4 Month Sleep Regression

[babieadopters]

Hi everyone

I'm sure this has been covered several times before but I don't seem to be able to find appropriate advice (which probably means there isn't any one answer).

Our little girl is now 4 months old which we are aware brings with it a regression in sleeping.

What I'm wondering is, if we are dealing with it correctly and/or any tips people may have.

She gets a bedtime routine of bath, massage, feed and going down into her cot which lasts from about 6-7pm. She used to go down really easily and sleep through till a feed at 11 (sometimes stirring but managing to settle herself) feed at 3 if needed, sometimes she would sleep through that and then awaken at 7. We are now faced with her waking and not settling herself every hour, sometimes every 20mins. She is really flailing her arms and legs about which means she wakes herself up. We end up giving her a dummy which is not ideal as when it falls out she wakes up and cries. This is the process throughout the night. Pretty exhausting!!

I'm not sure if we should be doing the dummy thing or not as it might be setting up something that we can't get out of (especially as we were so good at not using it before this point).

Oh, and she is teething just to add that joy into the mix.

Look forward to your pearls of wisdom. Thank you. xxx

Up to 3-4 months is the really easy phase for baby sleep. You cannot compare it to now, baby won't ever go back to the passively sleeping newborn phase. This is the new way of things.

Dummies are ace for independant sleeping. They are also recommended to lower SIDS risk and should be used regularly, not as a last resort. Embrace the dummy fully for it to have any benefit.

You need to understand a few things though:

Dummy is only an aid for going to sleep. Light sleeping and waking frequently is a seperate issue.

When baby goes into a deep sleep, jaw muscles relax and the dummy comes out. It's meant to. Some children who struggle to get into a deep sleep may relax enough to let their muscles relax, but not quite fully asleep yet, then dummy falls and they wake up having not got into a deep sleep. Such babies would benefit from havobg their dummy gentle held on for then, until in a deep sleep.

You'll have deep sleeping dummy users who suck dummy for 10m to get to sleep, it drops out, they wake up 11 hours later when needing a feed.

You will also have light sleeping dummy users who need to suck dummy for 30 minutes to get in a deep sleep, it falls out several times in the process of going to sleep and rewakes them up. Then finally in a deep sleep so dummy comes out, then 10 minutes later they are woken by something and the process starts again.

Any everything in between those two extremes. Dummy use is unrelated to light sleeping. Dummies are AMAZING for getting baby to sleep.

Dummies are not some Magic Answer to make sleep easy peasy though. They still require some active parental input though to develop healthy sleeping habits. "Plug dummy and walk away" rarely works until closer to 12 months old.