Why don’t babies sleep?

One of my favorite things to do is sleep. I can sleep for as many as twelve hours. Over the past few years many parents, including mine, have warned how much my sleeping patterns will change when I have children. That day seems so far away but I am going to need plenty of time to prepare for it. My sleep is something that is very important to me, and that is why I chose to research this topic. Through reading and talking to parents of young children I became extremely aware of what parents face. I now have a much more realistic approach to the day that I will have to trade my z’s for a midnight feeding or a LONG night of “unexplained” crying.

I acquired a chart from Dr. Richard Ferber’s book “Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems”. This chart shows the average amount of time a child will sleep at each age from birth through eighteen. Some of these numbers seem high because sleep does not always occur in one long, uninterrupted stretch. Babies sleep when they phy...