It is three in the morning. The house is quiet, the room is dark, and there is your baby, standing up in the cot, hanging on to the bars.

This time yesterday, they could not do that.

Somewhere else, a six-week-old is feeding every hour. Somewhere else again, a four-month-old has rolled onto their tummy and cannot work out how to get back.

Different ages, different nights, same feeling: sleep has quietly moved somewhere you cannot find it.

And it is not only the nights. The days have changed too. More cuddles, no naps, tears that arrive faster than usual.

Nothing about your routine has changed. Everything about your baby has.

We tend to talk about the two as if they were the same thing. They are not, and a baby who is growing needs something quite different from a baby who is learning.

A growth spurt is physical. For a few days your baby grows fast, and what you notice is the appetite. They feed and feed, get restless in between, and never seem quite full. Intense days, but they do not last long. They tend to turn up around 2 to 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months and 6 months.

A developmental leap happens in the brain. Your baby is working on something new: rolling, sitting, crawling, pulling up to stand, first steps, or the discovery that you can leave the room and not come straight back. Overnight, their world gets bigger. And a bigger world can make for a more sensitive baby, one who wants more cuddles and sleeps more lightly.

There are charts everywhere, on websites, in apps, even in books, promising the exact week each leap will land. For a lot of parents they come as a relief. They put a name on the harder days.

But development does not run to a timetable. It comes in phases, and no two babies do them quite the same way.

And not every hard night is a leap. Often the answer is a simpler one: your baby stayed awake longer than they could comfortably manage, or got to bedtime already overtired.

When your baby is learning something new, their brain does not clock off at bedtime. It carries on practising while they sleep. It is why so many new skills show up first at three in the morning.

During these days, you might notice:

• more night wakings
• shorter naps or more resistance to sleep
• more difficulty falling asleep

And one different night can quietly become a pattern. Sleep gets lighter, tiredness builds, and a tired baby finds it even harder to settle. More often than not, it is the tiredness, not the leap, that keeps the hard nights going.

Keep what was already working. Your sleep routine and the way your baby usually falls asleep are the familiar part, at a moment when everything else is new. On days like these, consistency is what holds them.

More cuddles, without changing everything. These days your baby needs more holding and more time, and there is no harm in giving both. If they were already falling asleep on their own, keep putting them down drowsy but awake, even on the harder nights. That is what gives them the chance to self-soothe. Once the phase passes, you go back to what you did before, so the extra help does not become the new way they fall asleep.

Bring bedtime earlier. If naps have been short or the day unsettled, moving bedtime earlier for a few days helps make up the sleep they missed.

Practise during the day. The more your baby practises something new while awake, the less they need to repeat it in the middle of the night.

Feed them when they are hungry. During a growth spurt, hunger is real hunger.

These phases usually last days, not months.

If the nights stay hard week after week, it is worth looking at the whole day, not just the night. It may be the moment to ask for help.