Anyone who has sleep trained their baby knows there is a lot of talk about specific sleep regressions: at four months, six months, ten months, 12months and 18 months. What they don’t know is that these sleep regressions are entirely avoidable, but it involves changing your mind-set about sleep training. It’s not about baby learning to self-soothe with prolonged periods of crying-it-out, it’s about teaching your baby sleep habits and patterns that will stick with them for life. With that said, here are the key ingredients to avoid sleep regressions.
Start before your baby settles
Two things happen somewhere around the end of the fourth month that make it essential that you have completed your sleep-training process before then. The first is that babies undergo a process called settling. They settle into a routine that imprints itself and becomes a baseline pattern to which they will naturally gravitate. Additionally, baby’s brain is, of course, undergoing development, and this early sleep milestone sticks as a difficult-to-alter pattern after the fourth month.
By teaching baby to sleep before this settling occurs, you’ll lock a 12-hour sleeping pattern. While it’s certainly possible to be effective later, it will never be locked-in in the same way. Babies that don’t successfully reach full dusk-till-dawn sleeping before the end of the fourth month are more prone to infamous sleep regressions, whereas babies that successfully complete the sleep-training process before the end of the fourth month seem almost impervious to these relapses.
By completely dodging the pitfalls of future sleep regressions, you’ll experience greater flexibility throughout your child’s early years. You can change time zones or have grandma visit. Your baby can get sick or weather the arrival of a new molar. None of it will seem to disrupt the 12-hour sleep cycle as long as it was imprinted early.
Teach your baby good sleep habits
If you start sleep training early, baby will have learned good sleep and self-soothing habits before a different set of patterns settles in. Babies that still receive nighttime feeds at five, six, seven months will learn that when they wake at night, they must be fed in order to fall back to sleep. Because your baby will still be quite young when he or she no longer needs these mid-night feeds, you won’t ever need to teach him this (typically in the form of ‘cry-it-out’). Instead, your baby will naturally learn to put himself back to sleep as long as his other nighttime associations are present.
You should be disciplined
To implement effective sleep training, you have to be incredibly disciplined during the first four months, much more disciplined than your friends who aren’t going to start sleep training until later. But your vigilance to do sleep training early and fully means that you’ve bought yourself a lot of flexibility for the next few years. It’s an investment that pays back many times over.
The key piece of guidance is to not ascribe a change in your baby’s sleep behavior as an unavoidable regression. If you stay relatively consistent, your baby should be sleeping from dusk till dawn right through his infant, toddler, and pre-school years. And while that sleep schedule is fairly resilient, you should treat it carefully and consistently if you want it to continue.
Jason Freedman and Stacy Karol
Jason Freedman and Stacy Karol are co-authors of The Dream Feed Method. A book that details a plan for parents to get their child sleeping from dusk ‘til dawn within the first four months of baby’s life. The Dream Feed Method will help parents teach their children to sleep with no tears, no talk of self-soothing and no struggles.
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