Do mothers know the reasons why infants and young children do not sleep well?

Nowadays, many children often show poor sleep quality. This is because breastfed babies need to wake up every night to feed, so they wake up more often. In addition, when breastfeeding, many mothers are in the habit of waking up their babies, which inevitably causes the children to wake up easily. Only by determining the specific reasons can we improve the baby's poor sleep problem.

Babies who sleep in their arms wake up more often at night

Studies have shown that in addition to sleep time, sleep continuity is also an important indicator of sleep quality. In our country, night awakening is the most prominent problem in infants' sleep. The study found that before 12 months of age, more than 85% of infants wake up at night, and more than 55% of infants wake up 1-2 times at night. The study also found that the number of times infants awaken at night showed a trend of "down-up-down again".

Only 10.2% of 6-month-old babies can sleep through the night, and 11% of 9-month-old babies can sleep continuously at night. Even at one year old, only 12.9% of babies can sleep continuously at night. Jiang Fan specifically pointed out that the core problem that prevents babies from establishing good sleeping habits is that parents lack the correct knowledge to cultivate healthy sleep for their babies, especially bad "sleeping habits", that is, the way of coaxing babies to sleep is the "culprit".

Milking and sleeping (sleeping with mother's nipple or pacifier) ​​and holding and sleeping (being held or rocked to sleep) are the ways to coax babies to sleep in most families in my country. Follow-up studies have found that babies who sleep with milk or with milk and in arms wake up significantly more often at night. Taking milk as an example, the frequency of night awakenings for a one-year-old baby will increase by 80% if he sleeps with milk.

Whether sleeping with milk or in the arms, children develop the habit of relying on external conditions to fall asleep. This habit becomes a necessary condition for children to enter deep sleep from light sleep. As long as they enter the lighter sleep stage at night, these highly dependent children cannot fall asleep on their own. They need to wake up and cry to ask their parents to provide such conditions again before they can fall asleep again. Usually, such children have a shallow sleep and are easily awakened.