It’s Linda, owner of Sleep Tight Consultants. Today on the Sleepy Qs podcast, we are going to be talking about the four months sleep regression. I often joke with parents that there are few things that can strike fear in the heart of parents more than the impending approach of the dreaded four month sleep regression. All joking aside, this is one of those things that parents often know is coming. They hear about it from other friends, and they’re terrified that this is going to somehow cause all of their babies newfound, good sleep to disappear. You may have heard of it about this regression. You don’t quite know what it is or what to expect or how to know that it’s happening. So we’re going to talk all about the four months sleep regression, what it is, how to get out of it, why it happens.
Overview
I’m going to start off today by talking what all of the regression points are that can happen for children. We’re going to talk about when the four month regression really starts, what to do if it happens, how to potentially prevent it and how to get past it.
What are all of the regressions?
So there are several different regression points that can happen to children. Please keep in mind that not every child experiences every sleep regression. There’s one at 4 months, as we’re going to discuss. There’s 6 months sometime although this one I find is a little bit less commonly around six months, exactly. There’s one at 9 months. One at 12 months, one at 18 months and often one at 2 years old. And then sometimes, children will experience one when they move from a crib to a bed. And when that happens, varies based on when your child actually experiences that transition. Please check out other podcast episodes for more information about the other regressions.
It is actually a progression
The 4 month sleep regression is actually not really a regression at all. It’s really more of a progression, but a lot of people characterize it as a regression because your child might be sleeping well. And then things all of a sudden fall apart and everyone assumes that that’s because there’s some sort of regression going on, but there are some big things that happen for babies at about this point in time. Three things cause this regression. We’ll call it a regression just because that’s what most people refer to it as.
Developmental leap
There’s a big burst of developmental awareness for babies. This means that your child goes from not really noticing that much is happening in the world around them. You may be able to feed your baby in the presence of a lot of people, and there’s a lot of distraction going on and that doesn’t necessarily bother your child. But all of a sudden, now your baby notices that there are all these things that are happening around them. I’ll give you an example of this: many years ago, when my daughter was a newborn, we used to live in New York City and I used to take her to the Baby Gap on Park Avenue. I used to nurse her in the dressing room, because, you know, who tries clothes on their newborn or their child at the store? And so the dressing room sort of became a de facto nursing room, which was great because you could be out and about and stop in there, feed your baby, and then continue on your way. I remember one time my daughter was about eight weeks old and I headed to the dressing room and a woman came out and she was all flustered and frustrated and she had her baby with her and she’s like, ” You might as well take a turn because she won’t nurse. All she wants to do is look at herself in the mirror.”
I remember thinking to myself, “Huh? That’s so strange. My baby, isn’t interested in looking at herself at all. She just feeds and then we go about our business from there. Lo and behold, a couple months later, all of a sudden my daughter was now four months old and there was not a chance that I could have fed her in a room where there was a mirror. She would have been way too interested in checking herself out. And so this is that burst of developmental awareness.
New gross motor skills
The other things that happen is that your baby may all of a sudden start rolling. Often children roll from back to front now, instead of going from belly to back first and so if your child is starting to roll, not only does this mean that you need to take them out of the swaddle, but it means that they may be trying to practice all of their new skills instead of sleeping. If your baby goes into their sleeping space on their back and say, they go in asleep now, when they flip over, they wake up and they’re pretty mad to be all of a sudden on their bellies. This can cause all sorts of night awakenings.
Growth spurt
And there’s also a growth spurt at this stage. So these three big things start to come together to create this regression.
How it begins
One of the most common scenarios that I hear about is where babies are actually starting to sleep pretty well. So, you know, once you get past the early months where sleep is so unconsolidated and babies brains, you can hit it your stride often around eight weeks or so, where they’re starting to sleep a really nice long stretch up front. Maybe that’s four hours, five hours up to eight to 10 hours at a time without having any night awakenings, which is excellent, great work. But here comes that regression.
In many cases, when babies are newborns they don’t have the ability to put themselves to sleep. The things we may do to get our children to fall asleep are often known as sleep crutches or sleep associations, which for newborns are all things that are absolutely fine to do because it’s actually our job as parents to help our children go to sleep when they need that help beginning of the night. So we may do things like rocking, bouncing, feeding, walking all around ,swaying, singing, any number of things in order to help children fall asleep at bedtime. And in many cases for newborns, we can do those things, put them down asleep, and then they continue to sleep and they do that nice, beautiful stretch up front at the beginning of the night.
Unfortunately, what happens is when you hit this regression point, now your child’s brain has all of that alertness and that awareness. And so when you put your baby down and they have gone down asleep a couple of hours later, when they go through those big sleep cycles as starts to happen, and they are more aware, now your child is going to wake up and they realize, “Hey, when I was falling asleep, Mommy was rocking me, bouncing me, holding me, feeding me” whatever it was now that’s not happening. And now your baby needs that help over and over again in order to go back to sleep. This is where all of the night wakenings start. So that regression may look like: at bedtime, before you could put your baby down asleep and they would sleep that stretch, but now you put your baby down asleep and he or she wakes up immediately and you have to do that all over again. Or it could happen every half, an hour or every 45 minutes or every two hours, whatever it is, that’s what the regression looks like.
Starts before 4 months
I find that this often starts happening right around 15 weeks. In many cases, as children pass through this developmental phase, it’s often done by about 18 weeks. Please keep in mind always that if your baby was born early, you always want to take into account your child’s adjusted age. So that means that if your baby was five weeks early, it’s going to actually be 20 weeks from when your child was born until you hit that 15 week mark and that’s when you’ll start to notice that regression happening. Every once in a while, depending on how old your baby is, you may see that the regression happens not quite on track with their adjusted age but that’s something you definitely want to take into consideration.
How to handle the regression
So, what do you do if this regression has struck you? I find that this is not a good time to start sleep training. So if that’s something that you’re considering, I usually encourage parents to wait until 18 weeks. The reason being that I want to make sure that you are past that regression point before you start to try to get your child to fall asleep or help them learn these skills. The way I think of it as that as you’re trying to get your child to actively fall asleep and their brain is actively trying to wake up, now you’re essentially pushing at that brick wall, which is that your child is their brain is trying to do something opposite of what you’re trying to help them learn.
So if you can get to 18 weeks, ideally, that can be a good point in time to then start making some changes because chances are pretty good that at that point, now you’re on the other side of the regression and you can start to make some more significant changes.
How to prevent it
The big question that everybody asks is how can I prevent this from happening? So not every parent or every child experiences, every single regression. So it may not happen to you, which would be great. But what can you do to prevent it? So some of this has a bit to do with who your child is based on their temperament and also if in the beginning months, there are any sort of underlying medical issues that have contributed to your baby having a hard time sleeping. The big one that usually comes up is the reflux. So what you can do to prevent this regression is actually help your baby learn how to fall asleep more independently prior to that 15 week mark. Again, you may not be able to do this. This really has a lot to do with who your actual child is. And as is always the case with temperament, you get who you’re given and you can’t make a choice about that. That is just who you get. And some babies are really feisty. They really, really protest being put down awake when they’re, when they’re very young.
When babies are are under about that four to six month age range, and you try to put them down awake and they escalate more and more, they don’t have those internal resources in order to be able to get themselves to sleep. So some babies can do this. Some babies can fall asleep independently without escalating. And if that’s the case, then that actually can help you get to that regression point and really not have quite as much trouble. So, what does this mean? Usually I have parents start working on this at about eight weeks. That means, I often recommend for the first snap of the day that you can practice this and also you can practice this at bedtime. So that means that if it’s time for sleep, you go into your child’s sleeping space. Maybe they’re swaddled, maybe they have a pacifier and you do just a very brief nap routine, and you put them into their sleeping space awake. This may mean that you stay in the room with your child. This may mean that you leave if you feel like being in the room is too overstimulating, but you watch and see what your baby’s doing. What you’re checking for are signs that your child is working on soothing themselves. These are things like is your baby lifting their legs and dropping them down moaning and fussing? Are they tossing their head side to side and also doing what I refer to as shout outs where they’ll go “Blah!” And then they’re quiet again, and then they go “Blah!” Then they’re quiet again. And they sort of squeak and squawk. All of those are things that your child is actually doing as a means of soothing, which is great. And it’s hard to sort of recognize some of these behaviors in the beginning, which is why I described them. I will say that almost always when I described these soothing behaviors to families, they tell me, “Oh, my baby does that all the time. I thought he was trying to wake himself up.” Actually, your baby is working on soothing and these are great things for your baby to be practicing.
So if you put your child down awake and you watch for those soothing behaviors, you want to give it about 20 minutes to see what your child is capable of. If your baby, it was escalating in that time, then it’s fine to do whatever you need to do in order to help your child go to sleep. It may mean that your child just isn’t quite ready yet. And in many cases, some children are not ready before they get to that four to six month range. And that’s fine. That means that you’re going to try again in a couple of days, you can try again in a week. You don’t know when you will yet to the point where your baby is ready to be able to do this sort of soothing and regulation.
If you put your child down awake and in that 20 minutes, there are doing all of those soothing behaviors then you may actually be very surprised to see that they’re very capable of getting themselves to sleep, which is great. And so once you see that that is possible, then you want to practice it. And if you get to that 15 week mark and your baby is putting themselves to sleep at bedtime, what you might see is that sure there’s a little bit of disruption. They’re going to wake up a little bit more again, because that growth spurt is still going to happen so legitimately your child may be more hungry, but actually now they’re able to get themselves through those sleep cycles so much more easily because at bedtime, they went in awake. Your baby fell asleep on his or her own. And now, at those sleep cycles, they’re not waking up wondering, “Hey, where’s mommy again, to rock me, feed me, bounce me and do all of those things.”
Sleep training often happens after this regression ends
So, what do you, you do if you cannot put your child down awake and actually going down asleep works pretty well, especially in those early weeks. That may mean, as we’ve talked about that, you’re going to get to that four month regression point and things may feel like they go a little bit haywire. I always tell parents if you get to the other side of this at about 18 weeks and things are not getting better, then this may be the point in time where you want to start thinking about making some more significant changes in your child’s sleep.
Maybe this is where you start to put them down awake at bedtime. Maybe this is where you start to decide what sort of consistent response you want to have overnight. And you start to figure out how to handle feedings overnight.
I hope that this information has been helpful. I hope that you make it through that four monthly progression without too much trouble and we see you on the other side.
This has been Linda Szmulewitz with the Sleepy Qs podcast. Thanks for listening in!
