How long can a newborn stay awake?

Forty-five minutes feels short, and it is. Search English sources for the wake window of a newborn and you'll find the same numbers.

But it isn't a matter of getting used to it, or of a baby who "simply" has to learn to stay awake: a newborn's brain still works almost entirely from the oldest, most primitive part. Your baby processes an enormous amount of new information and gets overloaded by it very quickly.

The wake window is also called the awake window. For a newborn, that window is the shortest it will ever be, and it slowly grows over the course of the first month.

What happens if you stretch that time

A baby who has been awake too long doesn't fall asleep more easily, but with more difficulty. Overtiredness makes babies restless, and then it seems as if your baby doesn't need sleep while it's exactly the other way around.

That's why you watch the wake window and not how awake your baby looks.

Feeding simply counts

The most common mistake this month: only letting the wake window start after your baby has fed. The time a feed takes is simply part of it. And in the first month, a feed can easily take forty minutes.

A feed and a clean diaper are often the whole wake window already in this phase.

The order that makes the day calmer

Kyra works with a fixed order within every wake window:

1. Wake up
2. A good, full feed
3. A short moment of play
4. Sleep again

So feed right after waking and not just before putting down. That way drinking doesn't get linked to falling asleep, and that makes an enormous difference in the months after.

What you can steer this month

Not much, and that's good news. The first month isn't the month for a schedule. What you do is keep track of how long your baby is awake, watch when tiredness comes, and steer on that a little. Nothing more.

What helps is learning to read the signals that come before crying. Crying is a late signal. Looking away, glazed staring and jerky arm movements come well before it.

Does it vary enormously? That's normal

In the first month, the wake window varies from moment to moment. One time an hour works, another time your baby is done after half an hour. That's no sign something is wrong, and it's no sign you're doing something wrong.

What happens more often in this phase is that day and night are still mixed up. If your baby sleeps long stretches during the day and is wide awake at night, start there: day and night confusion.

And if the crying belongs to a peak that just won't stop, read about purple crying. That helps above all with what you expect of yourself.

If you want to see how these numbers change later on, they're together in the overview of wake windows by age.