Teething is NOT giving your child sleep trouble
Teething is probably NOT why your baby is not sleeping well! I’m Dr. Wagner, I’m a pediatrician. I had a request to talk about evidence around TEETHING , so here we go. Everything from poor sleep to fussiness to fevers has been attributed to teething, and a high quality prospective study in the Journal of Pediatrics published in April of this year asked “Does teething affect sleep?” They used objective data to measure sleep (validated camera monitors in baby’s cribs) in 849 infants over a 4-week period who had at least one tooth, then looked at the day the tooth erupted (or broke through the gum) and sleep patterns on the days around it, and found no significant difference in total sleep time, night-time awakenings or parental visits to the crib on teething days vs non-teething days. Teething lasts a while – First tooth typically comes in between 4 and 10 months, with the last tooth coming in somewhere between age 2 and 3yo – so finding out exactly what can be accurately attributed to teething and what can’t could help a lot of parents with a huge age range of kids. This well-powered study using objective data is a good indicator that that teething is probably not affecting a baby’s sleep as much as we thought.
