Sleep Latency
How long should it take for your baby to fall asleep?
Sleep Latency refers to the amount of time that it takes to fall asleep. Ideally, you want it to be more than 5 minutes but less than 30 minutes (for adults, children, and babies!).
Why does sleep latency matter?
Sleep latency is a great tool to determine whether your child’s schedule is working well for them or not, and it can be used to determine if they need more or less sleep instead of focusing on exact wake times, bedtimes and naps times.
How do you track sleep latency?
For adults and most kids, it’s fine to start tracking this time when you get into bed.
For babies, start tracking when you begin to rock/nurse/cuddle your baby to sleep. If your baby falls asleep reasonably independently, you can begin counting sleep latency from the time you put them in their crib/sleep space.
If Sleep Latency is Less Than 5 Minutes:
Less than 5 minutes can signal that your child is very tired, and potentially overtired—particularly when accompanied with the following:
Fragmented night sleep
Very short naps
Waking up grumpy
While it might sound like a dream to have your child fall asleep very quickly after you put them down, this actually disrupts their sleep later in the night. If children are overtired and exhausted when they are put down for a sleep, they essentially ‘crash’ and skip through the lighter stages of sleep. They then find it harder to navigate the different stages of sleep later in the night, inevitably leading to fragmented sleep and/or early-rising.
What should you do?
Try shortening their wake window and/or bringing bedtime a little earlier.
If Sleep Latency is more than 25-30minutes:
This is a signal that there is not enough sleep pressure built up.
What should you do?
You can try extending their wake windows and/or pushing bedtime later (15min at a time).
Falling asleep within the 15–20-minute range is a sign that you have found YOUR baby’s ideal wake window.
Always layer your baby’s sleep cues on top of age-specific wake windows to determine their ideal sleep routine.
If you feel you need more of a 1:1 approach to help you improve your little one’s sleep routine, I work with parents to create a holistic approach that educates, empowers and supports parents. More information can be found here.