The Four Month Sleep regression
Overview
Just as you feel yourself come out of that newborn haze and you feel you have finally found your rhythm; your baby may be only waking one- or two-times a night now for feeds and you feel like this is very manageable. And then all of a sudden overnight those one – two wakes become five or six and you don’t know where you have gone wrong!
Well it is likely that you have hit the four-month sleep regression! This term is thrown around a lot with new parents and can be quite a terrifying thought, but I always like to reassure parents that it is actually a normal part of your babies’ development.
What is it?
The four month sleep regression is actually more of a progression with regards to your baby’s sleep maturity and sleep cycles. New born babies tend to drift through their sleep cycles a bit easier and they are not as pronounced especially overnight. However around 4 months your babies sleep cycles will change and instead of drifting through them they will wake fully at the end of each sleep cycle.
Sleep cycles are generally 45 mins throughout the day and 2 hours overnight so you will find your baby is now waking up at the end of each sleep cycle and needing you to come in and resettle them back to sleep.
This is when how you are getting your baby to fall asleep at the start of a nap and bedtime becomes more important. What happens is they will wake at the end of their sleep cycle and be needing the same environment they had falling to sleep in order to go back to sleep. This is called a sleep association.
A few examples of the most common sleep associations are feeding, rocking, the use of a dummy and motion (walking in the pram or front pack).
I think it’s important to mention that there is nothing wrong with feeding, rocking etc your baby to sleep especially in the first four months of their life, in fact all babies need some sort of assistance to fall to sleep and stay asleep when they are that young so if you found feeding to sleep worked for you and your baby then that is great!
However in saying that if your baby is showing signs of their sleep cycles maturing and you are needing to feed back to sleep more often overnight then it is usually a good sign that they are ready to move away from being assisted to sleep to learning how to settle to sleep on their own or learn to self-settle.
So, what is self-settling?
Teaching our babies to self-settle is when we teach them to settle to sleep or resettle back to sleep without the assistance of a parent or a sleep prop.
So that means when your baby wakes up overnight (something we all do) after a sleep cycle they are able to go back to sleep without needing to signal out to a parent to come and put them back to sleep with rocking, patting, feeding or replacing their dummy.
What we are NOT doing is teaching our babies to not signal out to us if they are hungry/sick/cold/wet etc and that is the key difference that is important to understand when it comes to teaching our babies to self-settle. We will still respond to our babies when they need us but if they know how to self-settle and resettle, they won’t signal to you at the end of each sleep cycle.
Another misconception is that in order to teach your baby to self-settle you must do cry it out which is also not true. There are many ways you can teach your baby to self-settle and this should be based on your parenting style, your babies personality and what specific sleep association they may have.
That’s one of the reasons why I don’t have a generic guide available for teaching self-settling as it is a very individual process and I like to ask lots of questions and write up a personalised plan for your baby and follow you through the process.
If the time has come and you feel your baby is ready to learn how to self-settle, get in touch and we can get started on getting some better sleep for you and your baby!
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