Updated 1/31/23
The 12 Month Sleep Regression: Signs, Causes And What Can You Do
The 12 Month Sleep Regression: Fact or Fiction? Let’s Find out
You thought you had it made! After working so hard on sleep during your baby’s first year of life, you had finally reached a point where your baby was sleeping 11 – 12 hours a night of uninterrupted sleep.
Feeling rested yourself, you thought, “yes, I can do this!”… and then it hit, the 12-month sleep regression and your baby started waking up either more at night or very early in the morning.
12 month sleep regression: Fact or Fiction?
The most common causes of a 12-month sleep regression are:
-
- Developmental change, ie walking
- Teething – 1st molars around 14 mo, lateral incisors should be coming in around 10 mo – 16 mo
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What can you do about night wakings?
When your child wakes in the night, respond to your child and provide reassurance that you are there.
Try not to create any new bad habits such as bringing your child into bed with you, or providing feeding or a bottle of milk to soothe.
Your best plan of action is to use your sleep training method or enter the room and provide hugs and cuddles and then sit beside the crib providing verbal reassurance until your baby can fall back asleep.
You’ll have to watch that bedtime is adjusted earlier as your child will probably be more tired on days following a night with more night wakings.
What can you do about early morning wake-ups?
When your baby starts waking up at 5:00 am, it can feel like it is the middle of the night.
This is really rough, especially if you are just getting used to a busier schedule, drop-offs, pick-ups, getting home to get dinner, and dealing with more life stress in general. The last thing you need is to be up an hour or two earlier in the morning, with a baby who is still tired and hence cranky.
These are harder than the night-wakings because it is more difficult for a child to resume sleeping past 5:00 am once they have woken. This part of the morning has more “light” sleep cycles.
The same principles of the night wakings apply. Lots of hugs and cuddles, but try not to create any new bad habits and expectations by bringing your baby into bed with you if you don’t sleep together currently.
You can go in the room and sit by the crib for a bit and verbally soothe your child back to sleep.
One helpful tactic is to focus on the quantity of sleep over 24 hours.
Your 12-month-old needs:
– 13 – 14 hours of total 24-hour sleep per day
– 11 – 12 hours of uninterrupted night sleep
– 1.5 – 3 hours of naps
Earlier Bedtime
With night waking, early wake-ups and if you are going through the 2 – 1 nap transition, remember to bump bedtime up earlier as your child will be overtired from the extra walking and not used to longer wake periods with the 2 -1 nap transition.
Slowly you’ll be able to push bedtime back to between 6 and 7 pm again.
Sleep begets sleep, the more sleep your baby gets, the better she will sleep.
It is tempting for parents to want to delay bedtime, theorizing that keeping babies up later will make them sleep in later in the morning. This just doesn’t work. The opposite is true – earlier bedtime equals more sleep and a later wake up.
Habitual Waking
If you are finding that the 5 am wake-up has now become a habit, ie. more than 3 days in a row. Then you may try a technique called “wake to sleep”.
In this technique called “wake to sleep”, you enter your baby’s room 1 hour before the habitual wake-up time and gently rouse them.
The idea here is to manipulate when the sleep cycles are occurring, so they are not “surfacing” between cycles at 5 am, and sleep longer. Stay tuned for a blog post on “wake to sleep.”
Conclusion
Lastly, remember that this won’t last forever.
This is a response to something changing in their lives.
Child’s sleep is just like life….just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, something changes.
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Sending sleepy vibes and sweet dreams your way!
Erin McCormick
Your Pediatric Sleep Specialist
