Have you ever wondered how much sleep your child should be getting in a 24-hour period? If you have, you’re not alone, because it’s a question I receive all the time! Knowing the answer to this question can be helpful for a few reasons.
If you know how much sleep your child needs overall, it can help you:
Figure Out Bedtime
I give plenty of scheduling advice for all ages, but what about when Baby doesn’t follow the schedule perfectly? What about those times when he takes several short naps, or skips a nap (or multiple naps!) altogether? That’s when you might want to take into account how much sleep he needs overall, because that can help you adjust bedtime.
This is especially helpful when Baby is taking only one nap, and sometimes skipping it. On days when Baby takes the nap, you use your usual waketime before bed (typically 4-6 hours for a single napper). On days when Baby skips the nap, you look at how much sleep he needs at his age, and you calculate bedtime based on when he woke up for the day. If he needs 13 hours of sleep and he woke up at 7am, you’d put him to bed about 11 hours after he wakes up, at 6pm, to get those 13 hours of sleep.
Fit In Enough Awake Time
There is such a thing as getting too much day sleep, and while it may seem great while it’s happening (yay for long naps!), it can then lead to less night sleep (or even interrupted night sleep!), which is the most restorative sleep.
Not only that, but too much day sleep can lead to having too few naps for the age because you can’t fit in all the long naps AND the necessary awake time! So if something about Baby’s sleep isn’t working, it’s worth looking into how much overall sleep he needs to see if he’s on track. Once you know how much sleep he needs, you’ll get an idea of how much awake time he needs; from there, you can figure out what to do with his waketimes.
For instance, if Baby is 4-5 months old, he likely needs 16-17 total hours of sleep, divided between a ~12 hour night and 3 or 4 naps. That leaves 7-8 hours of total awake time.
If Baby takes 3 naps (4 wakeful periods) per day, his waketimes need to be around 1.5-2 hours each to get enough awake time in.
If Baby takes 4 naps (5 wakeful periods), his waketimes need to be 1-1.5 hours each.
If Baby can only handle 1-1.5 hours of awake time but you let multiple naps reach the 2+ hour point, he’s not going to be able to fit 5 wakeful periods into the day, and therefore he won’t be able to fit enough total waketime into the day, which brings us back to the nighttime sleep problem — he’s likely to wake up in the night to fit in more awake time. You need to be able to fit those 5 wakeful periods in, which sometimes means waking Baby up from naps. He’ll have shorter naps all day (we still aim for at least 60 minutes), but he’ll get enough awake time and enough asleep time overall.
Okay, okay, we get that overall waketime is important, so now let’s have the numbers, already!
Here is the amount of total sleep that I recommend at different ages:
0-3 months: 17-19 hours
4-5 months: 15-17 hours
6-11 months: 14-16 hours
1 year: 13-15 hours
2 years: 12-14 hours
3 years: 11-13 hours
4 years: 10-13 hours
5 years: 10-12 hours
You can find more information about how this sleep is divided between night and naps in my scheduling posts and in my free nap guide!
Keep in mind that if you search google to find general sleep needs for a particular age, the answers you’ll find are typically quite a wide range. Personally, I think it’s because they’re accounting for a lot of kids who simply aren’t getting enough sleep. Therefore, take the google ranges with a grain of salt, and aim for the middle or higher end of the range. Or, just keep this blog post handy to have a better idea of how much sleep your child REALLY needs!