Developmental Milestones + Sleep

As a mother myself, as well as a sleep consultant who meets with the parents of babies and toddlers, I’ve reached the conclusion that babies are complicated creatures. 

Matthew McConaughey said it best about newborns: “They eat, they crap, they sleep, and if they’re crying they need to do one of the three and they’re having trouble doing it. Real simple.” A baby’s vital needs essentially break down into eating, sleeping, and pooping, and their only real form of communicating an issue with any of those things is through crying.

But as any parent knows, “solving” a problem is much more difficult than identifying one. Now, if you’re the parent of a baby who’s learning to crawl, or who’s teething, or just figured out how to roll over, you’ve probably realized that yes, developmental milestones are likely to cause disruptions in a baby’s sleep. 

In a 2015 study researchers looked at the sleep patterns of  babies before they started crawling, while they were learning to crawl, and a few months after learning to crawl. The results stated that, “Along with the overall improvement in sleep consolidation, periods of increased long wake episodes were also manifested; the rise in sleep disruption was temporally linked to crawling onset. The results of the study highlight the dynamic interrelations between domains of development, indicate that emerging motor skills may involve periods of disrupted sleep, and point to the moderating effect of age.” 

Basically, babies appear to have more nighttime wake-ups around the time that they learn to crawl. (Nighttime wake-ups were monitored by a motion sensor on baby’s ankle and counted only if baby was moving around for more than five minutes.) 

To quote that same study, “In dynamic systems, downward trends in performance and in behavioral control often mark the emergence of new abilities. This pattern has been identified in diverse domains of infant development including manual reaching, vocal production, and language acquisition.” 

Simply stated, things tend to get worse before they get better, and when your little one starts learning to talk, you can expect some random babbling sessions in the middle of the night.

Teething is another suspect that gets blamed for disrupting baby’s sleep and it seems like common sense. If their gums are sore, discomfort will make it a little harder to fall asleep and stay asleep. But do we really know that’s for sure? 

A study from the April 2000 issue of Pediatrics looked at symptoms that could and could not be attributed to emerging teeth. It found that during the 4 days before a tooth emerged, the day it popped out, and for the three days following, there was an increase in wakefulness and irritability. 

The discomfort that comes along with teething explains why it would be disruptive to your child’s sleep, but let’s take a look at language and movement skills and why these might also be responsible for some more frequent nighttime wake-ups. 

Just like the rest of us, babies get excited when they start to learn something new. To your baby, learning to roll over, learning to crawl, or learning to talk is truly amazing! They get a real thrill out of this newfound ability and they are going to practice it over and over. In the morning, in the afternoon, and when they wake up in the middle of the night, and that excitement is going to make it a little more difficult for them to get back to sleep. 

The reason I wanted to dive into this is because I see a lot of parents looking for a “solution” when these hiccups occur. But while they are trying to get their baby’s sleep back on track, they tend to lose consistency. They’ll move bedtimes around, start rocking or feeding baby back to sleep, change up the bedtime routine, anything they think might help. But the best advice I can give is for you to hold steady. 

You’re probably going to have to go in and soothe your baby a little more often during this period, and you may need to help get them out of the uncomfortable positions they manage to get themselves into, and you’ll likely have some frustrating nights where your little one will drive you a little nuts with the babbling at 2 am.  

And while you can’t fix the situation, you can make things substantially harder for both you and your baby. Trying a bunch of quick-fixes in order to get your baby sleeping quickly when they wake up at night is very likely to end up creating dependencies that will last long past the time baby’s figured out how to get themselves readjusted when they wake up in the night. So don’t give in to the temptation to rock or bounce them to sleep, don’t let them sleep in the swing, don’t take them for car rides, and above all, don’t nurse or feed them back to sleep constantly. 

Offer them some comfort, tell them it’s still bedtime, help them get back into a comfortable position if they’ve gotten themselves pushed up against the side of the crib, or roll them onto their backs if they’ve flipped. The key is to make sure to let them get back to sleep on their own. That way, once they’ve got this new skill mastered or that tooth finally came through, they’ll still have the ability to self-soothe when they wake up at night. 

It’s likely to be a bit of a challenge, and it may feel like one skill gets mastered just in time for another one to start developing, but hang in there. On the bright side, the entire time this is going on, your baby is also developing the ability to better consolidate nighttime sleep, so stay consistent and you can expect even more of those glorious sleep-filled nights once the storm has passed!