Around six weeks, many parents have the slightly bewildering feeling that someone has swapped their baby overnight. A baby who seemed to sleep almost anywhere a week or two ago may suddenly stay awake for longer, become harder to settle, wake the moment you put them down, fuss more in the evening, want to feed constantly or spend most of the day in your arms. Sometimes it can genuinely feel as though your baby has simply decided not to sleep.
And this is often the point when parents start wondering what they have done wrong. Have I kept her awake too long? Is he overtired? Is she overstimulated? Have I created a bad habit by letting him sleep on me? Should we have a routine by now?
At six weeks, however, there is another much simpler possibility to consider: your baby is developing extraordinarily quickly, and their sleep is changing too.
Your 6-week-old doesn’t sleep like a newborn anymore
Newborn sleep looks very different from the sleep of an older baby or an adult. During the first weeks, sleep and wakefulness are scattered across the entire 24 hours, with relatively little distinction between day and night. Over the first few months, circadian rhythms gradually begin to emerge, more sleep starts to consolidate during the night, and the organisation of sleep itself continues to develop.
At the same time, your baby may begin spending longer periods awake and becoming much more interested in the world around them. From the parent’s side, this can look remarkably like sleep has suddenly become worse. But nothing has necessarily gone wrong.
At six weeks, I would not expect a predictable daily schedule, precise wake windows or exactly the same number and length of naps every day. One day may contain lots of tiny naps; another may have a couple of longer ones. In the evening, feeding, dozing, waking and feeding again may blur together so completely that it is difficult to say where one nap ends and the next begins. That can all be part of normal early infant sleep.
“But my baby used to sleep so much more”
This is something I hear frequently from parents of babies around this age. A very young baby may doze repeatedly while breastfeeding or bottle-feeding, fall asleep for twenty minutes in your arms, have another little sleep in the carrier and drift off again during the next feed. All of these count as sleep, even if they don’t resemble what we tend to imagine as a proper daytime nap.
There is also enormous individual variation in how much young babies sleep. Short naps of ten or twenty minutes can be part of the picture too. So before deciding that your baby has hardly slept all day, try looking at the whole 24 hours. There may be considerably more sleep scattered through the day than you initially realised.
Does a 6-week-old need wake windows?
I wouldn’t organise a six-week-old baby’s entire day around precise wake windows. I understand why they are appealing. When sleep suddenly becomes confusing, a chart telling you that a baby of a particular age should stay awake for X number of minutes gives you something concrete to hold on to.
The problem is that your baby hasn’t read the chart. Sometimes a wake period will consist of little more than a feed, a nappy change, a few minutes looking around and then another sleep. At another point in the same day, that baby may be peacefully and happily awake for considerably longer.
If your baby is comfortable, alert and interested in you and the world, you don’t need to rush to make them sleep because an online wake-window chart says their time is up. And if your baby becomes sleepy and readily falls asleep while feeding, rocking, being carried or cuddling against you, you can help them sleep.
You don’t need to deliberately keep a sleepy six-week-old awake. But you don’t need to spend an hour desperately trying to make a contented, wide-awake baby sleep simply because the clock says they should be asleep either.
Why are evenings suddenly so difficult?
There is another phenomenon many families encounter at around this age: the witching hour. Your baby may become much more unsettled in the late afternoon or evening. They might cry more, want to feed repeatedly, fall asleep for ten minutes and wake again, want to be held constantly or seem to require endless rocking and settling.
It can feel as though the entire evening has become one very long attempt to get your baby to sleep. Crying and unsettled behaviour are indeed particularly common during the early weeks. You may have heard that crying universally “peaks at six weeks”, but the research is more nuanced than that. There is considerable variation between babies and populations. What we can say more confidently is that crying and fussing tend to be relatively high during the early weeks and generally decline as babies move towards the end of the newborn period.
And remember that a six-week-old baby’s night does not necessarily begin at 7 pm. Your baby might sleep for twenty minutes, wake and feed, doze on you, feed again, need some movement or cuddling, and only much later settle into their first longer stretch of night-time sleep. Those little evening sleeps still count as sleep.
What can you do when your 6-week-old suddenly stops sleeping?
Start by working out what has actually changed. Is your baby genuinely sleeping much less across 24 hours, or has their sleep simply become shorter and more fragmented? Do they sleep well as long as they are on you but wake when you try to put them down? Are daytime naps the main difficulty? Have evenings suddenly become chaotic? Or has night-time sleep changed too?
These aren’t necessarily the same problem, so they don’t necessarily need the same solution. During the day, give your baby daylight and ordinary daytime life. Open the curtains. Talk to them. Go outside when you can. Carry them around with you while you get on with your day. You don’t need a completely dark, silent room for every daytime sleep.
At night, keeping things quieter and dimmer can help provide environmental cues to a circadian system that is only beginning to develop. You aren’t “teaching” your six-week-old to sleep; you are simply giving their developing body clock useful information about day and night.
And use the things that actually help. Feeding, sucking, skin-to-skin contact, cuddling, rocking, carrying and movement are all perfectly reasonable ways to help a tiny baby settle and sleep. You do not need to teach a six-week-old to fall asleep independently in order for them to become a good sleeper later.
When it might not be just about sleep
A sudden change in sleep can simply accompany normal development. But not every change should automatically be labelled a sleep regression, developmental leap or difficult phase.
If your baby is crying in an unusual or inconsolable way, struggling to feed, not gaining weight as expected, having difficulty breathing, unusually sleepy or difficult to wake, has a fever, appears to be in pain, or you simply feel that something isn’t right, talk to your baby’s doctor or another appropriate healthcare professional.
When sleep changes suddenly alongside other symptoms, it is important not to try to solve everything by adjusting naps or wake windows.
Your baby hasn’t forgotten how to sleep
An enormous amount changes during the first six weeks of a baby’s life. Their sleep doesn’t remain the same as it was during those first sleepy days after birth. Your baby may now spend longer awake. They may need more help getting to sleep, take shorter naps, become much more unsettled in the evening or simply be far less predictable than they were a couple of weeks ago.
Before reaching for a new schedule, calculating wake windows to the minute or trying a new settling method, look at your baby and the whole 24 hours. When are they content and alert? When do they fall asleep easily? Where do they sleep well? What helps them settle? What, specifically, has become difficult for your family?
There may be something worth changing. But it may also be that the six-week-old baby in front of you is simply no longer quite the same newborn you brought home a few weeks ago.
References
- Nishihara, K., Horiuchi, S., Eto, H., & Uchida, S. (2002). The development of infants’ circadian rest-activity rhythm and mothers’ rhythm. Physiology & Behavior, 77(1), 91–98.
- Jenni, O. G., & Carskadon, M. A. [Itt inkább még ellenőrizném a pontos bibliográfiát publikálás előtt; az általunk talált longitudinális infant sleep-wake vizsgálatot is használhatjuk helyette.]
- Galland, B. C., Taylor, B. J., Elder, D. E., & Herbison, P. (2012). Normal sleep patterns in infants and children: A systematic review of observational studies. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 16(3), 213–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smrv.2011.06.001
- Wolke, D., Bilgin, A., & Samara, M. (2017). Systematic review and meta-analysis: Fussing and crying durations and prevalence of colic in infants. The Journal of Pediatrics, 185, 55–61.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2017.02.020
- Bilgin, A., Wolke, D., & Samara, M. (2022). Crying in the first 12 months of life: A systematic review and meta-analysis of cross-country parent-reported data and modeling of the “cry curve”. Child Development.