Expert: Mums Don’t Need To Stress Out About Their Restless Babies

An expert has warned that new mothers boasting about their soundly sleeping babies as a sign of good mothering is causing unnecessary stress for mums of restless babies.

While some new mothers are proud about their babies sleeping through at night and using it as a badge of honour, other new mothers are feeling bad when their babies are having a hard time sleeping at night, thus causing ‘mummy wars’ in mothers’ groups.

Mum-of-three Kate Parker, from Bridgewater, said that babies’ sleep pattern is always an issue among mothers’ groups. “Sleep is certainly a major topic of conversation among mothers’ groups, and there is so much information out there it can be confusing “” I asked my paediatrician about it, and I’d encourage other mums to make sure their advice is from experts,” she said.

Clinical paediatric sleep psychologist Professor Sarah Blunden, director of the Paediatric Sleep Clinic has revealed in her research, to be presented at the annual Australian Sleep Association conference in New Zealand this week, that many new mothers of restless babies see their babies’ night wakings as a problem that need fixing when in fact, rather than a normal infant sleep pattern.

In a study with the Adelaide campus of the Central Queensland University, Prof Blunden measured the sleep pattern of babies aged 6-12 months of 15 families by asking the parents about their child’s sleep patterns.

“Interestingly, our results showed parents very often believe their baby has a severe sleep problem when they’re actually behaving just as an infant should,” Prof Blunden said. “They tend to overblow the problem of night wakings and sleep duration, presumably not realising the behaviour is absolutely normal.”

Prof Blunden said that these parents resort to expensive sleep interventions to improve their babies’ sleep when merely educating them will help ease the anxiety.

“Parents may think their child should sleep from 7pm to 7am but that is not correct or based on evidence. If parents then have a baby that wakes a lot they may think something is wrong or they are terrible parents, Babies are different, and some do wake up,” she said. “If someone is not very confident in the first place it can be really hard on them, so educating parents with evidence-based information is imperative.”

Source: News.com.au