4 month sleep regression - is it real?

[Maisie2019]

I am a first time mum to a 12 week old little boy. We have just started to see longer stretches of sleep at night, our best night yet has been 10-5 with no wake ups! This doesn’t happen every night and I don’t expect it to, usually he goes 7-10, 10-3 and 3-6.30. He has essentially slept longer and longer since he was a tiny newborn. I’m pretty happy with this but then someone at work has made me fret about the 4 month regression and how awful it is. Although he did say his son is still in it at 14 months which makes me think he must just be a bad sleeper in general as surely that’s not possible!! However a lot of other mums I have spoken to have said they never really noticed a regression and don’t think it’s really a thing. So I’m just wondering has anyone NOT experienced it? If I search the threads it fills me with dread of bad reports but I’m hoping that people that haven’t experienced it just haven’t posted!

We haven't experienced it with either of our children.

Never experienced it with my 3. Never even heard of it until 2016, when I had dc2/3. Dc1 was born in late 90s and it wasn't a thing.

I had never heard of it outside of MN. But my DC were born in the days when we weaned early. Both were formula fed and slept through the night from about 8 weeks, and started small tastes of solids at the same time. There was never any “cluster feeding” or “regression”. If they woke at night they popped their own dummy back in and sucked themselves to sleep!

My friends lo never had a regression and slept 13 hours a night. In comparison my lo slept poorly at every single regression. I think it's luck of the draw

I have twin boys and we didn't have it- though at 10 months we did! Though not sure I'd call it a regression, probably more to do with teething.

I was out for dinner with NCT friends last night, there were 7 of us and all our babies are around 5/6 months old. I think 5 of those babies (mine included) experienced a sleep regression at 4 months, to varying degrees, but we are pretty much all through it now 🤞🏻.

It is definitely a thing as it’s triggered by the physiological maturation of the baby’s sleep cycles, as far as I know the extent of it depends on whether your baby is ready to learn to go to sleep without assistance from you so they can settle themselves between sleep cycles.

I didn't have it with either of mine, but my eldest had a truly awful 9m one! My youngest has never had one, ever. Brilliant sleeper. My mother in law told me DH had a bad one at 9m and he's still in it at 47.....

Different babies vary as much as different adults. You could easily escape it.

Ours has been awful to be honest. He was consistently sleeping 7-9 hours without waking until he suddenly one night just didn’t. Waking every 2-2.5 hours, some nights even more than that. It’s been 7 weeks now and he’s still not fully over it.

Self-settling has nothing to do with it, linking sleep cycles is a completely separate thing to self-settling. When you connect sleep cycles you don’t wake up fully between them and self-settling is only relevant if you do wake fully. Going to sleep without support is however not really developmentally appropriate until much much later, at least forcing it isn’t but some babies do it on their own because they’re just ready to do it. Babies can sleep through without being able to go to sleep without support.

Mum to an almost 7 month old here and no we didn’t have a regression as such. She did go through a phase at around 12-16 weeks of needing rocked to sleep for ages before she would sleep, both for naps and night sleep, but once she was asleep always did decent stretches of sleep. Then one day she just stopped the needing rocked too. So unless that was some sort of regression but it’s not really what I’ve seen others on here describe.

Mine slept through reliably from three and months forevermore.

It totally varies from child to child, what mine did will have no bearing on what yours will do.. but anecdotally from my circle of friends with babies we all had a similar ish experience of our babies doing decent stretches of sleep like you describe then things taking a bit of a downturn before improving again. Things like teething and learning to sit/crawl happen and these impact sleep. Sleep isn't a linear progression where they just get better and better, there's ups and downs. Don't fret and just enjoy the stretches you're getting now!

All depends on the child. I had one that slept great for the first 6 months, then didn't. The other one NEVER slept from the word go. Amazed I survived it. No point in worrying about something that may or may not happen.

He slept an 8 hour stretch at about 12 weeks then didn’t do it again until about 16 months. 8-10 months sleep was harder than 4 months though, which seems to be quite common. He was just learning so much.

The language of regression is unhelpful, they’re not going backwards their sleep is disturbed because they’re developing rapidly. Sleep for most babies is very up and down in the first 12-18 months, it’s not a continual line from bad > good and your best hope is not to expect that, you have to ride the wave and the development and the growth spurts and the learning new skills and the teething, they all impact sleep. But every baby is different. Some sleep through early and don’t change, some don’t sleep through for 2 years, others are up and down and they’re all on a continuum.

sarahockwell-smith.com/2017/07/24/the-rollercoaster-of-real-baby-sleep/

Jumping on here. I am exhausted. DS has been going through what I think is a regression for nearly 5weeks now (and add covid in the mix which he slept on me for 2 nights probably didn’t help). He’s now 5 months. I’m desperate for sleep. DH is in a different room as due to his job he really can’t afford disturbed sleep (coupled with some MH issues) so I do it all. Does this end? How long did it last for your little ones? Being a mum is so much harder than I thought, the nights are so lonely and I have so much going on in my mind, I was/am desperate for a big family but struggling to do these nights with just 1 :(. The battle between do I pick him and cuddle him to help him to sleep or do I dangle over the cot holding his dummy in for another half hour until he gets really stressed and screams and I have to pick him up anyway. Every night is different. Sometimes it’s every 15 mins, sometimes every hour. I’ve been awake now since 1:30. Sorry for the rant- nobody to talk to without them making me feel worse so looking for a mama who knows the feeling or has lived to tell the tale…

Quick question, reintroducing a bottle is a mistake, isn’t it? Read online sleep regression is not a hunger issue but I do wonder if he’s also hungry in the night x

Similar to the pp, my LO is nearly 6 months. At 3 months she started sleeping through the night and carried on doing so at 4 months....4 weeks ago she stopped doing so. Now we’ve have been abroad (long haul) in that time, and she had a really bad cold before that, but we’ve been settled back at home for 2 weeks now. She wakes every 1-4 hours and can’t get back to sleep without dummy replacement/hand holding/picking up/feeding. She’s definitely been going through a developmental leap as well, but things don’t really seem to be improving and I’m worried this is just her now!

My first reached her own of sleep, in the first 2 years, at 3 months. Then it went downhill again. The thing is, it's not so much a temporary regression, as a permanent change in how they sleep. What the worst bit is only a few weeks/month or two, what they settle in to sometimes bears little resemblance to the sleep they had before the regression. We'd get 11-6, and then back to sleep until 8/9.

Baby and toddler sleep isn't a linear thing, it goes up and down - and the newborn bit isn't always the low point. It's hard, but yet to appreciate the good spells and endure the bad ones knowing they won't last forever.