9-12 Month old babies wake up on average 3 times per night
It is normal for your 9-12 month old baby to wake up overnight to breastfeed!
A 2023 study in Norway followed 342 breastfeeding mothers of babies ages 6-12 months. Babies woke up between 0 times (only 3.2% of babies!) and 8 times (3.8% of babies) with the majority waking up 3-4 times per night. Each additional hour of daytime napping for an infant increased the likelihood of nighttime awakenings by 19% for younger infants and 24% for older infants in the study. Even though very few babies slept through the night without awakening, less than 5% of moms reported their babies’ sleep as a serious problem, perhaps reflecting different cultural expectations (or maybe the yearlong paid maternity leave in Norway makes the sleepless nights more bearable?). The more the baby woke up to breastfeed overnight, the more nighttime awakenings they had, but the longer their overall block of overnight sleep. In this study, 52% of babies were bedsharing with their parents, and interestingly, the frequency of nighttime awakenings was increased by 31% in infants who were bed-sharing compared to the infants who were not bedsharing. If you are a parent who is breastfeeding a 9-12 month old who is wondering if it is normal for your baby to wake up overnight, even multiple times, yes! It is!
UPDATE: A mom from Norway corrected me that their yearlong leave is shared between mom and dad (15 weeks for mom, 15 for dad, 15 shared), so they go back to work closer to 7 months if they don’t want to take a pay cut for the leave.
Aiding your infant to sleep through the night through all kinds of sleep training methods is a highly controversial topic even among pediatricians and other pediatric health experts. I will post some interesting (and contentious!!) studies over the next few weeks that look at different styles of aiding infants to sleep, their overall effectiveness and their effect on kids’ parental attachment later on as well as kids’ mental health. (Spoiler alert: in the end, regardless of the method, most kids learn to sleep through the night eventually, and most kids’ mental health and attachment turns out about the same regardless of the method used, but I’ll post more on these studies when I can!!)
Pediatrician Note: Bedsharing is a common practice in Norway in this study, but it is not recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics due to increased risk of suffocation. You can find safe sleep recommendations from the AAP here: https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/sleep/Pages/a-parents-guide-to-safe-sleep.aspx
Here is the full text of the Norwegian study:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10995-023-03805-2
