EVERY 2 HOURS. ALL NIGHT LONG!!

I hear it all the time. Babies who wake after being asleep for 2 hours. All…night….long!
It is very common for this to happen after the dreaded ‘4 month regression’ that so many people hear about. I am referring to those babies who used to sleep for long stretches overnight and then suddenly start to wake every 2 hours. The purpose of this blog isn’t to discourage feeding or to force your baby to sleep ALL night, as babies, children and even us adults don’t sleep ALL night long. I simply want to share some information on the reasons WHY babies suddenly develop this ‘regression’ and how we can get around it.
Somewhere around 4 months…….
At this age your baby’s night time sleep cycles mature and shorten to just 2 hours in length. This is when you may hear your baby do a noisy re settle, or if something is really bothering them, or they need help to re settle back to sleep they will fully waken. EVERY 2 HOURS!!!!
Self settling

Once your baby’s sleep cycle matures, this is when sleep associations really can start to affect full awakenings. This means if your baby has learnt to go back to sleep when they reach the lighter stage of sleep by being actively settled, by an action or a prop ie, by being rocked or fed to sleep or by using a dummy (that they are unable to replace themselves) they then need this to help them settle back into another sleep cycle again.  It is the only way they know how to get back to sleep again. However, many babies this age can LEARN sleep cues to help them fall back to sleep without actively needing to be resettled; such as white noise, a dark room, a good daytime nap structure. When all the conditions are right and put into place, they can happily re settle themselves back into another sleep cycle day and night.
So….What can you do??
The first thing you can do to improve the 2 hour waking it to make sure your baby is having the correct daytime naps, awake times and structure in the day appropriate to their age.  These factors can cause an unsettle baby between the sleep cycles.
Find out what your baby is needing to settle back to sleep and to encourage your baby to self settle for their naps as well as at bedtime – then the night time wake ups will reduce shortly after.
 If you require further support my sleep packages are able to tackle this very situation using gentle strategies and I don’t use any harsh ‘crying it out’ methods. Helping you and your baby towards a good night sleep is only a phone call away and well within your reach.
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