It is generally accepted that a newborn baby sleeps 14 to 17 hours a day. However, this is an accepted range: some babies sleep a little less, others a little longer. Sometimes parents worry that their newborn baby's sleep is too short or too long - in reality it often turns out that these fears are completely unfounded.

In fact, it is not at all easy to estimate exactly how much time a baby sleeps in a 24-hour period. The reason for this is that the baby does not sleep continuously for the aforementioned several hours - after all, from time to time he wakes up for feeds. Usually toddlers have sleep episodes of between 30 minutes and 3-4 hours, in between which they are fed. It is also worth mentioning here that newborns do not have a fixed diurnal rhythm like that of adults. They sleep during the day as well as at night and, in fact, a regular sleeping and waking pattern does not begin to form in babies until they are around 6 months old.

It may therefore happen that a parent who thinks that the baby is sleeping too little, when he or she carefully counts all the periods during the day when the baby slept, finds that the baby in fact sleeps for the optimal amount of time for his or her age.

Sometimes it happens that the carers observe that the newborn's sleep takes longer than usual - what can this situation be caused by? Usually completely harmless, trivial reasons. Babies who experience so-called developmental leaps sleep longer. Mild infections (e.g. a cold), as well as vaccinations can also cause the baby to sleep longer than usual.