Make Sure Baby is Getting the Right Amount of Sleep

Sleep. It’s the thing every new parent obsesses over, worries about, and never quite gets enough of. If you’ve spent the last few weeks googling “how much sleep should my baby be getting” at 3am with a baby on your shoulder, you’re not alone. Sleep needs change constantly during the first few years, and what’s normal at six weeks looks nothing like what’s normal at six months.

Below is a rough guide to how much sleep babies and children typically need at each stage. Treat these as ballpark figures rather than targets to hit exactly. Every child is different, and some healthy babies sleep quite a bit more or less than the averages. If you’re ever genuinely worried about your baby’s sleep, feeding, or development, it’s worth raising it with your health visitor, midwife or GP rather than relying on a chart.

Newborns, 0 to 4 Weeks (Roughly 14 to 17 Hours a Day)

Newborns don’t really have a sleep schedule in any meaningful sense. They sleep in short bursts around the clock, waking every couple of hours because their tiny stomachs need feeding roughly every 2 to 3 hours, day and night. It feels relentless, and it is.

Because feeding is so frequent at this stage, some parents do need to gently wake a sleeping newborn for a feed, particularly if a midwife or health visitor has advised this for weight gain reasons. It sounds backwards when you’re desperate for sleep yourself, but it’s usually only for the first few weeks.

A few safety points worth keeping in mind for this age group, based on current NHS and paediatric guidance:

• Always put your baby down on their back to sleep, for every sleep, day and night.
• Room sharing (baby sleeping in a cot or crib in your room) is recommended for at least the first six months, as it’s linked to a lower risk of SIDS.
• Keep the cot clear of loose bedding, pillows, cot bumpers and soft toys.
• Avoid letting your baby get too hot, and don’t smoke or let anyone smoke around your baby.

Your health visitor can talk you through safe sleep practices in more detail, and it’s worth asking if anything feels unclear.

1 to 4 Months (Around 14 to 15 Hours a Day)

Your baby is still sleeping a huge chunk of the day away, but the sleep is starting to organise itself a little. Around 6 to 8 weeks, many babies begin to show early signs of telling day from night, and the longest single stretch of sleep at night might stretch to 4 to 6 hours by around 3 to 4 months, though plenty of babies take longer to get there.

This is not the age to attempt formal sleep training. Most babies aren’t developmentally ready to self-settle for long stretches until somewhere between 4 and 6 months, and some take longer still. If your baby wakes and needs comfort at this age, that’s completely normal, not a habit you’ve created.

You’ll also hear a lot about the “4 month sleep regression,” where a baby who was sleeping reasonably well suddenly starts waking more. It’s linked to a genuine shift in how babies cycle through sleep stages, and it’s temporary, even if it doesn’t feel that way at 2am.

4 to 12 Months (Around 12 to 15 Hours a Day, Including Naps)

This is the stretch where you start to see your baby’s own sleep personality emerge. Some babies drop off anywhere, in the car seat, on a shoulder, mid-feed. Others fight sleep with everything they’ve got because they don’t want to miss what’s going on around them. Separation anxiety often kicks in around 8 to 10 months too, which can make naps and bedtime harder even for babies who used to settle easily.

In terms of naps, younger babies in this range often have three naps a day: a short one in the morning, a longer one in the early afternoon, and a shorter catnap in the late afternoon or early evening. Most babies drop that third, late nap somewhere between 6 and 9 months, not earlier, so don’t worry if your four month old still seems to need it.

Between roughly 4 and 6 months is a reasonable time to start putting a simple bedtime routine in place, if you haven’t already, things like a bath, a feed, a story or song, then into the cot while still awake or drowsy. It won’t fix everything overnight, but a predictable sequence of events genuinely helps a lot of babies wind down, and it gives you something to lean on when things feel chaotic. There’s no single right way to do this. Some families find their baby settles better with a parent nearby for a while; others find their baby settles fine independently from early on. Go with what actually works for your baby and your household, rather than what a book says should work.

1 to 3 Years (Around 11 to 14 Hours a Day)

Somewhere around 12 to 18 months, most toddlers move from two naps a day down to one longer midday nap. It can be a bumpy transition, with a few days of your toddler seeming overtired on the two nap schedule but not quite ready to drop to one. Hang in there, it usually settles within a couple of weeks.

Most children give up daytime naps altogether somewhere between age 3 and 5, though the exact timing varies enormously and has more to do with the individual child than anything you’re doing right or wrong. Some three year olds are done with naps entirely; some five year olds still need one most days. Both are normal.

3 to 6 Years (Around 10 to 12 Hours a Day)

If your child is still napping, the nap tends to get shorter as they get older before disappearing completely, usually by around age 5, though again this varies. Bedtime for this age group is often somewhere between 7 and 9pm, with wake times between 6 and 8am. If naps have dropped but bedtime hasn’t moved earlier to compensate, you may notice more evening meltdowns simply because your child is more tired than they were with a nap in the mix.

7 to 12 Years (Around 9 to 11 Hours a Day)

As school, activities and social lives ramp up, bedtimes tend to creep later, though there’s a wide range here, some children still go down at 7pm while others aren’t asleep until closer to 10pm. Most sleep guidance for this age group recommends somewhere between 9 and 11 hours a night, though many children in this age bracket are actually getting closer to 8 or 9 in practice, particularly once homework and screens enter the picture. If your child seems consistently tired, moody or struggling to concentrate at school, it’s worth looking honestly at bedtime and screen use before assuming it’s something else.

12 to 18 Years (Around 8 to 10 Hours a Day)

Teenagers need roughly as much sleep as younger children, arguably more given how much growing and brain development is still happening, but sleep is usually the first thing to get sacrificed to homework, social life, sport and screens. There’s also a genuine biological shift in adolescence that pushes teenagers’ natural sleep and wake times later, which is part of why so many teens struggle to fall asleep early even when they want to. Where you can, protecting a consistent wind-down routine and keeping phones out of the bedroom overnight makes a real difference, even if it’s a hard sell.

For more related reading, take a look at these articles:

• What to Do When You See Hair Loss in Newborn Babies
• Things to Know About Newborns