During the first months of life the child's dream does not have an established pattern. There is a stage, especially between four and eight months of the baby, in which the night awakenings are continuous and the sleep becomes much more interrupted.
To help you overcome these continuous awakenings, we must first understand how the baby's dream works to understand why do you wake up at night more than before.
Sleep is part of the baby's life, a vital necessity such as eating or breathing. But it is a process that is evolving depending on the physiological and emotional needs of the child at each stage of development.
The baby does not sleep the same when he is barely days old than six months or a year, so it is important to know what sleep is like at each age and how it evolves.
In Babies and more, what do I do? He slept well and now he wakes up several timesThe evolution of the dream
The dream appears in the prenatal stage. From the sixth month of pregnancy the baby already experiences a phase of active REM (Rapid Eye Movement) movement within the womb, where he sleeps most of the time.
When they are born they sleep most of the day, between 18 hours and 20 hours, without differentiating the day from the night. The periods of sleep are shortening as the first months pass and the baby needs to know more about the stimuli that come from his environment.
After three months, between the fourth and approximately the eighth month, a very special period occurs. You already recognize the difference between day and night. Sleep more hours at night and during the day surely take one or two naps, the most sleepy maybe three.
But at this stage the baby's dream becomes very unstable, with very frequent awakenings, even more than when he was a newborn baby. And this happens because their sleep phases are changing.
Understand the baby's sleep phases
The human being is not born with the same amount of sleep phases that he will have as an adult. The baby's sleep pattern is very different from that of an adult. The baby is born with two phases, while adults have five phases of sleep (a REM phase and four subphases of calm or non-REM sleep).
From birth to 3 months, the baby's dream is biphasic, that is, it has two well-defined phases: active sleep (REM) and calm sleep.
Active sleep is the initial phase of sleep in which the baby has eye movements, emits groans, moves legs or arms, while quiet sleep is a deeper and more relaxing sleep, but shorter than the active phase.
But it is between four and eight months, more likely at six or seven months, when the baby is acquiring the missing phases of sleep.
And here is the crux from the question to the question we ask ourselves. Why does the baby wake up at night more than before? Because you need to adapt to the new phases of sleep that appear.
Like everything, you have to learn to use them. The dream becomes more variable because the baby is practicing a new form of sleep different from the one before. New stages of sleep appear on the scene.
On top of that, it should be added that it is possible to wake up between phase and phase, in fact adults do it too, only we don't remember. We cover ourselves, we turn around and continue sleeping, but the baby has a higher percentage of light sleep so that between phase to phase it is much more possible to wake up at night.
Other things to keep in mind
The dream phases are a biological and natural process of the human being. It would not be healthy to force the dream, or drive it or try to educate it.
But in addition to this biological process that goes through the baby from four months to approximately eight, there are other changes that occur in his life at this age that is normal to affect his sleep.
It is very likely that the mother should go to work outside the home and be in charge of another person or start going to daycare. Obviously, this new circumstance in your life will somehow affect your way of sleeping.
Also at this age the baby begins to taste the food. Their way of feeding is modified, from exclusive breastfeeding to complementary feeding. This change is critical in your life, so naturally it will also affect your way of sleep.
As you see, The baby's dream is very changing and is very influenced by physiological, cognitive and emotional factors of their age of development.
I hope that with this explanation you can understand why the baby wakes up at night more than before. As parents, what we can do best is to understand your needs and accompany you in this special process.
