As a new parent, you’ve no doubt heard the term “sleep deprivation” from a friend, parent, or anyone else you’ve talked to about the journey you’re about to embark on. Most of these losses are due to illness or environmental changes, but a 4-month-old sleeper is a different animal. I’ll tell you what makes it different and how to get through it with less pain in today’s video.
– Hi, I’m Dana, welcome to this week’s video.
Sleep for Four Months. You know what I’m talking about. If you’ve been through it or it’s coming, I’ll give you some tips here today to help ease the frustration it can cause.
Now, four months of sleep is all I can guarantee. I actually, I don’t think there are nine months, the 18th month, I mean, I think that developmental changes happen in those months, but it shouldn’t affect sleep much, and if it does, it shouldn’t last more than a week.
But four months of sleep has a little science behind it. Between three and four months, a baby’s sleep patterns change dramatically.
In the newborn stage, newborn babies have only two parts inside. They’re either in deep sleep, which is the third stage, or they’re in REM sleep, which is rapid eye movement sleep, and that’s when a lot of things are happening in their little brains, and both are very important.
A lot of sleep restores, builds the immune system, REM sleep, good memory, and communication, neural connection, boosts energy, all very important, that’s why they do so much. But around the third to fourth month, it changes.
Now they are bringing the second and deeper stage with REM. So they’re going from two to four steps in their line, and that can, for some babies, be difficult.
You have to think when you are reorganizing the way you sleep, so that it doesn’t always go well, or there may be a little disagreement when you go through the process, that’s what I see happening, especially with babies who have strong sleep associations, and it can be, I breastfeed to sleep all the time, I’m bottle fed to sleep all the time, I sleep all the time. Now that they are going through the lighter stages of their cycle, they can notice that you are not shaking them anymore, you are not feeding them anymore, and this will wake them up, and they will be angry, because they don’t want to be awake, they want to sleep, but they don’t know how to do that.
So the good news is, if you’ve been working on the Sleep Sense Program with your little one, two months old, three months old, you should be able to get through this short period with ease. You might have a week or two of, “Oh, he’s not sleeping like he used to,” but it’s very mild, because he’s got talent.
If you have a child who is very dependent on getting enough sleep, you will see this weakness become more apparent, especially at night, and this is often when people start thinking, “Hm, is there something I should do to help the child sleep better?”
That’s when they tend to start reaching out and looking for resources, or finding a program, or hiring a sleep consultant, because things are going down so fast.
The bad news is that’s the way it is until your baby learns the art of sleep. It might get a little better as the initial transition is completed, but if he’s going through, light sleep, deep sleep, and going into REM, there are usually several times a night where he wakes up, realizes the prop isn’t there, and cries for the prop.
So if this sounds like you, I want to encourage you to take the Sleep Sense Program, which will help you do exactly what you need to do to teach your child independent sleep skills.
Thanks for watching, sleep well.
If your baby, toddler or child is having trouble sleeping through the night, help is just a click away! The Sleep Sense Program has helped more than 57,00 parents to get their children to sleep 11-12 hours overnight AND taking long naps, relaxing during the day. If you’re ready to get started today – I look forward to helping you!
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