 our drooly, smiley baby is learning so many new things from nine to 12 months old, and they should be getting a lot of good sleep in their schedule to balance out those long wakeful stretches and process new skills. “Generally, babies at this age are having two naps, and hopefully those naps are at least an hour, if not two hours or more,” says Erin Neri, a certified paediatric sleep consultant in Sherwood Park, Alta. “They should be able to stay awake for three to four hours between naps.” She adds that there are a small percentage of kids who start to go down to one nap around 11 to 12 months, but dropping the morning nap typically happens around 15 months.
 Your baby’s nighttime sleep often starts to lengthen a bit more, up to six hours at night. You may also start to see the beginnings of a schedule that works for both of you, whether it’s a baby that wants to eat as soon as they wake up or one that needs some snuggling and playtime first. “We know that there’s a fairly wide range of ‘normal’ for newborn sleep,” says Alexis Dubief, a child sleep consultant in Vermont and author of Precious Little Sleep. “It could be anywhere between 14 and 17 hours a day. The reality is that everything in that zone is normal for that individual child.”
 In adults, we’re most likely to dream during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, although dreams can happen during other sleep stages, too. This REM sleep may even start before birth: Brain waves that closely resemble those found in REM sleep have been measured inside the womb between 25 and 28 weeks. Since babies spend about half of their sleeping time in REM sleep, some researchers think it only makes sense that they are having some form of dreams. On the other hand, some scientists say that babies are not developmentally capable of the kind of abstract thinking (including the ability to imagine things visually and self-awareness) you need to have dreams.
If babies do dream, their dreams probably won’t have the rich visuals and interactions with other characters that adults have when they dream, says Zadra. “Their dreams are probably very similar to what they experience when they’re awake because they have a preverbal form of consciousness,” he says. “It may be a collection of sensations, whether it’s warmth, suckling on a breast or images of a close-up face.” Just as an adult processes the previous day when they sleep, so does an infant’s brain—it’s just not as advanced yet.  For overtired parents who can’t seem to get their kids on a healthy
sleep schedule, the promise of a magic pill can be pretty enticing. However, it seems that more and more doctors and parents are turning to melatonin as a Band-Aid for sleep issues for their children. I get emails all the time from people telling me they are giving their babies melatonin to help them fall asleep at night, and I have serious concerns about this. An article titled Too many children being prescribed melatonin to aid sleep, experts warn ... via www.theguardian.com - shares my concerns plus the concerns of even more medical experts. "After a surge in the number of children under 14 being admitted to hospital with sleep disorders over the last decade, specialists are concerned that it [melatonin] is being given to children “off label” – with little knowledge of the long-term safety or side-effects." Dr. Neil Stanley, an independent sleep expert and former director of sleep research at the University of Surrey. "Unless a child has a diagnosed condition such as autism that has been scientifically proven to be helped by melatonin, there is no medical rationale for a child to be given it,” he said. “Most paediatricians know little about sleep or melatonin. For non-autistic children, it is a fashionable treatment for parents wanting ‘perfect' children.” "Dr Liz Bragg of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: “I don’t want to criticise fellow practitioners by saying it is being overprescribed, but I wouldn’t like to prescribe it unless work has been done to make sure the right sleep advice has been given and ... the right bedtime routine to wind down to sleep is put in place."-Sarah Marsh; TheGuardian.com. Well, I don't agree that "parents (are) wanting perfect children"; I do think many parents and pediatricians are looking for solutions when things get desperate with their little ones lack of sleep. Being sleep deprived as a child or as a parent is not an easy thing to cope with. When you have a baby that doesn't sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time (if you're lucky), or a toddler/preschooler that takes hours to get to sleep, only to have them wake up in a few hours and you have to start all over again; it's exhausting, to say the least. Not only are parents dealing with the mental and physical consequences of sleep deprivation; but the situation can cause a lot of anger and frustration, even resentment towards your child. However, here's the deal: Melatonin is a hormone that is naturally secreted by your brain and is present in every person’s body. Taking synthetic Melatonin is NOT a long-term solution to poor sleep habits. Healthy sleep habits need to be taught at a young age to set kids up for a lifetime of healthy sleep habits. As Dana Obleman says SleepSense Magazine; ".. giving {Melatonin} to kids who aren't sleeping well is the equivalent to giving Tylenol to someone who has a broken leg. You may alleviate the symptoms, but you're NOT fixing the problem." “Bad sleeping habits.. won't just go away with time." While some studies have shown that melatonin can be helpful with children with autism or children with ADHD, most babies and children do not need melatonin; they need to be given the opportunities to develop their sleep strategies and develop good sleep hygiene. Here's why:  As the parent of a new baby, the number of questions you’re going to find yourself asking are, to put it mildly, astronomical.
The old saying about babies not coming with instructions has cemented itself in parental lore for a good reason. Even after spending nine months doing endless research on what to expect when baby arrives, as soon as we’re sent home from the hospital with our little ones, there’s an unavoidable feeling of unpreparedness. Every baby is different, after all, so no manual, no set of instructions, no amount of coaching from friends and family, is going to prepare you for your child in particular. And since this is just about the biggest responsibility that a human being can have, to raise another living person, we feel an incredible obligation to get it right. Unfortunately, we don’t get any practice swings or dress rehearsals. Your first run-through is the final performance, so to speak, which only increases our dedication to solving problems before they spring up. Eat, Poop, Cry, Sleep - and Repeat! Babies basically eat, poop, cry and sleep, we’re naturally very focused on those four things. What to feed baby, that’s often a contentious subject on its own, and we often find ourselves with a sudden fascination in poop that we didn’t realize we had. Which leaves us with sleeping and crying, and as a baby sleep consultant, I assure you, I’ve done a lot of research on both. Because the biggest question that parents have when they start sleep training is, “Will my baby cry?” This really isn’t the question they want the answer to, of course, because babies cry all the time. In fact, if a baby didn’t cry, it would be cause for concern. What they’re really asking when they pose this question is, “How much will my baby cry, and will I be able to provide comfort when they do?” Will Crying Harm my Baby? Why is this the major concern with new parents? Well, naturally nobody likes to hear their baby cry, but parents nowadays are able to access a wealth of misinformation that claims if you don’t respond immediately when your baby cries, you could actually be harming them. This wasn’t always such a contentious issue. Up until Dr. William Sears came out with his Attachment Parenting theory in 1993, parents were reasonably comfortable with the idea that leaving a child to cry for a period of time when they woke in the night was safe, if maybe a little unpleasant. Once The Baby Book was published, a generation of new parents began to cling to the idea that it was not just ineffective but was causing brain damage. Sears cited studies to back up his claim, but those studies looked at babies who were suffering from colic and a condition known as persistent crying, both of which are a far cry from allowing a child a few minutes of crying time. The argument has raged on for nearly 25 years now, with attachment parenting advocates accusing sleep training advocates of willfully neglecting their babies for their own convenience. Misleading Sleep Information It’s surprising that the pediatric and scientific community haven’t done more to prove or disprove this assertion, given the magnitude of the consequences. After all, if we’re causing our babies brain damage by allowing them to cry, even for a short period, wouldn’t almost every parent in the world alter their approach to prevent it? One reason Dr. Sears’ claims didn’t provoke an immediate and widespread investigation was because they were hugely misleading. The Yale researchers who conducted one of the studies his research cited responded to his use of their work by saying, “Our paper is not referring to routine, brief stressful experiences, but to abuse and neglect. It is a miss-citation of our work to support a non-scientifically justified idea.” Another went so far as to actually note in the study’s own conclusion that, “Our findings provide evidence that the quality of maternal behavior appears to be unrelated to this effect.” The mother’s response or lack of it to the condition of persistent crying was inconsequential. So that’s the argument against the original suggestion that started this whole movement, but its supporters will invariably ask, “Where’s your evidence to the contrary? How do you know it’s not harmful?” |
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