Some babies seem to arrive in the world with an unexpected talent for sleep. They fall asleep fairly easily, tolerate being put down and give their parents longer stretches at night surprisingly early. Other babies wake at the slightest attempt to move them, nap for thirty minutes, want help every time they fall asleep and appear to have missed the memo explaining that babies are supposed to spend quite a lot of their time sleeping.
It is very easy for the first baby to become known as a “good sleeper” and the second as a “bad sleeper”. I hear these descriptions all the time, often from parents who have more than one child and are slightly bewildered by how differently the same family can experience baby sleep the second time around. They did not suddenly forget everything they knew. They simply got a different baby.
The labels sound harmless, but I think they shape the way we see both babies and ourselves more than we realise. Once you believe you have a bad sleeper, every short nap or difficult bedtime can start to look like further evidence that something is wrong. And because so much baby sleep advice assumes that sleep is primarily the result of what parents do, it does not take long before “my baby is a bad sleeper” quietly becomes “I must be doing something wrong”.
Normal baby sleep covers a surprisingly wide range
One of the most useful things sleep research can tell us is not exactly how many hours your baby should sleep. It is how much variation there is between healthy babies.
Systematic research looking at sleep across infancy and childhood has found substantial differences in total sleep duration, daytime sleep, night waking and the longest stretch of continuous sleep. Even babies of the same age can have remarkably different sleep patterns. There is an average, of course, but an average describes a group; it does not tell us exactly what one particular baby needs.
This is one reason I am cautious about very precise sleep charts. They can be useful for giving you a rough idea of how sleep changes with age, particularly if you have no idea whether your baby’s pattern is somewhere in the usual range. The problem begins when a population average turns into a prescription for an individual baby. If the chart says fourteen hours and your baby seems perfectly well on twelve and a half, you can suddenly find yourself trying to manufacture an extra ninety minutes of sleep that your baby may not actually need.
And babies do not read the charts. This is inconsiderate of them, but remarkably consistent.
Some babies really are easier sleepers than others
We sometimes talk about baby sleep as though all babies begin in roughly the same place and parenting gradually creates the differences between them. Real life makes that difficult to believe, and research increasingly gives us reasons to take individual differences seriously.
Temperament, sensitivity, development and the way a baby regulates their state can all be part of the picture. Some babies transition between sleep and waking relatively quietly. Others signal quickly and loudly. Some seem able to sleep almost anywhere while family life continues around them; others notice every change in sound, light, movement or proximity. One baby may be transferred from your arms without opening an eye while another detects the mattress somewhere on the downward journey and immediately objects.
None of this means that sleep is fixed at birth or that what happens around your baby is irrelevant. Sleep develops, and your baby’s environment, routines, feeding, activity, light exposure and your responses can all interact with that development. But acknowledging those influences is very different from assuming that every difference between two babies was created by their parents.
I have worked with many families who understand this only when their second child arrives. They used to think their first baby slept well because they had done something particularly clever. Then baby number two appears, receives much the same loving care and has entirely different opinions about sleep. The reverse happens too: parents who struggled enormously with their first baby sometimes discover that their second simply falls asleep. It can be quite an educational experience.
Waking does not make your baby a bad sleeper
Adults wake during the night too. Most of the time we barely remember it because we move, adjust the duvet, turn over and drift back into sleep. Infant sleep is organised differently and changes rapidly during development, but waking and moving between sleep states are normal parts of sleep from the beginning.
What parents experience as a night waking is usually a waking in which the baby signals and needs or wants some involvement from them. Another baby may also wake but return to sleep without making enough noise for anyone to notice. From the next room, those two babies can appear to be very different sleepers even though the difference is not simply that one wakes and the other does not.
Feeding, seeking contact and needing help returning to sleep are also common during infancy. How often this happens varies enormously. Frequent waking can sometimes be worth investigating, particularly if your baby appears uncomfortable, there are feeding or breathing concerns, the pattern has changed suddenly, or there are long periods of wakefulness during the night. But the fact that your baby wakes does not by itself tell us that they cannot sleep properly.
Short naps are sleep too
Daytime sleep is another place where the good-sleeper label gets surprisingly powerful. A baby who takes two-hour naps is often admired for being a wonderful sleeper, while the baby who wakes after thirty or forty minutes can leave their parent spending half the day trying to extend naps.
Some babies naturally take longer naps and others distribute their daytime sleep across several shorter ones, particularly in the first year. Nap patterns also change as babies grow. A short nap is not automatically a failed nap, and a baby does not need to complete a particular number of sleep cycles for the sleep to “count”.
The more useful question is what happens around that nap. Does your baby wake cheerful and ready to continue the day, or do they consistently seem exhausted and unable to cope? How much sleep are they getting across the whole twenty-four hours? What happens at night? Looking at the baby in front of you usually tells us more than deciding that forty minutes is inherently too short.
The comparison problem
Baby sleep would probably cause considerably less anxiety if parents never met other parents.
You are sitting at a baby group after being awake five times, and someone casually mentions that their four-month-old has been sleeping through for weeks. Another baby apparently takes a two-hour nap every afternoon. Someone else’s can be placed awake in the cot and simply goes to sleep, which can sound like an urban legend when you have been walking around the bedroom for forty minutes with yours.
The difficulty is that these comparisons contain almost no context. Babies have different sleep needs, different temperaments and different family circumstances. People also use words such as sleeping through very differently, and we tend to hear about unusually good nights more often than the night somebody fed their baby four times and then spent an hour looking for a dummy under the bed.
Social media makes this even harder because baby sleep is often presented as an achievement. A long nap becomes evidence that a schedule is working. Independent settling becomes a developmental accomplishment. A twelve-hour night becomes something another parent can reproduce if only they follow the same routine closely enough. When it works for their baby, wonderful. It still does not tell us what your baby should be doing.
Normal does not mean you have to enjoy it
There is an important distinction here, because reassurance about normal infant sleep can become strangely unhelpful if it ends with “so just accept it”.
You can have a completely normal baby and still be exhausted.
If your baby wakes frequently and you are coping well, there may be nothing that needs changing. If exactly the same waking pattern is leaving you unable to function, then it matters. We can respect your baby’s development without pretending your sleep is irrelevant.
This is often where I start with families. Rather than asking how to make a baby sleep “normally”, I want to understand what is actually difficult. Perhaps the number of wakings is manageable but every resettling takes an hour. Perhaps nights are fine but you spend the entire day trying to make naps happen. Perhaps feeding to sleep works beautifully at bedtime but you need somebody else to be able to settle your baby occasionally. Those are much more useful problems to work with than the label bad sleeper.
Sometimes there are practical changes that make a considerable difference. Sometimes understanding your baby’s actual sleep needs removes a struggle you did not need to be having. And sometimes the most useful change is organising nights differently so that you can get more rest even while your baby continues to wake.
Your baby is not a sleep score
When I look at a baby’s sleep, I am interested in the whole picture. I want to know how sleep is distributed across the day and night, whether the baby seems well and rested, how feeding is going, what settling looks like, whether anything has changed and how the family is coping. The number of night wakings is one piece of that picture, not a grade.
This is why I would be very cautious about describing a baby as a good or bad sleeper. There are babies who need less sleep and babies who need more. There are babies who wake frequently, babies who sleep long stretches early and babies whose sleep changes every time you think you have finally understood it. Development rarely moves in a straight line, and sleep certainly does not.
If your baby’s sleep is difficult for you, that deserves attention. We can look for things that might help without first deciding that your baby is doing sleep badly.
Research
Galland BC, Taylor BJ, Elder DE, Herbison P. (2012). Normal sleep patterns in infants and children: a systematic review of observational studies. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 16(3), 213–222.
Paavonen EJ, Saarenpää-Heikkilä O, Morales-Muñoz I, et al. (2020). Normal sleep development in infants: findings from two large birth cohorts. Sleep Medicine, 69, 145–154.
Sadeh A, Mindell JA, Luedtke K, Wiegand B. (2009). Sleep and sleep ecology in the first 3 years: a web-based study. Journal of Sleep Research, 18(1), 60–73.
Tikotzky L, De Marcas G, Har-Toov J, Dollberg S, Bar-Haim Y, Sadeh A. (2010). Sleep and physical growth in infants during the first 6 months. Journal of Sleep Research, 19(1 Pt 1), 103–110.