Call it what you will, they SUCK. But I did want to clarify my thinking about what many folks call "sleep regressions." I realize it's not that important to many people what you call them: they're bad and they mean that yet again you are getting no sleep for some seemingly inexplicable reason. You may have had a child who was a glorious sleeper since she was born.  Or you found the most appropriate sleep-training method to suit your and your child’s needs and you applied this method at precisely the right developmental window. Your child was sleeping beautifully through the night, taking regular naps, you were getting 7 hours STRAIGHT yourself. Your child was a bright, bubbly, joyful child who was a delight to be with most of the time. Your depression lifted, you began to socialize again with friends. You even considered renewing your affection for your partner! Sex was potentially on the horizon! And then Bam!  One day your perfect sleeper goes from sleeping 12 hours through the night to waking up every hour and a half. She’s screaming again, crying for something, waking up and unable to fall back asleep. She is suddenly refusing to nap. The same routines are no longer working to calm her. The same music isn’t soothing anymore, the same bounce loses its hypnotic impact, the same bedtime story is slapped out of your hand in toddler disgust. Maybe it’s just a bad day or night? No, it goes on for days and sometimes weeks or even months.

We’ve heard this account from many parents and have experienced it firsthand. I like to refer to these times as "sleep setbacks", but they are more often talked about as “sleep regressions.” I'm not terribly fond of this phrase because regression implies a return to old patterns, old habits, more infantile forms of behaviour. And these “regressions” are actually the precise opposite: leaps forward, not backward—corresponding to a shift in the child’s stage of cognitive and emotional development.  (As an aside, I was thrilled to read in a Moxie post from more than 3 years ago that she thinks of these "regressions" the same way). However, to parents, they can definitely feel like regressions. After finally getting yourself a stretch of 6, 8 or even more hours of sleep per night, going back to 1 or 2 hour bursts of sleep feels like, well, GOING BACK.  To that dark and dreary place of sleep deprivation that you once thought only little, teeny, tiny newborns inflicted on their parents. And it was bearable in that newborn stage. But by now, most parents no longer have the support of friends and family who were there to commiserate when the baby was brought home from the hospital. Some parents perhaps joyfully announced, maybe even boasted, about their child’s hard-won sleeping skills. And suddenly, with seemingly no rhyme or reason, all those sleeping skills seem to have vanished overnight. What’s happened to your perfect little sleeper?

The short answer is that your child has probably hit one of the big developmental transition periods. (There are also other reasons, like teething, getting a cold, moving to a new house/room, the birth of a sibling, and so on). It's nothing you've done wrong and there's probably not all that much you can do about it.  These more vulnerable stages are the ones more difficult for sleep-training to begin with. These periods are created by cognitive advances and the emotional challenges they engender, and they are particularly troublesome periods for teaching an infant or toddler to sleep on his or her own. In the same way, entry into these stages may be what’s causing the psychological upheavals your child is going through now, and these may be responsible for sleep disruptions when none were present before. So, if your child has suddenly stopped sleeping through the night and/or begun to have napping strikes and she is between 4 and 5.5 months, 8 and 11 months, 18 and 22 months, 2.5 and 3 years, or 3.5 and 4 years, she's probably in one of these "sensitive windows" of development. The good news is that most kids who were good sleepers before these transitions usually become good sleepers again. This may require a little more "re-training," but generally once the transition is over, it's a relatively smooth process. So, again, it DOES pass and just knowing it's temporary may help you get through it with less stress and heart ache. For those kids who were never good sleepers to begin with, the next window of sleep-training opportunity could be just the cognitive-emotional stage your child was waiting for to show his magic sleep-awesomeness.