Do babies have a four month sleep regression?

Baby sleep needs shrink throughout the first year of life. For example, the amount of sleep babies need often decreases at around four months old. That's why excessive night waking quite often becomes a problem at this time.

You might hear people refer to this as the "four month sleep regression", although I don't use that phrase. It's not really a regression!

It's just that if we are expecting our baby to spend the same amounts of time sleeping after four months as she did in the first few months, we can find that after a few weeks she starts to wake excessively. This is when it's time to do a circadian reset.

To prevent excessive night waking at four months of age (or at any age, actually), you can work in a relaxed way with your baby's two biological sleep regulators, the body clock and the sleep pressure, day by day and week by week. This might mean spending much of the days outside the house, to meet your baby's sensory motor needs, which also incidentally helps meet your social and exercise needs. We want to make the days with baby as relaxed and as enjoyable as possible, for the sake of your night-time sleep!

If your baby's days are full of rich sensory motor nourishment, then your baby won't be in a sleep situation for longer than she needs to be. This protects your night-time sleep. Although it is quite normal for your little one to wake every couple of hours at night even into toddlerhood, keeping her sleep regulators healthy will help avoid excessive night waking, which can be quite awful for families.