4 month sleep regression: Will it resolve itself?

[Lbro888]

Hi all,

DS is 20 weeks old and we've been dealing with the 4 month sleep regression for about 5 weeks now.

He generally goes down for the night around 7-8pm and is up for the day around 7am, feeding once. Generally he does a longer stretch at the start of the night but then he wakes every hour from midnight onwards. Sometimes it's every hour for the entire night. Fortunately he doesn't require too much settling but it's getting really exhausting waking up so much.

We've been working on getting naps right and have made a bit of progress there this week. He gets around 3-4 hours in total but it's rare for them to be over 50 minutes each.

My question is: Do we need to be doing anything to get us out of this or will he just get there by himself? At the moment to get him to sleep we use white noise (which stays on all night), a dummy and we walk him for a few minutes with a lullaby. We put him down and if he cries or it's obvious he won't go to sleep we keep repeating until he's asleep. Occasionally we'll put him down in his crib drowsy but awake and he'll go off (with dummy) but often he's already asleep. Are these sleep associations we should be removing?

Thanks!

We found that it didn't resolve itself, and after four months of waking every hour had to resort to sleep training - I wasn't keen but our GP pointed out that prolonged sleep deprivation was worse for all than a few nights of CC. My DD was fed to sleep though, which is a notoriously difficult sleep association to break.

Not being able to resettle daytime naps past one sleep cycle (giving you short naps) and waking every hour or two at night are caused by one and the same thing - settling method.

The fact baby isn't going to sleep where he stays asleep (ie in the cot) is the root cause of both these. So the regression will go on as long as it takes you to find a way to help baby resettle without moving from where they are asleep.

As to how you go about teaching that - there are dozens of different approaches depending on your parenting style. But all aim for the same outcome - to teach baby to go from awake to asleep where they stay asleep.

Sensible advice from the previous posters. In my experience it didn't just go away, we had to sleep train but used the disappearing chair method and got a sleep consultant. I agree that prolonged sleep deprivation is torture for baby and parents!

I'm afraid it didn't resolve itself in our case. My kid slept through the night - waking only once or rarely twice before her initial sleep regression. At 5.5 months she started waking up every hour. sometimes every 40 minutes. I was miserable and at 8 months I moved her to formula. so that I can drop her association to sleep at the breast. IT helped but since she still needs comfort she still wakes every 3-4 hours all night and she's 12 months now no change.
The stage you are at, I suggest waiting out a couple of weeks so her phase can pass, then sleep train her right away. This is a great time since she isn't old enough to dodge and fight training relentlessly as older kids do. I've tried twice and given up because my kid can reeeallly put up a fight. So, I tell everyone to sleep train early if you want less tears on both sides.

The next sleep regression (8,9, or 10 month) usually isn't permanant but unless you train her now this regression WILL be permanant.

That's all really helpful (and what I suspected!) Thanks everyone. I'm going to focus on getting him down drowsy but awake for his naps and bedtime initially and hope that helps...

Unfortunately for us it didn't resolve itself. We did some gentle sleep training at 11 months. Before that he was terrible, waking every 45 minutes at his worst. Getting him to fall asleep by himself and not need rocking/feeding to sleep was key.