The Four Month Sleep Regression
As a professional sleep consultant, I hear the term “regression” used in regards to just about every imaginable circumstance.
Essentially, if your baby doesn’t sleep well for a couple of nights, parents start dropping the ‘R’ word.
Some people subscribe to the idea that there’s an eight month regression, a 9 month regression, a 1 year regression, as well as teething regressions, growth spurt regressions, and so on.
Tips For Extending Your Baby’s Nap Time
Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar…
Your baby wakes up in the morning after a solid night’s sleep. You feed her, change her, play with her for a little bit, take her for a little walk outside, then rock her to sleep and put her gently into her crib for her morning nap.
And then, 30 minutes later, she wakes up fussy and irritable and, despite your pleading, bargaining, and offers of riches, refuses to go back to sleep.
How To Juggle Bedtime Routines
Bringing a new baby into the house is a glorious, exciting, terrifying occasion, especially when you have one or two already, and it can bring up a whole lot of questions.
Trying to juggle two or three different bedtime routines can be mind-boggling if you’re not prepared for it. Read more
Helping Overcome Children’s Fear of the Dark
It’s 2:00 AM, you’re sleeping peacefully in your bed, and you suddenly wake up, not entirely sure why, but as you start to gain awareness of your surroundings, you become aware, to your horror, that there’s someone in the room with you! You hear the sound of their voice, and they whisper those four words that chill every parent to the bone.
Baby and Toddler Sleep Pattern
It’s spring again, which means the clocks go forward an hour. In some ways that’s lovely, because it means summer is on the way and the nights will get lighter. But if you have a child who you’ve just got into a good bedtime routine, you might find that the changing of the clocks affects their sleep. Bear in mind that your baby or toddler doesn’t actually know the time – they use their own inner clock – use that to your advantage. The secret is to be prepared, and with just a little bit of effort, you’ll find their sleep routine gets back to normal really quickly. Here are some tips to help you prepare your little one for time changes.
Adjust daytime naps to compensate
You’ll probably find that after the clocks change your little one will be tired before their “usual” bedtime – for example, if it’s 7pm they will be tired at 6pm once the clocks go forward. Try waking them a little later, moving their daytime naps forward or letting them sleep longer during the daytime – this will help regulate their body clock and assist them with moving their natural bedtime an hour later.
Move bedtime earlier
Perhaps the easiest way to get your little one used to the time change is to move bedtime earlier by a few minutes every day. Start about a week before the clocks change and move bedtime earlier by just 5 minutes every day. They will not notice this small difference and within a week of the clocks changing bedtime will be back at its proper time.
Stick to the original time.
If your little one normally wakes up too early then you might be able to use the clocks changing to your benefit. Leave bedtime at its usual time – so an hour later by the clock – and with any luck, they will sleep an hour later in the morning, at least by the clock. So if little one normally goes to bed at seven and wakes at six, put them to bed at 8 (new time) and they will hopefully wake at 7 (new time), giving you a psychological lie in!
Finally, another tip is to fit blackout blinds. Lighter evenings can make it harder for a child to sleep, whatever time you put them to bed, using blinds keeps the daylight out and helps your little one realise it is time for sleep.
How have you handled the time change previously? What do you do when you travel to another time zone with your little one? I love to hear from you, the information you share will benefit other parents.
Toddlers are fascinating creatures, aren’t they? Watching them develop into thinking, creative little people is such a fascinating time, and one that parents often wish would last a little longer.
Of course, they usually wish that after baby’s grown out of the toddler stage, because along with that creativity and new-found intelligence, we usually see a lot of boundary-testing, which can be a frustrating experience.
One of the central rules of sleep training is that you should allow your little one to develop their abilities to fall asleep on their own. So it can cause a real “Should I or shouldn’t I” moment when you look at the baby monitor and see that your child has pushed themselves into an uncomfortable looking ball against the side of their cot.
If there’s anything that can send your child’s sleep off the rails, if there’s an arch-enemy for sleep training, it is, without a doubt, the dreaded condition of overtiredness.
Kids, as with all people, have a natural rhythm when it comes to sleep. Our bodies secrete hormones to keep us up and running during the day, and different ones to help us rest at night. They’re dependant on a variety of factors, but timing is the most prevalent.
So what happens when your little one stays awake past the time when these natural cues to sleep are activated? Well, the body assumes there’s a reason that it hasn’t been allowed to get to sleep, assumes there’s a need to stay awake, and fires up those daytime hormones again.
One of the most aggravating situations I see parents running into when they’re sleep training is the sudden onset of a minor illness when they’re finally seeing some progress.
After months of sleep issues, they finally decide to take the initiative and get serious about getting their baby onto a schedule, baby starts getting the hang of it, the whole family is starting to see longer periods of consolidated sleep, and everyone’s getting ready to break out the champagne…
And then BAM! Baby gets a cold, or an ear infection, or a bout of diarrhoea, or one of the other seven thousand illnesses that babies are prone to, and the whole thing goes off the rails.
It’s taken you a few weeks to get your baby into a good schedule and sleeping well. Now that you’ve put in the time, effort, and energy to make this big change in your family’s life, that trip you have planned for next month is starting to stress you out! If you’re like most parents, your biggest fear is that a trip is going to derail all the progress you and your baby have made and cause you to start this process all over again. Sometimes the mere thought of it frightens parents so much that they cancel all summer trips and just vow to stay home until the child leaves for college. That is how important your baby’s new sleeping regime has become to everyone.
The good news is that you do not have to cancel all travel plans this summer and confine yourself to the house for the rest of your child’s life. It is possible to have children who travel really well, if you keep a few things in mind:
The biggest mistake parents make is that they over-schedule themselves. They try to pack in all the fun and adventure they might normally have had back in their “child-free” days, forgetting an important fact: They have a child now.
An occasional car nap or slightly later bedtime probably isn’t going to do too much harm, but if your baby spends a couple of days taking car seat naps here and there and having late bedtimes, she may become so overtired that by the time bedtime rolls around on day two, she has a complete meltdown and seems to “forget” all her sleep skills and just cries the house down.
You may start to give into this pressure and bend your expectations for your baby’s sleep. It’s easy to see how you could revert back to your own familiar ways in no time if you gave into this pressure and fear.
It’s very normal for babies and toddlers to test the boundaries around sleep when they are somewhere new. Just because the rule is the rule at home, that does not necessarily mean the rule is the same at Grandma’s house. This may mean that your baby cries for some time at bedtime or has a night waking or two. The best way to handle it is to not do too much different than you would if the regression happened at home. You can go in every five minutes or so to offer a bit of reassurance, but other than that, don’t bend your rules. If you hang on tight to your consistency, within the first night or two, your child will be used to the new environment and will be sleeping well again.
Make sure you bring your child’s sleeping toy and/or blanket!
Another big mistake parents make is to bed share with their baby or toddler while traveling. Bed sharing is a big no-no! Even it’s it is only for a few nights, if your baby decides this is her new preferred location, you could find yourself starting all over again when you get home. Most hotels have a cot you can use or rent or take your pack and play along and use that as a cot.
If your child is eight months or older, my advice is to try to make some sort of a private space for your baby to sleep. This could be the bathroom (if it’s big enough) or the closet. Anywhere that you can build some sort of a partition between you and your baby, so that if she has a wake up in the middle of the night she is not so excited to see her two favourite people that she ends up wide awake thinking it’s play time! Of course, getting an extra bedroom for your child is great if that’s an option for you.
Certified Sleep Consultant in tunbridge wells, maidstone, west malling, kings hill, tunbridge wells, London, uk.