The 4-Month Sleep Regression

What is it and why isn’t my baby sleeping anymore?!

Congratulations!

You’ve brought home your new bundle of joy and you’re in the ‘honeymoon phase’. Your baby is peacefully sleeping in their swaddle, and sleeping hours at a time, only waking up to feed every 2-4 hours. In a perfect world, they are happy, and you are happy.

As your baby begins to grow and develop, sleep cycles lengthen, you are getting longer stretches overnight, naps are great, and life is good.

As the weeks fly by and you get closer and closer to the 16 week mark, you begin to notice that your seemingly dream baby who napped beautifully until now, is only napping for 30-45 minutes at a time! What is going on?

Firstly, let me emphasize, that this is completely normal and biologically correct, so have no fear. At this stage, night sleep cycles start reverting back to lasting 2-4 hours just like they did as a newborn, hence why it is referred to as a ‘regression’. However, ‘regression’ is misleading because that is assuming that this is temporary and things will just go back to the way things were if you wait long enough. The better word for this biological leap is a progression. Your baby’s sleep is progressing and changing, and this isn’t going to just go away on its own.

Your baby is shifting away from a newborn sleep pattern causing sleep to fall apart. At the 4-6 months mark (although it can start as early as 3-months), your baby is experiencing cognitive, physical, and emotional development that can disrupt their normal sleep pattern, like rolling over and discovering the world around them. Parents often confuse this shift as teething pain or thinking that their baby needs to start solids to fix it.

So what now?!

If your baby has been completely assisted to sleep (which there is absolutely nothing wrong with at all!), they are 10x more likely to experience this regression. This is an excellent time to begin working on the skills of self-settling and self-soothing so that your baby can learn to resettle on their own and link their sleep cycles for naps and overnight! It is also important to un-swaddle at this time and move your baby over to an arms-free sleep sac if you haven’t already, as rolling from back to front while swaddled is a major safety risk for suffocation.

But my baby still feeds overnight! How do I know when they are hungry or if they are needing help getting back to sleep?

At 4-months old, your baby is still growing and definitely still needs to be fed overnight. The important thing here is to get your baby on a feeding schedule during the day of every 3-3.5 hours so that it avoids them from snacking but also gets optimal calories in during the day. Overnight, you can begin to stretch your baby’s feeds to every 4-hours, and then work on resettling for all wakes in between or before the 4-hour mark. This is of course assuming that your baby is otherwise healthy, growing, and steadily gaining weight.

So how do I fix this?

There are lots of gentle ways to sleep train your baby during the 4-month regression. It all depends on your baby’s temperament and your comfort level.

As always, if you are looking for 1-on-1 support through your sleep training journey, contact us for more information to see if we are the right fit for you!