6 hours of consecutive sleep), a high percentage of infants in our cohort did not sleep through the night at either age 6 months (37.6%) or 12 months (27.9%),” they write in their report.

“Using an 8-hour criterion for consecutive sleep, we found that more than half of the 6-month-old infants did not sleep through the night (57.0%), whereas 43.4% of infants at 12 months of age did not sleep through the night.” 

Put simply, no, your baby is not broken. Even by the time they celebrate their first birthday, it’s completely common for babies to not be sleeping for 8 or even 6 hours at a time.

Great sleep expectations

If you’ve ever been woken every two hours for weeks at a time you’ll know that sleep deprivation is all-consuming. And it definitely affects your mood. But researchers think that the expectation parents feel that their baby should be sleeping through actually causes more stress than being woken up at night. 

To take some of the pressure off, they think mums and dads should be better informed about normal baby sleep-wake patterns (and studies like this one), instead of being taught sleep interventions. And we couldn’t agree more. 

Having a baby who wakes a lot at night is stressful. It’s easy to feel like you’re doing something wrong. But the reality is that it’s completely normal. All babies are different and they will all reach this milestone at different times. 

So hang in there … you’re doing a great job!