6 week old - how much sleep? to wake or not?

[benne81]

Hi I have a 6 week old son - its my first baby and my family are far away so I feel a bit like I'm winging this whole parenting thing and I'm getting a bit confused about what I should be concerned about/ whats normal etc.

How much sleep should a 6 week old have during the day? It feels like he has been asleep all day today and hardly awake at all - I have started to make a log of his sleep/feeds etc so I can see if there is any natural rountine (there isn't!). Today since 7am he has slept 8hours (over the last 15hrs). I've read that you shouldn't let babies sleep longer than 2hrs in the daytime but I really struggle to wake him up. The longest period he slept today has been 2hrs 20mins.

Is this normal - should I be trying harder to keep him awake or wake him up in the day? on monday he only had 9hrs sleep in the whole 24hrs and he was so wound up by the end of it he was so tired he was inconsolable and it was really difficult to get him to sleep - because of this I'm loathe to wake him.

As any new parent I'm obsessed with sleep - he is sleeping for 2-2.5hrs bouts overnight and not sure what I can do, if anything, to make these longer.

Any help/advice/reassurance greatly appreciated!

They're all different in how much sleep they need - my 2 were very different as newborns, but DS2 definitely did the sleep all day thing for the first few months. I personally wouldn't wake such a young baby. The advice that I was given was to keep the house quiet and dark and night, and bright and reasonably noisy (i.e. don't keep daytime noise down, just go about what you would be doing) through the day, and they will eventually "get" the night and day difference. Also I read somewhere that natural daylight between noon and 4pm helps to set their bodyclock - could you let him sleep outside in a pram in the middle of the day?

I think this advice worked fairly well for mine, insofar as there was a definite difference between day and night fairly quickly, i.e. daytime pattern of nap / awake time / nap, and nightime pattern of sleep / feed / back to sleep. Although it didn't turn them ino sleep-through-the-nighters, unfortunately!

I had a sleepy newborn, (and family far away!) and I was advised to wake for feeds every 4 hours during the day, and gradually extend this to every 5hrs at night, then 6 etc. If there's no problem with regular feeding I would let him sleep.

Also enjoy it while you can, I wish I had (see my other thread called 'how exactly do you get a baby to sleep?')

Also, hard to do when you have no other source of reference, but ignore most of what you read!

Not only are all babies different from each other, but they change a lot and can be very different at 6weeks than 6months, iyswim. Not letting a baby sleep more than 2hrs make sense for an other baby (6m+) but not a newborn.

Good luck [hsmile]

I was obsessed with the sleep issue too with DS1, but much more relaxed this time. I used a book as a point of reference (can let u know if interested) but generally newborns need between 16 and 20 hours sleep, so when you take into account feeds that's their awake time! Keeping a baby awake during the day can harm their night sleep (I learnt this the hard way 1st time around!) the previous advice about night and day is great and what I have tried to do this time. Good luck!