Discovering the fourth trimester was a game-changer

Discovering the fourth trimester was a game-changer by Maxabella

I first heard about the fourth trimester when I was pregnant with my third baby. I was preparing for her arrival and fretting about how I was going to manage a crotchety baby as well as two busy toddlers – my son was three, and my eldest daughter was two.

I knew all about crotchety babies. Max was a terror and I swear he came out that way, but it was his newborn days that had nearly broken me. He was the kind of baby who could not be put down even for a second without screaming, who wouldn’t sleep for longer than 45 minutes at a time (and required endless soothing to even achieve that), and who was constantly active and over-tired and awake.

His eldest sister, on the other hand, was a gentle, calm baby. Max was 17 months when Arabella was born and such a handful that my daughter was pretty much self-raising from the get-go. She’d wait patiently while I changed her, lie contentedly in her cot until sleep gently took her, and endured the endless pats and hugs from her adoring big brother with a calmness that defied her baby status.

“They are such different personalities,” I thought. And they are. But there was something else going on, and I started to have my suspicions quite early. You see, the more attention I paid to my daughter, the more unsettled she became. She did best with lots of skin-to-skin cuddles and soothing words and then … nothing. Leave her alone and she’d happily take care of herself; fuss over her and she’d become a typical crying baby. So, for the most part, I let her be.

What is the fourth trimester?

Welcome to the fourth trimester. Of course, I didn’t realise that it was a ‘thing’ back then, as it wasn’t until my third pregnancy that I decided to research it. And I was hoping against hope that it was a thing, because I planned to do the exact same thing with my third baby.

The concept was first introduced by Dr Harvey Karp in his 2002 book The Happiest Baby on the Block. Karp proposed that parents should recreate the uterus in the outside world for the first three months of their baby’s life. “Our babies aren’t like horses. They can’t run the first day of life,” Karp says. “And so we need to recognise that they’re evicted from the womb three months before they’re ready for the world.”

The theory supposes that babies aren’t fully developed when they’re born, and that we need to be mindful of the stimuli they encounter once they arrive. This includes snug swaddling and white noise to recreate the enclosed feeling and whooshing sounds experienced in the womb, and lots of skin-to-skin contact to keep your baby close.

A further important principle is reducing external stimuli as much as possible, so no passing the baby around for cuddles with all the visitors, no bright toys hanging from the cot, and no sitting with the baby watching late-night television together (did I mention the Olympics were on when Max was born?).

Without realising it, I had created a fourth trimester environment for Arabella, simply through sheer neglect. How handy is that? I would never dream on scrimping on snuggles (that’s my favourite bit) so there was tons of that, and I would wear her in the BabyBjorn throughout the day simply to keep my hands free for wrangling Max. But there was just no time for other stimulation or even attention. She was breastfed, changed, snuggled, swaddled and put down in her cot. If she wasn’t feeding, being changed or being cuddled, she was in her bed either asleep or waiting for sleep. Simple as that.

Too much of a good thing is just too much

This approach to baby care was completely different to how I cared for Max – apart from the baby wearing. I wore Max for months out of pure necessity, as he wouldn’t settle any other way.

But he was also passed from person to person. Everyone would want a cuddle (and, as he was the first baby born in my group of friends, everyone was a lot), and all were excited to see him and would make those baby faces we make, right up in his face. Things would start well, but end with patting or rocking or jiggling him in an effort to calm him down. There is no doubt about it, Max was one very over-stimulated baby. He was in melt-down most of the time. He just couldn’t cope with all the stimulus we were throwing at him.

The fourth trimester is for mums too

So I had two different baby experiences under my belt when my third baby was due. I knew without a shadow of doubt that it was the fourth trimester experience I wanted. But was Arabella a fluke? Would the fourth trimester really work for Lottie?

One thing I quickly learned was that it didn’t matter. The best thing about the fourth trimester was that it gave me a plan. I was a mum of three under four and it was daunting, to say the least, but knowing that the only thing I had to do for Lottie was to feed her, love her and put her down to sleep helped me enormously. So that’s exactly what I did.

It’s hard to keep a newborn from getting over-stimulated when she has two rambunctious siblings vying for her attention, but we managed somehow. We used quiet voices around her and I made it the kids’ thing to gently help with cuddles and swaddling before we wished her a good night and backed slowly out of the room. I can still remember Max saying, “Shhhh, we need to be quieter” to Arabella a few weeks after Lottie was born. They got it and we managed to keep to most of the fourth trimester principles.

As it turned out, Lottie was a calm and lovely newborn who slept well and was self-soothing from the start. I’m convinced that the fourth trimester theory works and it was a game-changer for me.

Of course, babies change all the time. I can’t lie and say that Lottie was always a self-soothing, good sleeper (she wasn’t and still isn’t!). But she certainly was for the first six months of her life, and it was just what a tired mum needed.

All I know is that even if the fourth trimester isn’t actually ‘real’, it surely won’t hurt. The principles of baby-wearing, skin-to-skin contact, sleep first and a gentle, quiet atmosphere are certainly beneficial for both the baby and the family. After experiencing the chaos and anxiety that was my first unsettled baby, I know this was true for me.