- Sleep Foundations
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Nobody warned me about the exhaustion before the exhaustion.
I knew newborns were tiring. Every person I had ever met who had a baby told me to sleep while I could, which is advice that is both accurate and completely useless to anyone who has not yet experienced what newborn sleep deprivation actually involves. What I did not know and what nobody told me, was that the first year of baby sleep is not a single experience. It is a series of entirely different experiences, one following the other, just when you think you have figured out the one you are in.
The baby who sleeps in two-hour stretches at week one is completely different from the baby who is waking every forty-five minutes at month four because their sleep architecture just permanently matured. The baby at month four is different again from the baby at month nine who has discovered that you exist when you leave the room and has decided this is unacceptable. None of them are broken. All of them are exactly what your baby is supposed to be at each stage.
This article is the guide I wish I had at the beginning of the year, not a perfect sleep training programme, and not a promise of when things get easier, but an honest, age-by-age explanation of what normal actually looks like from week one through to the first birthday, so that when you are in the middle of a particular stage you can locate yourself in it rather than feeling like you are the only person whose baby sleeps this way. And most importantly, knowing which prior action during a sleep regression can impact the upcoming series…
Before anything else: every number in this guide is a range, not a target. If your baby is sleeping slightly more or slightly less than what I describe, they are almost certainly fine. Development has a wide normal range. Use this as orientation, not assessment.
First, the concept you need before all the others: wake windows
I am going to use the term wake window throughout this article, and it is worth understanding before we go through the ages, because it is genuinely the most useful single concept in infant sleep.
A wake window is the amount of time your baby can comfortably stay awake between sleeps. It is not how long baby should be awake, it is how long their developing nervous system can manage wakefulness before sleep pressure builds to the point where they need to sleep. Too short, and baby is not tired enough to settle. Too long, and baby crosses into overtiredness, where cortisol production makes sleep harder rather than easier.
Wake windows grow gradually across the first year. A newborn can manage 30 – 60mins of wakefulness. A twelve-month-old can manage 3 – 5 hours. Learning to read your baby’s tired signs like the yawn, the eye rub, the glaze, the sudden loss of interest in what was engaging them a moment ago and acting on them within the expected wake window is the single most practical thing you can do for their sleep at any age.
Weeks 1 to 2: the sleepiest days
Total sleep: 14 to 18 hours per day
Wake windows: 30 to 60 minutes
The first two weeks are the ones where your baby sleeps more than they will at any other point in their life, and yet somehow you are more exhausted than you have ever been. The maths does not add up until you understand that those 14 to 18 hours of sleep are scattered across the entire 24h period in fragments, with no preference for night over day, and that every fragment ends with a feed that requires you to be awake.
There is no sleep schedule in the first two weeks. There is no routine. There is only: baby wakes, you feed them, baby sleeps, baby wakes again. The intervals are roughly every 2 – 3h around the clock. This is entirely normal and is driven by a stomach the size of a marble that empties quickly, an immature nervous system that cannot yet sustain long sleep, and a biological need for frequent feeding to establish milk supply.
Your only job at this stage is to keep them fed and keep them safe. Everything else, including sleep schedules, belongs to a future version of your life that you will reach in a few weeks.
In Mauritius heat, watch for overheating even in these early days as a baby who is too warm wakes more frequently and sleeps more lightly. Check their chest rather than their hands for temperature. Warm but not sweaty is what you are aiming for.
Weeks 3 to 4: the first hints of a pattern
Total sleep: 14 to 17 hours per day
Wake windows: 45 to 60 minutes
Something begins to shift around week three. The alert periods, the windows of genuine, engaged wakefulness, start getting slightly longer. Baby begins to have opinions about the world they are looking at. Baby tracks your face more consistently. The cluster feeding that arrives in the evenings around this time looks like a supply crisis but is almost always them stimulating the increase they needs. Evening fussiness is common and normal and does not need solving, it needs surviving.
Night and day confusion is still very much present. Some families find that keeping daytime naps in lighter, noisier environments and nights in dark, quiet ones begins to help the circadian rhythm develop but this is a gentle suggestion rather than a rule that will make a measurable difference immediately. The rhythm develops on its own biological schedule over the next few weeks regardless.
Month 2: the social smile arrives
Total sleep: 14 to 17 hours per day
Wake windows: 60 to 90 minutes
Somewhere between six and eight weeks, something happens that changes everything about the experience of early parenthood. Your baby smiles at you. Not a wind smile but a real, deliberate, social smile in direct response to your face and your voice. It arrives like a reward for everything the first six weeks contained.
Sleep is still fragmented and night waking is still very much present. Some babies begin producing one slightly longer stretch at night around 3 – 4hours rather than 2 and parents treat this like a gift, which it is. Others continue waking every 2 – 3 hours. Both are normal. The two-month-old who wakes every two hours is not sleeping badly. Baby is sleeping like a two-month-old, which is what they are.
Wake windows of 60 to 90 minutes mean you are putting them down fairly frequently through the day. The naps are often short, 30 to 45mins, and numerous. This is not the stage to think about consolidating naps. It is the stage to accept the rhythm and feed their sleep needs as they come.
Month 3: the calm before the storm
Total sleep: 14 to 16 hours per day
Wake windows: 60 to 120 minutes
Month three is often the sweetest sleep month of the first year. Many parents describe it as the moment they finally felt like they were getting somewhere with slightly more predictable patterns, slightly longer night stretches, a baby who has found their hands and can self-soothe briefly with them. Four or five naps spread across the day. A bedtime that is starting to feel like a bedtime.
Enjoy this. Rest in it. Bank every hour you can.
Because at the end of month three, or the beginning of month four, something is coming that nobody told you about and that will feel, when it arrives, like a complete reversal of all the progress you just made.
Month 4: the regression that changes the game
Total sleep: 13 to 16 hours per day
Wake windows: 90 minutes to 2.5 hours
The four-month sleep regression is not a phase that passes and returns to what it was. It is a permanent architectural change in your baby’s sleep. Baby’s brain has matured to the point where they now cycle through distinct sleep stages (light sleep, deep sleep, a brief arousal between each cycle) in much the same way adults do. The difference is that baby does not yet know how to bridge those inter-cycle arousals back to sleep independently. Every forty to forty-five minutes, baby surfaces. And if baby needs you to fall back asleep, baby calls for you.
The baby who was sleeping four-hour stretches last week is waking every forty-five minutes. The naps that were consolidating have fragmented again. Bedtime has become a battle. You are more exhausted than you were in the newborn days, which felt impossible but is real.
This is the stage where most sleep advice becomes unhelpful, because the regression is developmental and no method makes it resolve faster than their nervous system is ready to. What does help is consistency, keeping the bedtime routine intact, offering the drowsy-but-awake opportunity at bedtime, and understanding that you are in something that is finite even when it does not feel that way.
Month 5: the gradual settling
Total sleep: 13 to 15 hours per day
Wake windows: 2 to 2.5 hours
For most families, month five brings some stabilisation after the upheaval of month four. The new sleep architecture is still there, baby still cycles, baby still briefly arouses but baby is beginning to develop more ability to manage those arousals without fully waking. Three naps across the day. A more consistent bedtime emerging. Night sleep that, while not uninterrupted, is often less chaotic than the peak of the regression.
Many parents begin to experiment with the drowsy-but-awake approach more deliberately this month, as the window between the four-month regression and the developmental leaps of month six gives a brief period of relative stability to work with. Some babies take to it quickly. Others need more time. Neither outcome reflects on the quality of the parenting.
Month 6: solids begin and sleep shifts again
Total sleep: 12 to 15 hours per day
Wake windows: 2 to 3 hours
Month six brings two significant changes simultaneously: solids begin, and another period of sleep disruption often arrives. Whether the disruption is a sixth-month regression or simply the stimulation of new foods, new textures, and dramatically increased sensory input is somewhat academic. The experience for many families is a baby who had been settling reasonably well who starts resisting naps and waking more at night again.
The solid foods question has nothing to do with sleep. Starting solids does not help babies sleep longer. This is one of the most persistent myths in Mauritius parenting culture where giving rice or food earlier in the hope of longer sleep and the research is unambiguous: early solids do not improve sleep, and introducing them before six months carries digestive and allergy risks. Feed solids because your baby is developmentally ready. Not because you are hoping for a longer night.
Two to three naps per day. Night waking remains common. Many six-month-olds still need one or two night feeds and this is within the range of normal.
Months 7 to 9: mobility changes everything
Total sleep: 12 to 15 hours per day
Wake windows: 2.5 to 4 hours
Your baby is on the move. Rolling, commando crawling, possibly hands-and-knees crawling, pulling to standing. The physical skill acquisition of this period is extraordinary, and it affects sleep in a very specific way: a baby who is learning to stand and cannot yet sit back down will pull themselves upright in their cot at 2am and then shout for you because they are stuck.
This is one of the most common and most disorienting sleep disruptions of the entire first year with the baby who seemed to be sleeping better who is suddenly standing in the cot howling at midnight. The solution is twofold: practise the skill extensively in the daytime so they master the return movement, and respond calmly at night rather than escalating the emotional charge of the situation.
Object permanence arrives in this window too, i.e. your baby now understands that you continue to exist when they cannot see you, which is a cognitive leap forward and also the cause of the separation anxiety that peaks around eight to ten months. Baby is not being manipulative when they scream the moment you leave the room. Baby is demonstrating that their brain has developed enough to understand that you can be somewhere else, and they have decided they would prefer you were not.
Months 10 to 11: two naps and a consolidating night
Total sleep: 12 to 14 hours per day
Wake windows: 3 to 4 hours
Many babies have settled into a two-nap rhythm by this stage, one morning nap and one afternoon nap, with a bedtime that falls somewhere between 6:30 and 8pm. Night waking is still common, research suggests approximately 30% of ten-month-olds are still waking at least once and this is within the normal range for developmental reasons.
The window of approaching the one-nap transition is visible in some babies from around twelve months, but pushing it before twelve months tends to backfire. A baby who transitions to one nap too early becomes chronically overtired, which ironically makes sleep worse rather than better. Two naps until at least twelve months unless your baby is unambiguously telling you otherwise.
Month 12: the first birthday and what comes with it
Total sleep: 11 to 14 hours per day
Wake windows: 3 to 5 hours
The first birthday brings another developmental leap: walking, or the approach of walking, first words, a dramatically expanded understanding of the world. And in many families, another disruption to sleep that had been improving. The twelve-month sleep regression is real, is developmental, and is temporary.
The nap transition question arrives with force around this time. Many twelve-month-olds begin resisting one of their two naps. Many parents interpret this as readiness to drop to one nap. In most cases it is the transition period, the messy, inconsistent weeks where sometimes two naps works and sometimes one works rather than a clear readiness signal. The full transition typically takes several weeks to settle.
Walking changes the energy expenditure of your baby’s day significantly. A newly walking baby burns more energy and may, paradoxically, sleep better once they have had adequate physical opportunity during the day. Time on the floor, freedom to practice, and adequate outdoor time in the cooler parts of the Mauritius day all support better sleep at this stage.
The question everyone asks: when do babies sleep through the night?
The honest answer is that it depends what you mean by sleeping through, and it depends enormously on the individual baby.
In sleep research, sleeping through typically means a continuous stretch of six to eight hours, not the twelve uninterrupted hours that many parents imagine. By that definition, many babies achieve some version of it by six months. By the definition most parents mean the whole night, no waking, many babies are still not there at twelve months, and this is within the normal range.
The babies who sleep through earliest are not better babies or more successfully parented babies. They are babies whose neurological development happened to produce that outcome on an earlier timeline. The babies who are still waking at twelve months are not failing. They are in the long tail of a wide normal distribution, and they will eventually sleep through not because of anything you did or did not do, but because development always continues.
Safe sleep in the Mauritius context: the non-negotiables
Whatever stage your baby is in, the safe sleep basics apply at every age and every nap.
Back to sleep. Every sleep, every time, until they can roll both ways independently. This single practice has reduced SIDS rates by over 50% globally. Firm, flat surface. No pillows, duvets, loose blankets, or bumpers. A sleeping bag rated for the room temperature. Room sharing for the first six months minimum.
In Mauritius specifically: keep the room between 18 and 20 degrees if using air conditioning, directed away from your baby. A ceiling fan on the lowest setting improves air circulation without directing airflow at her. A properly secured mosquito net over the sleep space attached firmly, not draped loosely. Never use a mosquito coil in the room where your baby sleeps.
The reframe that makes the first year survivable
Baby sleep in the first year is not a problem to solve or a ladder to climb. It is a series of stages, each one driven by the extraordinary neurological development that is happening inside your baby’s brain every single week. The disruptions, the regressions, the nap collapses, the night waking that returns after weeks of improvement are almost always signs of development, not signs of failure.
The baby who is waking every forty-five minutes at four months is doing it because their brain just built new architecture. The baby who is standing in their cot at nine months is doing it because they learned a new skill that their body cannot stop practising. The baby who needs you close at midnight at eight months is doing it because they have developed enough cognitive sophistication to understand that you exist even when you are not there, and that is worth crying for.
Every difficult week of the first year is connected to something your baby is becoming.
That does not make the tiredness smaller. But it makes it mean something different.
Related Read:
Sleep Regressions in the First Year: The Full Timeline and What Each One Means
References: Sleep Foundation — Newborn sleep patterns. sleepfoundation.org. Huckleberry — Baby wake windows by age (updated March 2026). huckleberrycare.com. American Academy of Pediatrics — Safe sleep guidelines. healthychildren.org. Tresillian Family Health Centres — Newborn sleep and responsive settling. tresillian.org.au. Gilchrist A. et al. (2025) — Maturation of infant sleep during the first six months: a mini-scoping review. Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. If you have concerns about your baby’s sleep, development, or health at any stage, contact your paediatrician. Safe sleep guidelines in this article reflect current international recommendations — always follow the specific guidance of your healthcare provider.