Is your baby waking a lot at night because of a developmental leap?
Motor development doesn't cause excessive waking at night
Babies not only wake less often as they grow into toddlers, but they move less in the night. Reaching a new motor milestone doesn't result in excessive night waking.
However, researchers have found that
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Babies do wake more often in the night when they are learning new motor skills, such as sitting, crawling, pulling to stand and walking
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This increase in night movement and waking is only temporary and disappears after a few days, as the baby becomes more confident in the new motor skill
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The increased frequency of waking that happens with new motor skills remains within the spectrum of normal night waking (which is around every couple of hours at night).
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The twitches and jerks or sucking and bigger movements you might observe when your baby is asleep at night are accompanied by bursts of neural activity in the brain. It's possible that twitching and gross motor movements in sleep are ways in which your baby's body practices and develops more mature and complex sensory motor neuronal maps.
You can find out more about your baby's movements during sleep here.
Developmental decreases in the amount of sleep your baby needs over a 24-hour period can result in excessive night waking
Baby sleep needs are not only highly variable, but shrink throughout the first year of life. This means that when there is a change in baby's sleep needs, but we are still asking our little one to be in a sleep situation for the same amount of time, baby's body clock might become disrupted. This can result in excessive waking at night.
You can find out about the way decreasing sleep needs might affect your baby's sleep here.
Selected references
DeMasi A, Horger MN, Scher A, Berger SE. Infant motor development predicts the dynamics of movement during sleep. Infancy. 2023;28:367-387.
Nakagawa A, Naruse M, Heutchy M, Miyachi T. Not sleeping soundly in early infancy is not bad. Acta Paediatrica. 2022;111:2149-2156.
