Even if you have had kids before, each baby will be different. Newly born babies generally sleep about 16-17 hours in a 24 hour period. Most babies won't sleep thru the night till they are at least a quarter old. There are a few reasons why. Firstly, their stomachs are miniscule and they will get hungry faster, particularly if you are breastfeeding your baby. Breast milk is far more simply digested than formula, and your baby must feed more frequently, particularly at the start. Babies also have shorter sleep cycles than adults do and have shorter dream cycles. Generally, though , a newborn baby should sleep about eight or 9 hours in the daytime and eight hours or so at night. These will not be in 8-hour cycles, naturally. In the start, those sleep times will be terribly short. As the baby ages, up to about two years old, she'll still be sleeping 13-14 hours, but the quantity of daytime sleep will lessen month-by-month.
By age two, your baby should be sleeping thru the night with a 2-hour snooze throughout the day. Your baby might need a marginally longer nap or 2 short sleeps. At this age though, try to deter snoozes too late in the afternoon, as this may make it harder to make them sleep one or two hours later at bed time. Once a baby starts to continually sleep thru the night mothers and fathers are usually dismayed when he / she starts to awaken in the night again. This usually occurs at six months of age and is frequently a standard part of development called separation foreboding, when a baby doesn't understand that separations are non permanent.
