A baby sleep tracker for naps, night sleep and wake windows
What should I track to understand my baby’s sleep?
Track four things: when the baby fell asleep, when they woke, whether it was a nap or night sleep, and how long they were awake beforehand. Those four give you total sleep in 24 hours, nap count, the longest night stretch, and wake windows: the numbers every sleep guide is actually referring to.
What to log
Sleep start, wake time, nap or night, and a short note when something changed: teeth, illness, a big day out.
What it shows
Total sleep, nap count, longest night stretch, and the wake window that reliably precedes an easy settle.
Best for
Working out whether naps are drifting, preparing for a nap transition, or describing sleep accurately to a clinician.
What is a wake window and why track it?
A wake window is the time a baby is comfortably awake between sleeps. It is the single most useful number a sleep log produces, because an overtired baby and an undertired baby both resist sleep, and from the outside the two look nearly identical.
Tracking the awake time before each nap, and whether that nap was easy or a fight, turns guesswork into something you can read. Most families find a window that works within a week or two of honest logging, and it is usually not the one the internet promised for that age.
How much sleep does a baby need by age?
Published ranges cover total sleep across 24 hours, not night sleep alone, which is why a baby who wakes at 5 am can still be inside a normal range. Newborns sleep roughly 14 to 17 hours a day in short blocks; by 12 months most babies are near 11 to 14 hours with one or two naps.
The spread inside every range is wide and deliberate. A log is more useful for tracking your own baby against themselves last month than against a chart. The direction of travel says more than the absolute number.
How can I tell a regression from a one-off bad week?
A rough patch shows up as two or three disrupted nights inside an otherwise steady fortnight, usually with an obvious cause sitting next to it in the log: a cold, a heatwave, travel, a vaccination.
A genuine shift looks structural: the longest night stretch shortens for a week or more, or naps consolidate from three to two and refuse to go back. Both resolve, but only one is worth changing your routine over, and the log is what tells them apart.
Why log sleep in a shared timeline?
Sleep is the handover question that causes the most friction, because the answer decays fast: "she went down at two" is useless information an hour later if nobody wrote down when she woke.
BubSync keeps sleep beside feeds and nappy changes in one shared timeline, so whoever has the baby next can see the last wake time without a phone call, and so the person who has been awake since 4 am does not have to be the archive.
Can a tracker turn my logs into a schedule for tomorrow?
A log tells you what happened. The question most parents actually want answered is what to do next, and that gap is why so many people end up following a routine written for somebody else’s baby.
BubSync’s AI hub builds a day schedule from the sleep you have already logged: one timed list for the day ahead, covering naps, feeds and wind-down, generated from the baby’s own aggregated pattern and their age, never from raw history and never from a published routine. A baby born early gets the schedule on corrected age.
A separate Sleep rhythm action reads the shape of your baby’s sleep back to you: how the naps sit, where the night stretch is heading, and what has shifted lately. Every response arrives as an editable note, so you keep the useful parts, change the rest, and can pin it above the shared timeline where the next carer will see it.
With only a few days of logging there is not enough to build a personal pattern from, and the schedule says so plainly rather than inventing one: it opens with that caveat, then gives age-banded guidance clearly framed as general for your baby’s age, never as your baby’s own pattern.
- One timed list for the day, generated from the baby’s own logged pattern
- Editable before you keep it, and pinnable above the shared timeline
- When logging is sparse it says so, and gives age-banded guidance framed as general
- A Premium feature. Logging sleep and reading the day and week charts is free
What if the waking never gets logged because nobody wakes up properly?
Most night wakings are never recorded. A baby wakes, cries, is resettled, and nobody ends the sleep entry and starts a new one, so the night looks like one unbroken stretch. The signal that most directly describes how tired the parents are is the one that goes missing.
BubSync records a waking in one tap on a near-black screen with no white flash and no sound. A waking is an event inside the night rather than the end of it, so three wakings leave one sleep record with three wakings on it rather than four separate sleeps. Marking back-to-sleep is optional, and so is noting how the baby was settled.
If the night happened and nothing got logged, the morning prompt lets you add it afterwards rather than losing it. None of this is Premium.
Wake windows and total sleep by age
| Age | Wake window | Total sleep / 24 h | Naps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Newborn | 30–60 min | 14–17 h | 4–6, irregular |
| 1–3 months | 60–90 min | 14–16 h | 4–5 |
| 3–6 months | 75–120 min | 12–15 h | 3–4 |
| 6–9 months | 2–3 h | 12–15 h | 2–3 |
| 9–14 months | 3–4 h | 11–14 h | 2 → 1 |
| 14–24 months | 4–6 h | 11–14 h | 1 |
Ranges published by the Cleveland Clinic, Raising Children Network and Red Nose Australia. Ranges, not targets. A baby who wakes happy and settles easily is in their own right window.
Frequently asked questions
- What does a baby sleep tracker help with?
- It helps you log naps and night sleep consistently so you can see trends in timing, duration and wake windows, rather than reconstructing a fortnight of broken nights from memory.
- How long should my baby be awake between naps?
- Wake windows run roughly 30 to 60 minutes for a newborn, 60 to 90 minutes at 1 to 3 months, 75 to 120 minutes at 3 to 4 months, 2 to 3 hours at 5 to 7 months, and 3 to 4 hours by around a year. These are published ranges rather than targets.
- Should I wake a sleeping baby to keep to a schedule?
- That is a question for your child health nurse or GP, because the answer depends on weight gain, age and feeding. A sleep log is useful here mainly because it lets you give them an accurate fortnight instead of an impression.
- Does BubSync show shared sleep history?
- Yes. BubSync keeps sleep logs in a shared timeline so partners and carers can see the last wake time and pick up exactly where the previous person left off.
Keep reading
General information only, not medical advice. If sleep changes suddenly, if breathing during sleep worries you, or if your baby is difficult to rouse, speak to your GP, midwife or child health nurse. For safe-sleep guidance in Australia, see Red Nose.
