I'm going to address a few readers' questions that have been piling up in my inbox about sleep. But I'd like to open up the floor more in the next couple of weeks to any kind of question you might have about your child's development. Feel free to email me your non-sleep questions as well as the more sleep-specific ones and we'll try to tackle them as soon as possible.  Here's a fairly typical question from that dreaded 4-month mark:

My son is 3.5 months old; born June 12th. He was a really great sleeper
right from the get go. By 2 weeks old he was sleeping atleast a 6-7
hour stretch every night. I did very little to encourage this, he sort
of developed this pattern on his own. He kept this up until about a
month ago, when he randomly starting waking up every 2-3 hours. I am
tired! I miss my sleeping baby! Every times he wakes in the night I
nurse him. He goes right back to sleep after a feed, no problem, but I
am getting sick of the frequency of wakings now.

Some background
information for you: my son is huge! he was born weighing 9 lbs 14 oz.,
and at 3.5 months he is a little over 17 lbs. Do you think he could be
extra hungry because of his size, and he needs these extra feedings? Or
do you think he is mostly habitually waking? I am reluctant to do sleep
training because he is still so young, but I am also sleep deprived. I
have a 2.5 year old at home as well, so napping during the day rarely
happens!

Also,
my son seems to be teething, and he is also obsessed with grabbing for
toys right now. Do you think all this stuff going on is disrupting his
sleep, and he may start sleeping well again in a matter of time?

First off, congratulations for being one of the lucky ones who got more than 2-3 hours of consecutive sleep at night in the first 3 months or so. Many parents don't experience that early sleepy phase. Having said that, it seems like your baby has hit the first major sleep transition with full force. We've talked about the 4-5.5 month developmental stage at some length here  and here. Go read those posts first, so you have a sense of what's going on in your baby's head — the new and amazing ways he can see the world differently and interact with you and the world differently (yes! Reaching and grasping is a new and fabulous skill he's going to be practicing). That will give you some context for what I'm about to say next: I'm very, very sorry, but there's not a whole lot you can do about his sleep in this transition stage. At least not in terms of successfully sleep-training. That doesn't mean you can't try one of the variety of methods out there, if you're so very desperate that you just need a plan of action. But many of these methods are doomed to fail because this stage is just an inherently volatile, senstive and difficult time for sleep.

To answer your last set of questions directly: Yes, I DO think that his sleep is disrupted because of these new cognitve capacities that are coming to fruition just now. Yes, he may start sleeping well again afterwards. But my guess is that he won't go easily back to "old" patterns of sleeping because children don't "regress" to old patterns, they continue to develop new ones and continue to adapt to new contexts as they are able to understand more and more about their environments. That means he MAY turn into a good sleeper again, or he may need your help learning new sleep skills. The good news is that you have only a few weeks before things re-stabilize for a while (it will not SEEM like a few weeks, it will seem more like a few DECADES, but nevermind…). At around the age of 6 months or so, if your baby HASN'T developed his own better sleeping habits after pulling through the transition period, you can choose a sleep-training technique that best suits your family's needs and implement these strategies then. Between 5.5  – 8 months, you have a much better chance of success in whatever method you try.

If you are indeed at your wit's end and need to try some sleep-training method, first read the posts I linked to above about the milestones he's hitting. Then, armed withthe "why" of what your baby's going through, pick what you think will have the best chance of working for your child and for your sanity. Just make sure that whatever sleep-training method you pick, you stick with it consistently for 3 days. If you don't seen any noticable improvement by then, you may want to cut your losses and wait for that next window of opportunity.

GOOD LUCK!