One of the parents' greatest concerns is the dream of their children, for one more obvious reason: if babies sleep little and wake up a lot, parents also wake up a lot and sleep little.
When a couple comes home with their baby, they quickly realize that there seems to be a problem. The baby often wakes up, sleeps better during the day than at night and sleep a few hours straight. That is when the doubt appears: what I do? Does my baby have a problem?
He wakes up a lot
Babies 'dreams are very different from adults' dreams, especially since their rhythms in general are very different from ours. We eat 3 to 5 times a day and they do it from 8 to 12. To be able to eat so many times it is clear that they have to sleep very discontinuously, so the most logical thing is that babies sleep a lot, because they do, and that they also wake up a lot.
In addition to eating, they wake up as a survival mechanism: babies come prepared to survive. If they slept several hours and woke up quietly without making noise, the parents would be tempted to leave them alone on more than one occasion. If this happens on our floor nothing happens, because there is no danger within the four walls of your room. However, if this occurs in some poor country, where there is no infrastructure like ours and where there are wild animals, the danger is much greater.
So, is it normal for me to sleep a few hours straight?
Exact. It is normal and it is logical. A few weeks ago we commented that the size of a newborn's stomach is like that of a marble on the first day, reaching the size of an egg by the tenth day.
With such size and with the brutal energy requirements that babies have, that in the first year they have to triple their weight and grow half of what they measure, there is a lot of food they have to take and to do it they must eat very frequently (imagine how much you would have to eat to triple your weight in a year).
Also, since awakenings have a lot to do with their survival, as we have said, Normally, they sleep a few hours straight.
Do I catch it when you wake up?
At first I did not intend to talk about this in this post, but I have been able to read recently (unfortunately for my eyes) some advice about children's sleep that says that the best thing, when a baby cries, is not to take it, because if we do the rhythm of sleep is disturbed, we shake it and then it is even harder to fall asleep again.
According to my personal experience and according to my logic, the best way to shake a baby is to let him cry. Crying is not something that a baby does to tell us "good, I woke up, but calm, that right now I fall asleep again", but something he does because he has a problem, probably a "good, I woke up and I would like keep sleeping. Maybe if you give me some food and you rock me, I can fall asleep again. ”
In other words, do you have to reassure the child to sleep or cry? Well, just as nobody would think of making a child cry for sleep, it makes no sense to let him cry so he can do it again, but try to return to get the state of tranquility necessary for him to go back to sleep, and the sooner we achieve better, because less will have been revealed.
