Ideally, a newborn baby should sleep for eighteen to twenty hours a day. But there are situations when the duration of sleep decreases, or the newborn child does not sleep during the day and at night is awake.
Why does the newborn sleep a little?
- Intestinal colic . Colic is the most common cause that reduces the duration of a child's sleep. They develop as a result of excessive gas generation, which stretches the loops of the intestine and provokes severe pain in the abdomen.
- The baby is hungry . Hypogalactia can provoke a situation when a newborn does not sleep or sleeps badly both during the day and at night. For differential diagnosis, it is necessary to carry out a control weighing of the child after the next feeding and to estimate the amount of milk that has been drunk.
- Unstable circadian rhythms . In this situation, the newborn does not sleep at night, although during the daytime his sleep does not cause censure. Unstable circadian rhythms, as a rule, stabilize to a monthly age. There are cases when a newborn does not sleep at night time until six months old.
Bad sleep as a sign of illness
Problems with sleep in the newborn can arise for more serious reasons:
- The child fell ill . The most common disease of a newborn is respiratory viral infections, which are manifested by rhinitis and hyperthermia. As you know, a newborn baby is able to breathe fully with his nose. Why does the newborn not sleep during illness? During a viral infection, a nasal breathing disorder occurs. This causes the child anxiety, agitation and, as a consequence, sleep disturbance.
- Perinatal damage to the nervous system . If a newborn does not sleep during the day, it may be due to damage to the nervous system during childbirth. As a rule, insomnia in a child in this case is combined with a pronounced nervous excitement, manifested by continuous crying.