Crawling Babies More Likely to Wake up at Night

The developmental stages of infants can influence their sleep habits. Proving this point, a new study found babies waking up more often at night after they started crawling.

To examine the link, Dr. Dina Cohen of the University of Haifa and colleagues included 28 healthy babies. Researchers monitored sleep habits of the infants from four months to 11 months. Using a device called ActiGraph, they recorded different sleep patterns during different stages of development. Apart from that, parents also provided information about their babies' sleep habits.

Babies' developmental stages, including the crawling process, were monitored and video recorded. Investigators found most of the babies start crawling at seven months. They also noticed a difference in the number of times babies get up before (1.55 times) and during (1.98 times) the crawling stage. The length of sleeplessness each time babies woke up was found longer (10 minutes) compared to before they started crawling.

Researchers also found babies who started crawling early having higher incidents of waking up and restlessness in sleep, compared to babies who started crawling later.

At the end of the study, researchers found the sleep pattern lasting only three months from the day infants start crawling and after that, they return to their old sleep pattern.

"With ongoing monitoring of babies' development, we can demonstrate that the increased awakenings are a temporary short-term phenomenon, which occurs as part of a wider process of the baby's gradually improving ability to regulate states of sleep and wakefulness," Dr. Cohen said.

The feeling of insecurity caused by crawling may be leading to this occurrence, researchers said.

"It is possible that crawling, which involves a vast range of changes and psychological reorganization in the babies' development, increases their level of arousal, influences their ability to regulate themselves and causes a period of temporary instability that expresses itself in waking up more frequently," Dr. Cohen explained.