A sleep consultant's guide to gently settling your baby to sleep

Your baby is likely to be engaging with the world a lot more and hopefully the cluster feeding and 2-3 hourly feeds have settled down.

I am sure you have heard about the dreaded ‘3/4 month sleep regression’, please know that this is actually a progression in your babies development - which is a good thing! With progression and development, comes unsettled behaviour and sleep though.

The thing with this particular developmental leap, it is a permanent change in sleep. Your baby now has mature sleep cycles, which means they fully wake between sleep cycles and if they are reliant on you to initially settle off to sleep, then they will be relying on you to resettle between sleep cycles.

This means you'll start to notice 45 minute naps throughout the day (if you haven’t already) and your baby needing to be re-settled every 1.5 to 2 hours throughout the night. Don't mistake this frequent night wakings for constant hunger, it's unlikely your baby needs to be feeding 2 to 3 hourly at this age. They are simply looking for a way to resettle back to sleep.

Now, feeding back to sleep is not a ‘bad’ habit, so I don’t want you to think it is. Feeding to sleep and feeding back to sleep, can work really well for some babies.

So if you're happy to feed your baby to sleep like this, then please continue doing so. However, if you're finding it’s not working all that well, then it's a good age to start implementing a different way of settling and resettling your baby for sleep. There are many hands on and gentle ways to do this!

Setting up a strong sleep foundation

Now is a great time to start setting up a strong foundation and relationship between your baby and their sleep. It’s a good idea to ensure their sleeping environment is going to optimise and encourage quality sleep. Implementing a gentle age-appropriate routine/rhythm to their day is going to reduce the chance of your baby becoming overtired and stressed - overtired and stresses babies can struggle with settling to sleep, staying asleep and can even struggle with feeding, so we want to avoid this.

Sleep associations

Sleep associations are what your baby associates with falling to sleep and resettling back to sleep between sleep cycles. You might hear a lot of talk about negative and positive sleep associations and much like feeding to sleep, there's no such thing as a bad association – it's about what works best for your family.

Sleep associations can look like –

• Rocking/feeding to sleep
• The dummy
• Patting to sleep
• White noise
• A swaddle or sleeping bag
• A dark room

It’s ok to use all of these associations, some of them or even none of them. Again, do what works best for your family.

Further support

If you need support, don’t go it alone. There are a range of support services to help new parents. For support on sleep, health, behavior and parenting you can call the Parent helpline (Child and Family Health Service) on 1300 364 100 to speak to a qualified nurse, social worker or community health worker or the Pregnancy, birth and baby helpline on 1800 882 436 to speak to a maternal child nurse.