Welcome to sleep in the fourth trimester
Reviewed by Dr. Laurie Jones
Welcome to your fourth trimester. Whether it’s your first or fifth time around the newborn-parenting block, you’ve likely heard some wild things about sleep. The common narratives go something like this: It’s terrible! You’ll never sleep again! You’ll be up all night! Your baby will wake up every hour! Did I mention you’ll never sleep again?!
No one needs this kind of negativity, right?
There’s a whole lot of anxiety and confusion surrounding infant sleep—and parent sleep—during the first year of a baby’s life. While your baby’s sleep may feel unpredictable, yours may feel elusive (or at least frequently interrupted). Between four and eight weeks postpartum, moms wake up an average of three times per night, for 49 minutes each time, according to a recent study1.
During these early days, you may feel overwhelmed. Trying to run a household while tending to your infant’s ever-changing needs (not to mention your own!) can be incredibly challenging. With your established habits thoroughly disrupted, you may feel like nothing is within your control. Adequate sleep is a crucial need, especially if you are planning to return to work.
Sleep loss can hit you hard. It can make you feel frantic—like you have to control your baby’s sleep in order to soothe your exhausted self. This natural response is very common but not very helpful.
Dr. Laurie Jones
Pediatrics, Breastfeeding MedicineThis guide is designed to help you learn about ways to support yourself—and seek support from others—during the first three months of your baby’s life. You may learn some things about sleep that surprise you, or run counter to what friends or social-media posts have told you, about newborn or postpartum sleep. Don’t worry; some of this information or advice may actually feel liberating! (Hint: You probably don’t have to change your baby’s diaper at every wake-up or burp after every feeding.)
The first few months are very likely going to be more challenging than you imagined. But as your baby adjusts to life outside the womb and grows, you’ll make your own adjustments and grow as a parent. You will undoubtedly make many sleep adjustments along the way.
Take comfort in knowing that your current sleep challenges will likely change soon. There’s only so much you can know in any given moment, but you likely know more than you think you do. It sounds like a paradox, but trust your instincts.
As you are hit with the initial round of sleep deprivation, you may feel a bit betrayed, wondering, “Why didn’t anyone warn me about this?” This is normal, especially if your friends and family are wary of freaking you out. (They also know that every baby is different, particularly regarding sleep.) That said, you can pregame the sleep challenge a little bit by setting up supports and being prepared to make adjustments. Your inner circle will be there for you, once you’re in the thick of it.
There’s a lot to cover, but let’s acknowledge the proverbial elephant in the room here: your decision regarding if or when you are going to return to work. Planning to return to the office, in person or virtually, may increase your desire to get a handle on your sleep. And without a doubt, this desire can get intense.
You can immediately train your infant to sleep through the night.
You don’t have to suffer through this sleep-deprived period. There are strategies you can develop without much effort to help you cope with loss of sleep. Let’s start by talking about what we’re not covering—and acknowledge that some of what you encounter here will undoubtedly run counter to trendy parenting advice.
This is a drama- and marketing-free zone around sleep and parenting. You won’t stumble upon any pushes for specific baby products or brands. You also won’t hear preaching about baby sleep schedules.
As Dr. Jones points out (and your own experience may suggest), it’s not easy to get a baby from 0 to 3 months on a sleep schedule, as their needs are varied and unpredictable. Babies will do baby things, and adults can’t control them.
The best you can do at this early stage is respond to your newborn’s needs and cues with care and self-assuredness (even when feeling utterly unconfident) while helping build sleep associations. As your baby develops (and experiences growth spurts that disrupt sleep), you’ll learn ways to cope with sleep deprivation.
You can read this guide with confidence that it does not blindly endorse any trends or practices. (This includes co-sleeping.) Instead, it serves up some serious myth busts to help you develop a flexible plan, gain confidence, and sort through the unsolicited advice you’re getting at every turn (social media, family, friends, random strangers). We’re covering daytime and nighttime strategies for all aspects of sleep, including how to set up safe sleeping spaces at home and on the go, how nutrition and breastfeeding factor into sleep, and how to have tricky conversations with your partner about managing the domestic workload (moms often bear the brunt of this) so you can get more shut-eye.
Our guidance prioritizes science-backed, mom-tested, actionable advice. It’s about meeting you where you are: tired, frazzled, overwhelmed, overjoyed—and, most of all, in need of the straight scoop on you and your baby’s sleep. The expert-vetted information is designed to help inform and empower you to make the best decisions possible for you and your baby—and ultimately to remind you that your child has many development phases ahead.
Although some days and nights will feel like an eternity, this phase won’t last forever.
“The key is not to catastrophize what is happening with sleep from 0 to 3 months,” Dr. Jones advises. At 4 months, she says, you typically begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel. So hang in there. It gets easier!
References
1 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25431167/
Additional resources
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