Many parents experience a regression in their baby’s sleeping habits at around four to five months. After they have emerged from the fog of the fourth trimester their baby’s physiology develops enough for them to begin to know the difference between night and day meaning that more and more sleep is taken at night. Around the three month mark babies may be beginning to settle into some kind of predictable pattern in their feeding and sleep, both day and night. By three months babies may even be sleeping in stretches of four hours at night.
Life begins to regain a small sense of normality, albeit a new one and many parents begin to gain in confidence after the fourth trimester is complete. Parents begin to look forward to their days being calmer and nights becoming easier as their baby gets older. It comes as a harsh shock then when their baby begins to wake as often as they did as a newborn. To add to this any colic experienced in the first few months has possibly begun to fade, which makes it seem so cruel when the short weeks of having a happy baby give way to having a cranky baby who is hard to settle and grouchy and bored in the daytime.
To add insult to injury by the time your baby reaches four months of age the support network you had around you in the early weeks has often begun to dissipate. The emails, phone calls and visits asking how you are, bringing you chocolate and meals are increasingly rare. Discharged from the midwive’s support and now in the hands of the local health visiting clinic things are very different than they were at the beginning. It’s no wonder parents question what they did wrong, did they allow their baby to be too reliant on them? Should they have listened to those who told them not to spoil the baby with too many hugs? Is it all their fault? The answer is definitely no to all and many more questions asked. This is a normal developmental stage that will pass.
Developmentally much happens between four and five months of age. Babies are so much more alert and aware of their surroundings, yet their bodies are not capable of movements that they would probably so like. Can you imagine how difficult it must be to be four or five months old and to deal with that frustration on a daily basis?
As a baby approaches four and five months they become stronger, especially their core strength. They begin to develop a grasping ability, though this is still immature and often they get frustrated that they cannot pick up a certain object or move it where they would like, more frustrating is the knowledge that they cannot purposefully let go of the object. The baby’s senses heighten at this age as their sensory processing matures. One of the most sensory areas of a baby’s body is their mouth – which is why they put everything they can in their mouth. This is often mistaken as teething or a need to introduce solids, but it is likely due to neither.
As well as strength and sensory processing, four to five month old babies become much more aware of their surroundings, their vision improves and they begin to recognise familiar – and non familiar objects and people. This is also the stage that babies may begin to babble or make purposeful noises.
With all of this rapid development imagine how exhausting and confusing this period must be for a baby. It would be like everything in your world changing all at once, almost with no warning. It makes sense therefore to keep everything else in your baby’s life as constant as possible, so as not to introduce any more change into their life. Many parents are tempted to wean onto solids, move the baby into their cot or room or even sleep train at this stage, however all of these introduce even more change and are therefore quite likely to make things worse and not better. It may feel as if this stage will last forever, that your baby will never sleep again, but it will pass and relatively quickly. It may be a month or two until your baby’s sleep naturally improves and they become easier in the daytime, so the key is to look after yourself in the interim. Making sure you sleep when you can, accepting and asking for help and taking any opportunity to relax will help you to cope with this normal developmental phase, that will pass.
The Baby Sleep Expert 