Perspectives
Infant sleep problems
Might prevention be better than cure?
1 School of Psychology, University of Reading, Reading, UK
2 Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Correspondence to:
Lynne Murray, Winnicott Research Unit, School of Psychology, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AL, UK; lynne.murray@rdg.ac.uk
Perspective on the paper by Hiscock et al (see page 952)
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
It is normal for infants to wake and feed at night during the first few months, especially when breast fed. Indeed, such behaviour is adaptive, since it secures the nutrition necessary for physical development and brain growth, and is particularly important for vulnerable infants.1 These adaptive aspects of frequent night waking become increasingly less important as the infant grows, and by around 6 months of age infants are usually able to sustain prolonged periods of sleep when they do not wake to feed, without any costs in terms of their physical development. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of infants aged 6 months and older may wake and then have difficulty settling back to sleep without their parents’ active intervention (see Stein and Barnes2 for a review). In fact, it is this settling difficulty, rather than the awakening per se, that is the key factor distinguishing between infants with
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- Improving infant sleep and maternal mental health: a cluster randomised trial
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Arch. Dis. Child. 2007 92: 952-958.[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
This article has been cited by other articles:
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Hiscock, H., Bayer, J. K., Hampton, A., Ukoumunne, O. C., Wake, M.
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