Is My Baby Regressing At 4 Months Old? What To Do?
As parents, we celebrate every milestone our babies reach.
However, it should be worrisome when your baby seems to lose skills or experience unexpected delays in their development.
Is My Baby Regressing?
The Baby Development and Movement Expert Michelle Turner wants you to immediately contact your pediatrician and request appointments with a neurologist and genetics specialist if one or both of these things are happening to your 4-month-old baby.
- Loss of previously acquired skills: If your baby could roll over, sit independently, vocalize, and then lose these abilities.
Many genetic conditions can have regressive features.
- Marked changes in behavior or responsiveness: Unusual fussiness like high-pitched screaming for hours, lethargy, or sudden poor eye contact.
Neurological issues can range from facial nerve inflammation to sub-clinical seizures and beyond.
When to Work With Other Types of Specialists
- Signs of pain or discomfort: A baby constantly arching their back, vomiting or is highly constipated, doesn’t eat well and is losing weight (failure to thrive), or seems excessively sensitive to certain stimuli could be experiencing a medical issue.
Other specialists you might consider making appointments with if you have these issues are Ears, Nose, and Throat (ENT), Gastroenterologist, Metabolic Specialist, etc.
Disclaimer: This blog post does not provide medical advice. Please consult with your healthcare providers for any concerns regarding your child's health.
Don’t Be Fooled or Pacified by “Wait and See”
You will hear from almost every doctor that babies develop at their own pace.
You may hear something like it’s normal for babies to temporarily lose skills like babbling when concentrating on learning to crawl.
A baby should NEVER LOSE SKILLS to learn another skill, especially at 4 months old. All developmental skills build on top of and complement each other.
At 4 months old, your baby should be working on their Grabbing the Feet Milestone.
Look at our charts below to see if your baby is on track for optimal development or if your baby is falling behind.
If your baby has to stop one skill to learn another, that is a warning sign to you that your child’s developmental movement structure is not setting up right, and that you need to be more proactive in teaching your child developmental movements.
How to Be Seen Quicker By Needed Specialists
No professional should leave you feeling worried without a proactive plan for helping your baby’s underlying developmental needs that are not happening on their own.
It’s your top priority to consult with specialized medical professionals based on your concern about your baby.
We hope that you are always taken seriously and your baby gets the medical help it needs to live and thrive.
Sometimes, when you can’t get a quick appointment and if your child’s symptoms are that concerning, go to the ER and see if you can’t get admitted.
When your baby is admitted to the hospital, your baby is likely to get immediate appointments with the needed specialists versus months when you call to make an outpatient appointment.
Disclaimer: This blog post does not provide medical advice. Please consult with your healthcare providers for any concerns regarding your child's health.
How Can You Help Your Baby With Movement and Development
Regardless of the underlying cause, movement is vital to your baby’s overall development.
Your baby’s development is a non-negotiable. This means it should just happen, giving you pleasant surprises versus a sickening gut feeling that something isn’t right.
Even with the medical ball rolling, there will still be a lot of “wait and see” for your baby's development.
Even with therapy, you may be getting milestone performances, but the development still looks off.
Why is that?
That’s because the milestone experience is not happening in your baby’s body, and it won’t happen unless you manually initiate, stimulate, and enhance the milestone experience.
Here at Movement Lesson, we teach you step-by-step how to do that in our Fast Start Support Program.
While waiting to see a specialist, your baby’s development doesn’t have to wait.
At four months old, if your baby isn’t working on the Gabbing the Feet Milestone, then you need to go back to the beginning of development and work on imputing the development experiences their body has missed out on.
You can do this in our Fast Start Support Program.
There, you will learn how to optimize your baby’s first milestones.
Some of your worries will be alleviated because you can do something to help your baby, while there is still some “wait and see” for medical investigation results.
Even better, you won’t have to figure out the courses on your own, especially when you are unsure if you are doing the exercises right.
When you enter the program, you will get a weekly 1-on-1 with a certified Movement Lesson Practitioner.
The program gives you access to 13 optimal development courses that cover the milestones in the first 12 months of development.
That’s about $2600 worth of course material.
The Fast Start Support Program gives you access to the Optimal Development courses for $20 a month, but by CLICKING HERE, you will get the first two months free.
You can try out the courses, and if you don’t like them, you can cancel your subscription before you even pay a dime.
CLICK HERE to join, and the first course you will start with is the Sleeping and Lying Down Course.
