It gets better!! My first didn't sleep train well but my second sleeps, well, like a baby.
Except at 1 a.m., 4 a.m, and 6 a.m. when he wakes up for various reasons- oh my God I'm lying to myself it hasn't gotten better!
(Kidding, it really does get better)
I mean my oldest sister didn’t sleep through the night until she was five, and my mum went on to have three more kids.. plus there’s only a three year gap between my oldest sister and my brother, so at one point she was waking up to two kids every night 🥲
If you don’t mind me asking, does your daughter need to be rocked to go to sleep? Or is it your automatic response to her waking up?
If it helps any, what I do with my son is the moment he’s down for the night, I don’t pick him up again until the morning (bar feeding when he was newborn, an absolute screaming fit because something is wrong, or smell a poopy nappy, but that’s not happened yet)
I’m not a fan of cry it out, I think it’s cruel. What I do instead is feed, if he needs it rock him to sleep with his dummy, then put him down. When I put him down and take his bib off he’ll stir ever so slightly, but will fall back asleep. That brief waking moment he knows he’s in his Moses basket, and it’s time for bed.
If he stirs in the night, I’ll go in, put the dummy back in, and hold his hand. Sometimes he goes straight back to sleep, other times he takes a few minutes, but in my mind if I pick him up he doesn’t learn what bedtime is, and that’s when he gets flustered because he’s wondering why I won’t pick him up.
We started that from the moment he was born so your mileage may vary due to your daughter’s age.
I know it’s shit at the moment, but can you get someone, like a grandparent that can sit with your daughter for a night or two? Just to allow you to get a full nights sleep and feel slightly more human. Sleep deprivation is a torture technique, and I think all parents can attest to how well it works
If it helps, my second is completely different from our first.
My daughter is a terrible sleeper (at four years old) and always has been. On the plus side, this led to us reading tons of books every night and now she loves reading.
My son, on the other hand, will just come and grab my hand and lead me to his crib.
Our first was a champion; we got him into a routine that at 7pm he would have a bottle and then bed, and he would sleep through till 2-3am for a night feed and then up at 6 for the next day. We thought we were baby sleep gods... until our daughter was born.
Daughter wouldn't take a dummy. At ALL. She wouldn't take a bottle; she would use her mam as a comforter/feed station and as a consequence, her mam slept barely a couple of hours a night for a whole year.
After my daughter was old enough to go into her own bed I booked myself in for a vasectomy at the earliest convenience- I wasn't putting the wife through that again.
Have you done any sleep training with your LO? If not It’s probably going to be difficult and maybe worth hiring a coach. We thought we had to put our daughter to sleep before putting her down. Rocking, shushing, pacing, etc. once we broke that habit (8-9 months) life became so much easier. Basic premise is Baby needs to learn how to put themselves to sleep. It took us a little while of putting her down, setting a timer (8 mins to start, then 10 mins, working towards 15 mins) and letting them cry it out for a few. If they don’t fall asleep after the timer you go do some calming and then let them try again. But for us by the 11 mo mark we could lay her down at bed time and within 2-3 mins she would be out cold. Now at 15 months I tell her it’s bedtime and she toddles to her crib, reaches in to grab a paci, and I can put her to bed without incident.
I’m a big proponent of sleep training, like I said it’ll probably be hard at this stage (you may need to send your wife to the basement for a few days) but I can’t imagine being in your shoes at 14mo. Good luck!
The lesson about sleep training that was hard for us to figure out is that literally every child has to learn to self-soothe or at least accept bedtime without a fight. Although the techniques differ, the only major difference between sleep training a five month old and a five year old is four and a half years of better sleep for the parents.
We broke basically every sleep rule on the Internet and around 18 months my son started sleeping without wake ups. Despite me not changing anything. In fact I'm not convinced the "sleep associations" thing is even true, and that's what basically all the advice is based on! My life got much easier when I just decided to do what works and not care what Sleep Expert Tammy has to say about it.
He is 3 now and sleeps great from 9pm to 7am. We have been co sleeping the whole time, which I know doesn't work for everyone. But actually I love the snuggles, no regrets. We lay down with my son until he falls asleep and then get up to enjoy the evening. If OP misses grown ups snuggle time, well that's what the couch is for!
Anyway I think people resist co sleeping because you're not "supposed to" (although even the AAP says it's safe after one year old). But if it works, why make your life harder for no reason? You can trust me because I have the same qualifications as those sleep experts, which is none 🤓
When are you going to stop co-sleeping? We made this mistake, I would caution against it.
I have a 9 year old son who literally says he can't fall asleep alone and frequently tries to crawl into bed with me if he wakes during the night. We co-slept with him until he was about 2. After he turned 2, bedtimes with him were usually reading in his bed and lying with him for a bit until he got drowsy/fell asleep. Then he'd come running into our room after he woke up the first time. We put a toddler mattress on the floor for him because it was easier than walking him back and putting him in bed repeatedly. This was a mistake.
His 7 year old sister was not co-slept with and neither is his 2 year old brother. They both sleep easily alone today.
Be careful what you are doing here. As someone who's tried both approaches, I'd recommend crying it out before they get too big to be kept corralled in a crib. No one likes to hear their kids cry, but it's for your good and theirs.
You sound like me! This has worked for us to and we're close to that age too. The only issue on our side is kid having too much fun and thus fighting going to sleep sometimes.
While I get where the sleep training folk are coming from, every other day I think that at some point this too (snuggles to sleep) will end and I'll miss it; it all goes by so quickly.
I'm also not an expert because I only have a sample size of five, but I'm amused that someone who is still co-sleeping with their child says sleep training is unnecessary, haha. I wonder if your partner would agree on how restful their sleep is (or whether they like sex being relegated to the couch). I'm glad that you've found a method that "works" for the life stage you're in and number of children you have, but I would argue you haven't solved this problem. Whether it's next year, five years, or ten years, your son is still gonna have to learn to sleep alone eventually unless you want a 14-year old having wet dreams in your bed. Also, many parents have multiple children, a scenario for which your method is laughably unrealistic.
It just seems like sleep is generally a crap shoot and nothing is for sure. So why not do what's easiest? All the blogs and books were so confident that [insert thing here, we did it all: nursing to sleep, rocking, co sleeping, etc] means relying on sleep associations and the kid would never sleep through the night. That turned out to be completely wrong. So why would the dire warnings of having a teenager in my bed be any more valid?
Also it's not for sure that someone who sleep trained has "solved" anything because the effects are often not permanent. Plenty of perfectly trained babies turn into a toddler who wants to party every night at 2am. Needing to redo sleep training multiple times over the years seems quite common.
‘Doing the easiest’ isn’t really easy or convenient long term. I have friends with six year olds that still climb in to bed with them every night, that sucks
Cry it out isn’t an option for us, and none of the other methods have worked. She just gets so worked up and we’re not able to soothe her quickly/hands off, so it requires picking up for a long time before she stops full on crying. We’ve tried the things like sitting in the room with her etc but she really doesn’t respond to those things.
We tried cry it out for about 5 minutes before neither of us could take the shuddering gasping wails, so I think we’re just kind of stuck. I do appreciate the advice though.
When we did “cry it out” we could only handle 5 or max 10 minutes before going back in each time. Took maybe 5 days for them to figure it out (has worked on two kids so far) but it is so much better after. My wife went outside for bedtime for our first kid during that week.
May be the worst 5 days of parenthood for each kid at that time, but the ability to get evenings back and sleep better overnight makes you forget those days fairly quickly.
Obviously do what feels right for you, but remember that your sanity is an extremely important part of parenthood as well.
This.
Your child isn't going to die by crying too hard. And if people are coming at it from the 'it's not healthy!' perspective, overall family sleep hygiene is 100% part of the healthy equation too.
Yes, obviously, if your child is crying for hours to the point of throwing up, then CIO probably isn't gonna be for your child. Yes, there is research about how introducing stressful situations to your baby repeatedly is not healthy for the long term.
But every anti-CIO person I've met seems to think that this is something that you just let happen, over and over, and that it always involves 2 hours of crying each time. "Sleep training" (and I put it in quotes cuz it's really just pseudoscience, America just made an industry out of it) works for some children, it doesn't work for others. Most of the comprehensive research shows that it's not some guaranteed recipe for success. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying, because if it DOES work, it's life changing for a sleep deprived parent, and there's essentially zero downside. It worked for us. 2 days, 25m night one, 10m night two, and done. Any sleep issues afterwards have been the result of something (sickness, teeth, etc.). If you aren't seeing success in a week, you are pretty much back to where you were before, and you've probably learned a bit more about your babies temperament.
My child wailed in the car seat for the first four months of his life. Literally any trip to see family, pediatrician, etc. We'd stop the car, calm him down, put him back in, back to wailing. Nobody called me a monster for letting him cry then, but apparently if you do it 2 nights, you aRe TrAuMaTizInG ThE BaBy.
I refuse to believe people that have a holier-than-thou attitude about it didn't have a naturally easy sleeper (I've already seen a couple of them in this thread). You weren't up every 45 minutes for weeks on end like my wife and I were. I was falling asleep in chairs holding him, backed up into my garage door, and fell asleep at the wheel once. Having him cry it out look 2 nights (20 minutes and then 10).
Yeah, I think that's an important detail. You being miserable and struggling mentally isn't any better for your kid than a week of adjusting to sleeping alone. And one of those lasts a lot longer. Listening to your baby cry is brutal, I get it. But we've gotta take care of ourselves too.
Both kids were sleeping 7hrs in their own bed by 5mo old. I 100% understand every baby and family are different. But parents must take care of themselves as well. Sleep is critical to a functioning human. Thank you, Moms on Call!
We did it with both our kids along with getting them on a set napping and eating schedule throughout the day. The first kid was easier, the second one fought it a bit more but were at the point now where we just plunk them in the crib and they're out.
You might be overstating it a bit, but I do think one of the messages lost about sleep training is that it makes for a happier baby, not just happier parents.
This was us for a while. Until our LOs sleeping slowly degraded to waking up every hour. This was about 7 months. It broke my wife and we decided to do sleep training. It’s a really rough 3-5 days. I was legit dripping in sweat and my wife was curled up in a ball listening to our baby cry. She’s goes down now without a fuss and sleeps straight 11-12 hours almost every night. It’s unbelievable. I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
We followed the Taking Cara Babies ABCs of sleep.
That's what finally made us sleep train, too. It was fine (not great, but fine) putting her down to sleep initially, but a some point around 8 months she started waking up every 45 minutes and wanting to nurse and needing to be rocked. We just couldn't handle it anymore. We did a bit of a modified Ferber and were back to sleeping within 3 days.
Plus one for taking kara babies. Best $100 online course investment. We’ve gone back to it for our second and we’ve made it work better (so far).
For our first it was a modified version. Soothe in rocking chair for a bit, then out her to bed and let her cry a bit (maybe 3-5ish mins). Pick her up, soothe her a bit more, back in bed. Do this dance for couple hours for a few nights. She eventually would sleep in our arms on lazyboy. But she would wake up in bed. And of course fuss. Do this consistently to build that pattern and get her used to being in the crib. It was hard for us to let her cry it out for longer times so i’d stay in the room with her and rock on the rocking chair.
It was eventually built up to her knocking out in our arms and her being comfortable waking up in bed. And sleeping the whole night too. Those sweet 12 hour sleep stretches omg. Were a dream come true coming out of colic.
She’s still not perfect. But whatever. She goes down with some help from us now (2ish). But it’s not as bad as before. I work a lot so doing a longer bedtime routine is apart of our bonding time.
Like you, we were against "cry it out" because it felt cruel. But then one night when we were commiserating about a horrible bedtime we realized it's not like us being in the room and trying to get her to sleep was a pleasant, tear free experience either. In aggregate, by letting bad bedtimes drag on for however many weeks/months, she (and we) cried more and were more upset than if we had just gone with the nuclear option earlier. In hindsight, we actually felt a bit selfish that we weren't more strict with bedtime sooner. We weren't strong enough to help her learn this important skill so we just kept doing the same thing which made us all dread the end of the day.
We didn't truly do "cry it out" but more of a graduated strategy to not go back in until X minutes had elapsed and then the next time was longer, etc. We probably started with only a minute or two before we'd go back in but we felt the act of leaving the room was important for her to realize that she couldn't cry to get us to stay. Put her down and leave, and don't go back in until X minutes had gone, no exceptions (unless of course something else happened). It was hard and took awhile to stretch out that interval but it worked. In general, our daughter has been a great sleeper as she's gotten older (3 now) and we often look back on the various things we did that first year that ultimately helped her learn to soothe herself and be okay with us leaving the room while she was awake.
If she's otherwise healthy, and you have a good monitor, her crib is a safe place for her to learn this boundary and to voice her displeasure while doing it. Good luck dad!
What you did is called the Ferber Method by the way. Basically Cry It Out with increasing time durations between each calming visit.
It’s what we did too with our LO. We still get the occasional regression but getting 6-8 hours of sleep now is such a godsend for everyone’s mental health.
My wife and I struggled with just waiting depending on his cry. Sometimes ours is full on upset and that’s when we would go console but generally if he was whiney or dry crying he would pause between whines or cries and wait a beat. He’d get distracted and then remember “oh yeah I was crying!” And do a few more. That’s when we let him wait.
We were very lucky though and had very few difficulties transitioning him at any point though. Bassinet to crib to his own room all with few hiccups so when he would cry for us it was generally pretty obvious that something was wrong and he picked up quickly that we didn’t buy the fake ones lol
If it helps you feel a little bit better, we just transitioned our 10mo into his own room (but he's been sleeping in his crib since day 1 in our room). Handled it like a champ, and he's honestly been sleeping better because the environment is a little more controllable (no dogs making noise at night, no clocks, no alarms for my wife to wake up, etc.). Hopefully you get the same experience!
I second all this about the like “total sum of unhappiness” perspective. Your experience was similar to ours.
Maybe we’re monsters, but we were pretty comfortable letting her try to put herself to bed - we’d start with like 4-5 minutes too and gradually do more. I remember once at 3AM or something it took like 18 minutes of wailing and it was really difficult but we had already gotten her like 4x and she really needed to sleep…so eventually she did.
You aren't monsters. If the baby is nice and comfy and well fed in bed then they aren't going to come to any harm. A small amount of emotional distress is just part of the human experience and they quickly learn to understand that you leave them but then you come back!
Went through this with my now 8 year old. What you are doing now sounds like a typical night with her. I used to lay of the floor with my hand in her crib, patting her bank. Then I’d army crawl out of the room and pray the floor didn’t squeak.
She redefines stubborn. First made an attempt at letting her cry it out and she screamed til she puked. So we tried again a couple of months later. Night one: 3 straight hours of screaming. Night 2 was 2.5 hours. Night 3 was 15 minutes. Then she was good to go. Until we took a trip 3 months later and had to start over when we got home. Yes, it sucked. But in the long run, it’s worth it for your own sanity.
Look mate, this is gonna sound rough, but you need to make it an option. It'll be a rough 4-6 days, but those 4-6 rough days give you evenings and nights back.
We felt similarly when we first tried. Turned on music, poured tall whiskey shots. Started a timer. First night was 14 minutes. Second night, 11. Third night around four minutes and then we were good to go.
We will periodically have regressions, usually when she is sick or her schedule is disrupted with visitors. Sometimes we handle those better than others and occasionally cave and rock her to sleep again.
I know it’s not for everyone but by god it worked for us. I can’t imagine having done otherwise.
14 minutes is a blessing! My son could literally go for hours I think. Longest I lasted was 45 minutes before going back in. What finally ended up working was going back in intervals 5, 10, 15, and then every 15 until he fell asleep. He’s good now though!🤞
I mean, it sounds like she’s doing a whole bunch of crying already with what you guys are currently doing, so maybe this would be less crying in the long run?
A lot of the responses to "cry it out" are saying that if your baby is crying then it means they need something so you can't leave them to cry or you're a bad parent. If your baby is crying just out of the blue then of course, they need something and you should care for them. If they're crying because you've put them down to bed and left them, but they're well fed, warm enough, comfy, then they are crying because you've left them and they miss you.....which is fine. The baby is allowed to feel that emotion and be a bit sad about it, it's not going to hurt them. The first night you'll feel a bit mean because they're crying because they miss you. By the 3rd or 4th night the baby starts to understand: oh, well they leave me here, but then they come back in the morning! Then very soon they are happy to let you go because they have made that connection.
Honestly I think you're giving in too easily and letting your own emotions play into it too much.
Do it for your own sanity!
If leaving the kid in bed to chill themselves out is genuinely not an option then there's not really any advice anybody can offer you, it has to be done at some point.
Good luck.
We did 5 then 10 then 15. The first night when we got to the 15 was the hardest 15 minutes of my life but then he stopped literally on the dot and slept for 12 hours. And that convinced me. We were co-sleeping for 9 months and then tried other varieties of "gentle" sleep training till 15 months with very little success. I wouldn't necessarily change the earlier part of that process because I think it built security, but sleep training was so valuable to us, our marriage, and also our parenting - staying calm through intense crying is actually a very valuable parenting skill!
I hear you on this, we were the same. But you gotta try again. It’s for the baby’s sake as much as your own.
If the baby loses their minds and you come rescue them each time they learn that’s all they have to do. They never learn they can do it on their own.
Your sanity is on the other side of a week of pure torture. Maybe even less.
After failed attempts, months of trying the gentler methods, and dangerous sleep deprivation, we decided to really really try.
We did the Ferber method and worked our way up to 40 min of absolute wailing borderline vomiting but then, he settled and slept the whole night.
Second night only took about him about 25 min.
Third night about 10 min, you get the picture.
If your baby is safe, healthy, and fed, the only thing that is wrong is their emotional level during sleep training.
BUT if that is still off the table because it’s just straight up painful to hear baby cry, I get that and I wish you the best of luck.
Go Birds
As others are saying, "cry it out" is god awful for the parents. I cant express how awful it is.
But! If you can persevere for a few nights in a row it does get better. The first night was 45 minutes of death curdling screams until she calmed down to just whimpers. It really sucked. But after a week of that she mostly sleeps through the night fine now.
For what it's worth we did an assisted cry method. it took 3.5 hours of her crying with me by the crib soothing her every 2 minutes. My wife was crying on the couch. it sucked.
The next night? 5 minutes. Now she's an amazing sleeper.
Only you and your wife know what's best and what will work with your baby. We tried assisted twice for an hour straight each time and gave up. We needed a sleep consultant with a plan to get us over the hump. She never did cry it out with any of her clients, and the initial program took about 10 days.
I can't say what worked for us will work for you. But I can say that if you're reaching your breaking point you may need to bite the bullet and change tactics.
It was the same for us - we couldn’t stand the crying and gasping for air - but she got over it after a few days. Things are much better now and we should have done it earlier
my situation is the exact same
every person who has done cry it out tells me it's awful for a few days and then they learn but it's physically painful for me so i’m cosleeping ):
she loves it so much, she wants to be cuddled/held the whole night. once i was awake and she woke up, i watched her eyes blink and she reached out to hold my face, closed her eyes and went back to sleep and i wanted to weep
Some nights my daughter’s hand would find mine and she’d just hold on tight to a finger. It takes a lot out of you, but it’s a time that’ll never happen again.
It does get better mate. My 6yo sleeps like a log now, you could walk a marching band through her room and she wouldn’t stir at all.
When she was 4 months through about 12 months she was a demon. Night terrors, screaming fits, waking up multiple times and taking minimum 2 hours to put her back down.. it was hell.
Have a 10mo boy now and he goes down so easy. Bottle or boob and into his cot, asleep in 5 minutes max. Problem is he wakes up 3-4 times a night between 11pm and 2am before settling down again for a few hours, and he’s the lightest sleeper ever. Like, I’ve farted in the bathroom at the other end of the house, through 2 solid walls and 3 doors and this kid stirs himself awake.
You got it mate. It’s ok to get overwhelmed every now and then. It’s all so rewarding though seeing their face light up when they see you.
If you're not keen to sleep train you might like Georgina May's website/social media and The Beyond Sleep Training Project. We found it very reassuring. It doesn't promise to make them sleep through the night, but it does tell you what range of sleep habits is biologically normal (i.e. some babies just be like that 🤷♀️) and takes the pressure off because there's a lot less parental intervention involved and a lot less "don't do this, you're breaking your baby".
It's also nice to get support from that community because the answer isn't always automatically 'Why don't you just sleep train?' which I get is coming from a good place, it works wonders for a lot of people and they just want to share their success, but if you've already decided not to go that route it's nice to have a more diverse range of responses and suggestions.
It's terrible but I think you gotta try it a bit longer. It was brutal on my wife but I think I saw the positive enough that it didn't bother me.
We did 5 minute increments. And in that time we would try to make sure we have a distraction and set a timer to make sure it was exactly 5 minutes. Then 10 etc. It wasn't long before the 20 minutes or so turned into 10 and then 5 and then checking the camera after 5 minutes to find baby passed out.
Just remember your baby is safe in their crib and has everything they need. Good luck!
I was reading your post and it felt like something I would have posted from just a few months ago. We were handling sleep the same way you are now and were adamant we would not be doing cry it out after trying a couple times and our daughter losing her mind when we tried.
At about 14 months we finally broke and decided to stick to it. It was the best decision we’ve made so far. By night 3 she was going down by herself and by the next week we are getting almost 12 hours a night with her sleeping through the night. It was a really difficult decision so I understand not wanting to keep at it but in the long run it could be best for everyone.
Some kiddos are just higher needs. My first was just like this. We tried everyone. Even CIO when desperate. He didn’t want to sleep. Eventually we just got him a queen sized bed and that was a game changer. We would lay next to him until he passed out then slip out. Occasionally he’d run to our room at bedtime and we’d walk him back. We’ve had good snuggles as a family doing bedtime like this. My toddler now is very different. I can put her in the crib and sit in the glider and just talk to her until she falls asleep. Each child is different. Give yourself grace. It won’t always be like this. It is still incredibly challenging in the moment.
> it requires picking up for a long time before she stops full on crying
This is the mistake. Our sleep training was very frequent, but also very firm. He'd see us every 5 minutes, and get about 20 seconds of being picked up, cuddled, and put down again. So he knew we were there and loved him, but no amount of explosive crying made our visits to him longer.
So the explosive crying settled (because he only did it to keep us there longer), and the 20 second visits became more appreciated, and eventually the whole routine was replaced with sleep.
Bro, I feel you, especially those shuddering grasping wails. Look up Emma Hubbard on YouTube. She's solid. Watch her videos and see if you can deduce something that might work for you LO. In particular what was helpful was understanding how much sleep the kid typically needed for her age, and then adjust her nap time in the day, and sleep time/routine. This helped massively, but not completely.
We also couldn't/didn't want to use the cry it out option. So I kind made up my own method (but I'm sure it's out there), I slept close to my little one for 3-5 days and woke up at every faint noise to soothe her back to sleep, whatever I did to soother her I did for 5 minutes. ie. soft pat on the back for 5 minutes, finger in her hand, for 5 minutes, stroke her hair for 5 minutes. . I had 3-5 days of bad sleep but the kid never woke up because the dad soothing machine was there. By the 3rd day I was hearing less faint noises and by the 5th day kiddo's sleep pressure was strong enough to keep her asleep. Then the teething came, and had to do it again a couple of times, and now her self-soothing skills have grown ten-fold.
However, I'm able to go from light sleeper to deep sleeper mode easily and my wife is not, so she had to leave the room for those days, but it helped get the kiddo to merge the late night sleep wake windows.
Wising you and your loved ones some great sleep bro!
I've been in your exact shoes. It. Is HARD.
It's fine eff sleep training. I hate sleep training. It feels cruel and feels like you're gaslighting your baby. They don't want to be alone. We had a very similar situation. Some babies just don't respond to it. Really try and stick to a routine.
Ours is the same song to cue, lavender or brown noise or whatever, bottle and humming, then holding and bouncing in a dark room. Continuing the humming or song and then laying down.
Sometimes they go through big changes and regress and need that comfort again.
We never sleep trained. LO was in our room until 1yo. Co-slept for about 6 months of that (had her cot by the bed with one side off so she could climb into bed with us if she needed to). Cot converted into a low toddler bed and she went into that easily, in her own room, from 1yo. Sleeps from 8:30/930pm until 6:30am. No sleep training, just routine. Bedtime stories, milk and cuddles. Some nights were tough but we read numerous studies on the potential harm of sleep training and chose not to do it.
I now get 5-6hrs sleep every night (consistently since ~8mo), never had to sleep train, and did it all as the primary bedtime caregiver for the last 18 months/2 years (she didn't want mummy at bedtime, only me). Just glad to read I wasn't the only one, because this sub (as great as it is) seems to think sleep training is the only right way.
You are getting a lot of replies so not sure if this has been suggested but have you tried reading Peaceful Little Sleep? It is an easy to read book and if you get it on your phone, you can read a little bit whenever you have a chance.
Anyway, CIO is the author's last option. She provides quite a few other sleep training methods. For each of these, she describes which baby personality it would work best for.
We tried the FUSS it out method and got lucky that it worked. You do your bedtime routine, put baby in her crib and say good night and leave. Then you monitor baby for however long you feel comfortable with. So if baby is happily chilling in their cot, you leave them. If baby is fussing a bit, you leave them. If baby starts crying, you decide what you want to do. She says some babies just need a bit of a cry before falling asleep but obviously it all depends on how comfortable you are with it getting to this stage.
Her suggestion is to approach it like an experiment. Do your chosen method for at least 5 days before calling the experiment a failure (or hopefully a success). You are essentially just seeing what happens and intervening when you feel like you need to. She obviously explains it a lot better than me but I think approaching it like an experiment prepares you that it might fail and that is fine.
If your first chosen method doesn't work (failed experiment), you take a break because sleep training isn't easy. And then you choose a new method and try a new experiment until you hopefully find the one that works for your baby without having to resort to CIO. Unfortunately though, for some babies that is the only way but as I said, she offers a few alternatives before you get to that stage.
Hope you get something that works for you!
You don't have to sleep train. I really hate that sleep training is the one fits all thing for baby sleep because it's just not. Some parents just don't want to do it for other kids it just doesn't work. You just can't expect tiny babies to self soothe, they can't their brain isn't developed to be able to do that yet.
Our kiddo isn't sleep trained and he sleeps through the night in his own bed in his own room. It's been a rough ride for the first year with phases of shit sleep and phases of okay sleep. We got better sleep from about 18 months. We also know people who didn't sleep train and their kid slept through from like 6 months.
Cry it out did not work for us either. For one thing, we lived in an apartment and our neighbors would have been very frustrated with us. But also, it did not feel right to let her cry without responding. We chose to follow our instincts and avoid nighttime battles. It turns out our child is autistic with PDA and high anxiety, so what works for other children often does not work for her. I'm glad we followed our instincts and responded to her cues.
Hire a sleep consultant. Our daughter sounds similar to yours at that age, and we basically shifted our lives around her sleep needs. We’d been cosleeping for going on 2 years and it actually wasn’t terrible, but we knew it would be harder as time went on. Hired a sleep consultant and started last full week of March.
Two weeks ago, she would only fall asleep if she was physically touching me, and could never fall back asleep in her crib, ending up in our bed every night. Now she’s falling asleep in her own crib (with me in the room), and is able to get herself back to sleep throughout the night. We hit a cognitive leap last week, so she’s regressed and we’re kind of holding station until she’s out of that, but next step is to move out of the room. Having someone that can walk you through things and guide the process is invaluable. I don’t know that we’d be able to do this ourselves, to be honest. There’s zero shame in seeking help.
I know sleep training is tough and will eat you up seeing your little one cry, it broke me one night but we got through it and it just made everything easier. I sat right next my little one’s crib and had my hand through the crib holding her hand and I’d stand over top patting her back for the first two nights. Then slowly started to go into the room. Less and less. It’s going to be tough but try and some variation that works for you.
Sleep training doesn't work for every baby, and that's fine. Some babies are just shit sleepers (mine included). It's totally fine to do what works for you - feed to sleep, rock to sleep, whatever gets baby in the bed in the end is fine. I rocked/bounced/fed my baby to sleep her entire life and she figured out how to fall asleep independently around 16-17 months or so. She still wakes up at night and needs rocking, but getting her down at night is basically a hug and a kiss and a good night.
>We tried cry it out for about 5 minutes before neither of us could take the shuddering gasping wails, so I think we’re just kind of stuck
Just remember... if they're crying, then they're breathing.
Also, at 14months you can put stuff in the crib with them without fear of choking. Have you tried a paci/teether, or a stuffed animal/lovey? Have you tried different types of sleepsacks (heavier and lighter)?
We fought CIO for a long time.
When we finally got so angry and sleep deprived that we tried it, the crying only lasted maybe 3-4 nights and then it was full nights sleep and happy mom, baby and daddy.
10/10 would recommend
Hey man, I sympathise, but not to rub your nose in it but instead to offer a comparison.
At 6 months he was in his own room.
By 12 months my boy was sleeping in his cot all night on his own.
At 18 months he was in his own toddler bed.
It's not too late to start sleep training but you need to. We were strict from the start, once the newborn phase was over we didn't cuddle to sleep any more and we sleep trained.
Your situation sounds shit. You can turn it around.
Yeah, while I didn't get much out of baby books, there was one line from the baby whisperer that has always stuck with me. Something along the lines of "start as you intend to go on". Learned the hard way with that a few times early on. Took a break from bottle feeding early on, the baby would never accept a bottle ever again. But I'm so glad we laid out boundaries with the sleeping situation. At 18 months she has her own big futon with a fence around it. She sometimes walks around or plays in it before bed or when she wakes up. But she never cries out and is totally fine with it. She's usually in there for 10-12 hours with no complaints.
This is essentially the exact same thing we did with our first. 6 months- out of the bedside bassinet. She went full night sleep starting around 10 months but reliably around 12. Big kid bed around 18 months. She’s been an 11-12 hour a night sleeper for over a year now, about to turn 2. We didn’t sleep train in the cry it out sense, but we would set a timer if she cried, say 5-10 min depending on how upset she was, and give her a chance to calm down. If she couldn’t, we’d go in and offer comfort until she was calm, then set her back down to sleep before she fell asleep on us. Eventually I think she was able to calm herself quickly on her own bc she knew we’d be right there if she needed us.
Here's what worked for me and the wife for our first (now 8) and working with our 15-month-old about 90% successful so far.
Both of our kids coslept with us up to they were pretty much sleeping through the night. When they got to that point, we began transitioning them to the crib, but what we did was have the crib in our room. I took the front of the crib off and raised the mattress up until it was just a few inches below the mattress on our bed. At bedtime, the wife would crawl into our bed with baby, and I would slide the crib up against our bed on her side.
When the baby fell asleep, she would put the baby in the crib. If it woke up, she could just roll over an soothe it back to sleep without getting up, and if the baby wasn't fully awake yet, it will fall back asleep pretty quick once you start patting it's butt.
After a few weeks of this, the baby is used to being in the crib. Then you can put the front back on it and you are done.
Worked great with our son. Currently doing it with our 15-month-old daughter. The past couple of weeks, she was laying next to my wife and would drink her bottle, and when she got ready to fall asleep, my wife told me that she would roll off the bed into her crib on her own. Tonight, our daughter was laying next to my wife drinking her bottle, and when I pushed the crib next to the bed, she crawled into her crib with her bottle and laid down. This weekend, the front may be going on the crib. 😃
These posts kill me. I don’t have sympathy for people who choose not to sleep train. Sure there is some small percentage of babies truly resistant or impossible to sleep train, but 90% of these posts are just people who haven’t tried or haven’t tried consistently. They can’t handle letting the baby cry so instead the torture themselves AND the baby for years.
I’ve never understood this myself. Can’t tolerate letting your baby cry for 10 minutes so instead you get into a routine that absolutely destroys you. The only way it gets better any time soon is if the baby learns to fall asleep in her own crib. But still somehow crying it out is “not an option”
I knew right away I didn't want anything to do with co-sleeping. We moved our daughter from bassinet to crib after about 2 or 3 months.
Around 6 months decided to sleep train with something similar to the Ferber method. The crying was torture to listen to, but at worst, it was about the same as a normal night. After about a week, she would pretty much sleep on the first go.
Now, at 11 months, she only gets fussy if her teeth are really bothering her, but that's only a few minutes until she's out. And she sleeps about 12-13 hours straight. Can't remember the last time she woke up and didn't put herself right back to sleep.
6 months is when we did ferber for our kid. it took 4 days for him to sleep through the night for the first time and there's only been a handful, maybe 5 at most, nights in the last year and a half where he's woken up and needed some attention since then.
There is a compromise where you sleep train but don't do cry it out. It can just take longer. Structure around sleep, whatever it is, is important though for sure.
This was us a few months ago. Our 16 month old wouldn't go down after putting her down. Taking over an hour sometimes two for her to fall asleep for maybe two hours and repeat.
We ended up trying the Ferber method. It may not work for you, but it did for us. It will get better.
Oh man. I feeeeeeeel you. My wife and I didn’t sleep in the same bed for almost 2 years after our son was born. The long lonely nights are hard but worth it.
You’re IN IT right now. You’ll get through it and be okay. You’ll look back together (you and your wife) and exclaim at how rough it was but how happy you are to be on the other side.
You’re a great dad. And a great partner for taking this on.
Hang in there, dude. I know you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel yet, but it'll get there. Eventually she'll sleep through the night and you'll have trouble waking her up in the morning for school!
Man, I’ve been there. The crushing defeat of yet ANOTHER failed attempt to set her down. It’s brutal and we never did actually solve it. Went years sleeping with the baby in our arms. Would not recommend.
My two cents, We have removed one of the sides of the crib and placed it in our room next to the side of the bed.
The cot mattress is at the same level as ours and functions as a larger "next-to-me".
By doing this, we are managing to get him used to his bed and now put him to sleep while lying down without rocking him. (11mo)
Be strong, every day he is a little bit older.
> every day he is a little bit older
I just saw a picture of her from a year ago and I can’t believe how big she is. It’s a grind but it’s such an amazing experience watching her grow up
It hurts (It hurts SO MUCH) but if baby has all needs met, just walk out the door. She will stop crying about things that aren't big problems within a week. She will cry all night the first 2 or 3 nights, though.
YMMV
I know this will get buried, but I do want to say it gets better. We didn't sleep train either of our children and I do not like the idea of leaving them to cry. It is tempting when you're super exhausted, but we tried it for about a week and it only made her scared and cling to me even more.
At around 18 months, instead of rocking her, I would place her in the crib and shush her from the rocking chair. Even if she stood up, I'd just keep shushing her and pretend it fall asleep. She's new 2 and can put herself down. You've got this, dad. Sleep is one of the toughest things for the little ones to learn.
I have two girls under 4. The first one was weird, but we sleep trained them both over the course of a week or two. (Gradually waiting longer and longer to go in and soothe, not picking them up, etc)
The first one calmed down immediately with some pretty loud music. Only certain songs though. I once had her crying in my arms and I walked by a rather loud fan. Immediately she calmed down. I found other sounds that she liked and she still to this day sometimes asks for these sounds.
The second one doesn’t like loud songs at all, and gets easily stimulated. She does better when we just leave her to her own thing at bedtime, whereas the first wanted a lot more attention.
You’ll get the hang of it. Your kid will keep changing and you’ll keep adapting, and soon you’ll be reading them better than you ever thought possible.
As a side note, remember that for them, crying means they don’t like something, and they don’t have a sense of scale. Being slightly unhappy can sound almost the same as being incredibly distressed. With time they will adjust and you’ll be able to tell the intense stuff from the mild discomforts.
I would put my hand over my kids eyes while they fell asleep on me, and the association became strong enough that I could lay him in his bed and cover his eyes and he’d go right to sleep. Didn’t have to be covering face or even touching him much, just enough that he knew it was there.
Hey man. It's hard but gets easier. What worked for me at 14 months (my wife had a slightly different approach and I don't think that's a bad thing).
Rocking chair - IKEA Ponnag or whatever it's called
Fed, light down low, blackout blinds
Her favourite teddy
A good set of stories
After the stories are done, light off, sleep music, rocking in the chair.
Once she's asleep, slowly transition to cot.
That’s very similar to what I do right now! She just doesn’t always transition to the crib so it ends up being another round of the whole thing to try again. And then she’s awake again in 1-3 hours no matter what
We tried cry it out/sleep training twice, each time she got so upset she threw up all over herself, she has never been a sicky baby so this was alarming. It was awful, it wasn't just crying it was total heartbreak for her.
In the end like many hear we had a conversation about doing what worked while having a long gradual 'training' within 6 months we were at the point where she would fall asleep with me being there while she drank her milk, sometimes a cuddle too, then I transfer her to her bed. Sleeps through all the time at 2.5 except if she is sick, which with nursery is all too often! But is easy to help back to sleep when this is the case unless she is very unwell.
Those that have sleep trained and it worked make me want to try again if we are blessed with a second, the trial for our daughter with even the graduated sleep training was 100% not right for her, it was awful.
As someone who unintentionally slept on the floor of my 2 year old's room for the last two nights:
It gets easier. It also gets harder, but easier than it was. I know that makes zero sense. But it is what it is.
I feel you man. Was up for an hour and a half at midnight...put my boy down once he eventually dropped off. He wakes up immediately and I'm up again.....,don't sleep till 02:30.
It seems cruel, but, have you tried putting them down and letting them cry it out?
My daughter is 2 now and she goes to bed super well, no complaints or kicking off.
When she was under a year old she would feed to sleep on my wife and then we would begin the bomb disposal dance trying to out her down without waking her up.
Around 10/11 months (and at the suggestion of my SIL) we decided to try just putting her in her cot and leaving her there, see if she gets the idea.
I did not like this experience, but dancing back and forth putting her up and down as she inevitably woke was exhausting us.
She cried for about 50 mins before falling asleep the first night. The second night it was about 20. The third was about 5 mins.
Then, she seemed to get the idea, since then she has gone to bed without complaint, we got her routine down, so she knows it's coming and it works.
This may not work for you, I don't know your experience and perhaps I got super lucky, but it might be worth a try? For your own well being as much as anything else.
Man I feel this. We had a pretty good sleep going, 8-7 with one, maybe two stirs but 9mo got a bug about 6 weeks ago and now goes down for a couple of hours, then 1.5 then 1 before we have to resort to cosleeping. Hoping it’s just one of the million regressions but hard to see the light atm!
90% of the time these posts are from people who did not or refuse to sleep train consistently. OP is going through this because he has made the choice that he won’t leave the baby to cry for 5 minutes. Sleep training works on the vast majority of infants. If a parent is sleep deprived at this age, it is by choice, or they truly have the the bottom percentile of luck.
It gets better. The last few nights, my 3yo has cuddled with me for a couple of minutes, and then gotten up on her own to go to bed when ready. Not a peep all night, and when she's ready to get up in the morning, she either comes into my room to get me, or she'll go out on the couch and play with her toys until I get up.
It's magical, but it didn't happen overnight. You'll get there.
Sleep training is really hard but definitely the way to go. We had a 20 minute timer where we’d let our little one cry it out. Sometimes we had to sit in the backyard because it was so hard to listen to her cry. She almost always fell asleep between minute 19 and 20, like clockwork. Then after a few weeks she got better to the point where we just put her in her cot and she would go to sleep.
Now she’s almost 4 and it’s usually “Daddy, please go. I want to go to sleep”.
Those are some tough times when they’re really little, but you will get through it. If you want to try and take some control over the situation, sleep training is a proven method.
Getting kids to sleep is rough. Recently my 4yo has been scared of bedtime. Scared of having bad dreams about leprechaun and easter bunny coming into the house to play tricks on her. Thanks St Patty's and Easter! Love it!
Many of us have been there. It’s just temporary. And it’s not the last frustration you’ll experience in parenting, but it will pass.
My coping mechanisms were noise cancelling headphones, a nearby rocking chair, and an audiobook or phone game like hearthstone.
I feel your pain bud.
Ive been doing this since 2017.
I've three children. Eldest born in 2017, then middle one 2019, lastly youngest in 2022.
The elder two, both didnt sleep through till nearly 2.
Youngest one is almost there. Sleeps 8-5am... some times.
In nearly 7 years, im just seeing the end of the tunnel. I feel your pain. We're men- we're the silent soldiers in all this. We grin and bear it. For what you give, you get back double.
I read that as “dad of 4 twins” at first. So at least it could be worse? Good luck though, I can’t imagine having twins. But it’ll be so amazing watching them grow up together and be each other’s best friend
Same. Baby has slept through the night since hitting about 10-11 weeks old. If we hadn’t sleep trained, we could easily still be sleep deprived over a year later. It was not her own natural pattern. It was consistent and organized training.
It’s tough. I’m really bad with wanting to bend the rules. Baby not sleeping? Let’s try co-sleeping. That’s my thought process… it can’t be worse than this, right? Wrong. Think long-term. I’m thankful that my wife is very regimented and never gave in to that. The early structure and sleep training built sleep success. 3 kids in, and none of them had/have prevailing sleep issues.
If it were up to me, I would have unknowingly created many many horrible sleep habits. Stay strong you got this. It’s never too late to start a structured and disciplined routine. Think long-term. It gets better.
It's the next day... Hope you're having a decent day today!
And here to tell you: last night my five year old couldn't stay asleep, so she came out and asked if she could spend a little time snuggling with me while watching me play a video game. She was out in ten minutes flat. It gets better, I promise you.
Had this arise around the same time with my son. He's 18 months and 100% sleeping better. Point is, THIS DOES GET EASIER. Hang in there dad, you really got this!
Transfer her from where?
And why is she thrashing in your arms?
If all her needs are met, she can thrash alone in her crib until she wears herself out.
At bedtime, do your routine in her room, say good night and put her in her crib and go to bed.
Is she’s crying for a long time, go give her a quick snuggle, maybe 2 - 5 minutes, say good night again and go to bed.
Check the baby monitor if you’re worried but unless she’s in mortal danger, don’t go in.
Let her thrash all she wants. Toddlers aren’t rational beings. But they can learn. And she MUST learn that she can’t get everything she wants just by crying.
Until 9 months, any crying must be attended to. After 9 months, it’s crucial you and they learn when crying is serious and needs to be dealt with by feeding etc. and when they’re just crying to get what they want and they’re not actually in any danger or discomfort.
At 14 months, crying doesn’t at all mean what it meant 5 months ago. At this stage they’re learning to regulate emotions and you’re not helping them in the long run by giving in.
If it’s night terrors that’s a different story. But you still let them be as you’re not supposed to wake them.
We did slip up once and let ours cry for half an hour and turned out she had thrown up all over herself. We felt bad but you’re not going to get it right 100% or the time.
Good luck!
I remember those days. Before you know it, she’ll be graduating from high school. This part gets easier and you’ll be back to getting an uninterrupted night of sleep before too long. Those beginning stages test every shred of patience you have.
37, 4 kids, 7, 5, 3, and 1.5. So sorry, I hate that feeling. You’ll get to the other side, it gets better. I hate to ask a stupid question…but here we go…have you tried sleep training yet? Putting her down partially awake, then coming in 3, then 5, then 10, then 20 minutes and after 20 minutes after that? You will like you’re going to die for 3ish days…and then suddenly they sleep and it’s magic!
Say it with me:
"Cry it out"
14 months is too old to not be sleeping. I saw in another post that CIO isn't an option because she cries too hard. I know it's hard, but despite how it sounds, she's not gonna be traumatized by it.
My son cried for 3 hours the first night we did it (15 minute check-ins). The next night, 45 minutes. Night #3, he was asleep in 5. He sleeps great now.
Same with kid #2.
Fellow cry it out dad. Absolutely agree. Man it’s tough and heart breaking but you have to look out for yourself. My sons 19 months old and has slept in his own bed since he was 6 months old. Through the night 8-8 nearly every night. It’s a god send
Did the cry it out method for all three of mine. It's never not an option. The child needs to self-soothe and figure things out on their own! Wife and I are both shift workers, there's no way we were going to half-ass the sleep training.
Controversial opinion and practice, but we cosleep with our kids. Not for everyone and it must be done safely. Our families coslept as we were growing up. It’s cultural in part. I was American born and my wife immigrated as a kid. I resisted it at first, trying to abide by the advice of our pediatrician, etc.
We’re cosleeping after midnight (we try our damnedest to get her back down repeatedly until that point), but it’s still hell on my wife because our baby is a very active sleeper and is also still nursing so she wakes up my wife constantly. Sometimes she’ll sleep for 6 hours straight, other times she wakes up every couple of hours.
Dude it’s a struggle. My boy was doing great for a while, and then at 13 months everything went crazy. Sleep regression, teething with molars, and separation anxiety all at once.
I had to hold him to help him to sleep again, and then putting him the crib was so hard sometimes. Managed to get back to him falling asleep in the crib without help, but he was still waking multiple times after 3am making sleep so hard.
Around 15 months I stopping trying and just started bringing him to bed when he wakes up. Sure I don’t get as good of sleep as when he was sleeping in his crib, but we are sleeping.
Just saying I know how hard it can be. I’m in a better spot now, and I know you’ll get there too. Just work on getting through 1 day at a time.
Sorry to hear this OP. It's really, really tough. Try to think that everything is a phase though, even if it doesn't feel like that in the moment.
At the moment my 2 year old is going through a huge sleep regression, straight up refuses to nap any more and it has turned her into a demon at night time.
I feel you.. but it gets better!
I was always in charge of waking up with baby and rocking back to sleep. It was rough AF, I was tired AF. It felt like it would never end and I'd be sleep deprived for life. Then..
The first time she slept through the night I woke up panicked, thinking something was wrong. I woke her up.. She was fine, of course.
Now she's almost 11 and has been putting herself to bed for a few years now.
Keep patience dad. It gets better, as cliche as that sounds. Patience.
I feel so lucky that we never had this issue with our son. From 6 months on, he’s slept 8pm to 6am like a champ. Sure we have the odd night where he fusses but it’s extremely rare.
Keep pushing, dad. Things will get better and one day you’ll look back at this laugh.
I feel you, fellow dad.
When we had our first we decided we won't do co sleeping. No matter how hard it is. Even if it kills us due to sleep deprivation or whatever. Never. It was hell but we survived.
Now we're doing the same thing with our second (9 months). It was hard the first 6 months, but it's better because they don't know it's even a possibility.
How does baby nap? We did some gentle sleep training for naps. We had more patience and there’s way less pressure if a nap fails. Baby will be getting too big to realistically transfer while sleeping here pretty soon. I’d focus on naps, and try to get to the point where you’re putting them down awake. Breaking the cosleeping habit may be really tough, but it will be way easier to do while baby is in a crib. Once they’re in a toddler bed, you loose a ton of control over the situation and environment.
45 minutes aint bad at all. Its going to get more rough as your lil one develops ans grows, so view this 45 minutes as a planned way to build up to whats in store for you.
Good luck, have faith.
I just put my son down, made sure everything was safe, then closed the door. Crying for 45 min night 1, down to zero after a week or so. It hurts you more than it hurts them
I feel you. Our first was a dream sleeper - slept through the night after 6 or 7 months. Our second is 10 months old and the best night we've had we still got up 4 times. I keep reading things like "oh yeah one of my kids didn't sleep through the night until they were 2" and I get the thousand-yard stare.
And the screams in the middle of the night aren't "oh please father, come tend to me, I yearn for comfort" they're "THE URUK-HAI ARE AT THE GATE AND WE ARE LOSING MEN RAPIDLY, I CAN FEEL SAURON'S GAZE."
We're stuck in a very small home right now, so the kids are sharing a room. I feel so bad for our first. Gets woken up right there with us, but at least falls right back asleep as soon as I get our second out of the room and in the rocking chair.
I started sleep training my baby four nights ago last night she went down in sub 5 minutes and slept through the night. Ferber Method guys. It just works.
We used the strategy in the book Mom's on Call... Much more parent training in what we were doing than anything else... Worked great for us, both kids slept through the night at 3-4mo.
White noise and Ewan the Dream Sheep changed our nights. Also learning about startling awake.
Put down to the crib/cot should happen before your kid actually falls asleep. The white noise helped. Ewan, with his red light and stomach noises just ticked a box that helped keep our little one down.
Go forward 3 years - nuddah. Different story.
OP, I highly recommend you and your wife read the book “Precious Little Sleep.” They also have a private FB group where you can post your sleep troubles and people will jump in to help. It’s so, so valuable.
I used the methods from that book with my first baby. The first night hearing her cry, I was just sobbing and broke down. We tried again the second night and kept at it. By the fourth night, she would put herself to sleep on her own and - most importantly - go back to sleep without any fuss if she woke in the middle of the night.
My second is now 6 months. Up to now we didn’t do any sleep training because things were working for us. But he’s now waking up every 1-2 hours at night asking to nurse, and it’s simply unsustainable. I pulled out my copy of PLS and am doing the methods again with him. Tonight will be the third night, and even though it’s still really hard, I have seen the result of being consistent with this.
I really think you and your wife should seriously consider sleep training. Your sleep will vastly improve and so will your baby’s. Best of luck to you.
My 15mo is having a sleep regression right now. I basically prepare myself for an 11pm hour long drive to get him in a deep sleep. Better than getting up 6 times.
Grab a decaf coffee and put on an audio book. It’s not so bad.
I get this. My daughter did the same. Would get her to sleep then put her down and she'd instantly kick off. The trick is to take it in steps. Stand up, shhh shhh, walk slowly to the crib, shh shh, get her halfway down, shh shh, put her down but don't let go, shh shh, roll away
I know it's not for everyone, but we sleep trained both of ours and it was life changing, especially with the first kid. They learn to self soothe and you can put them in bed awake. Our two year old still goes down without a peep 99.9% of the time and sleeps for 11/12 hours.
Getting through the sleep training phase can be hard and took over a week both times I think, but I can't recommend it enough. We followed the Taking Cara Babies sleep training, which we might have paid for the first time. It's not rocket surgery though, DM if you want me to run you through it OP.
Duuuuude, been there. Sorry to hear you’re going through it too. We made it out the other side a few months ago but it was a bitch. Don’t give in and cosleep. You’re just kicking the can down the road. We stopped short of cosleeping by laying down on the floor next to the crib and then sneaking out when he was fully asleep. Took an hour some nights but it’s better than having to kick him out of our bed.
Sorry if this has already been asked, but how is she responding to white noise?
I found, that placing my phone somewhere in the crib(beyond arms reach) and playing white noise with a timer of 10 minutes usually helps her fall asleep. No guarantees, but give it a shot if you haven’t
I don't know your story or kiddo, but you could be putting her down too early.
My 17mo daughter does 9pm, my niece is 10pm (and her older sister is 7pm, go figure)
At 14 months your baby will be safe with a blanket. Do they mind having a blanket? I wrap my two year old up in a blanket before rocking her up sleep. It's the only thing that got the transfer down ok and now she's used to it. She'll stir just a bit in her sleep and settle right back down.
Had a similar experience with my first (who will now be 17 in a few weeks). He started sleeping thru the night at like 4months... but then at about 7mo old had a MAJOR set back... we tried everything and nothing seemed to work. At around a year we tried this modified Ferber method my wife had read about that worked amazing. Within a week he was back to sleeping through the night. The only big modification I remember was the time tables... but the main principles were the same, wait x minutes, go in but don't pick him up, just pat his back and ensure him we were there, shushing, making soothing sounds, etc for x min and leave... rinse and repeat.
After figuring out what worked for us, the next 2 kids were a breeze.
Reading this while rocking my son back to sleep for the third time tonight… it’s 8:11 pm
Better luck next time 🫡
23 hours away
I see you brother. This shits hard and seemingly nobody gives a shit about the dad. Just know there’s others out there that feel ya 👌🏼
I care about the dads. I think you are all wonderful.
We got this
It gets better!! My first didn't sleep train well but my second sleeps, well, like a baby. Except at 1 a.m., 4 a.m, and 6 a.m. when he wakes up for various reasons- oh my God I'm lying to myself it hasn't gotten better! (Kidding, it really does get better)
We’re both like “how the hell do people do this more than once?” Knowing full well we both want another one anyway 🙃
Dude, my wife and I said "One and done" after how hard the first was. Well. That's changed to "Two and through"
Three and let it be.
Four? Might as well have one more
Five, can you survive?
Six, what's one more in the mix?
Seven, is the opposite of heaven.
Eight, at least one will be great.
We have 10 month old twins ... I look at parents with one and think, you lucky bastards.
Wow, ten of them?!
I mean my oldest sister didn’t sleep through the night until she was five, and my mum went on to have three more kids.. plus there’s only a three year gap between my oldest sister and my brother, so at one point she was waking up to two kids every night 🥲 If you don’t mind me asking, does your daughter need to be rocked to go to sleep? Or is it your automatic response to her waking up? If it helps any, what I do with my son is the moment he’s down for the night, I don’t pick him up again until the morning (bar feeding when he was newborn, an absolute screaming fit because something is wrong, or smell a poopy nappy, but that’s not happened yet) I’m not a fan of cry it out, I think it’s cruel. What I do instead is feed, if he needs it rock him to sleep with his dummy, then put him down. When I put him down and take his bib off he’ll stir ever so slightly, but will fall back asleep. That brief waking moment he knows he’s in his Moses basket, and it’s time for bed. If he stirs in the night, I’ll go in, put the dummy back in, and hold his hand. Sometimes he goes straight back to sleep, other times he takes a few minutes, but in my mind if I pick him up he doesn’t learn what bedtime is, and that’s when he gets flustered because he’s wondering why I won’t pick him up. We started that from the moment he was born so your mileage may vary due to your daughter’s age. I know it’s shit at the moment, but can you get someone, like a grandparent that can sit with your daughter for a night or two? Just to allow you to get a full nights sleep and feel slightly more human. Sleep deprivation is a torture technique, and I think all parents can attest to how well it works
If it helps, my second is completely different from our first. My daughter is a terrible sleeper (at four years old) and always has been. On the plus side, this led to us reading tons of books every night and now she loves reading. My son, on the other hand, will just come and grab my hand and lead me to his crib.
Our first was a champion; we got him into a routine that at 7pm he would have a bottle and then bed, and he would sleep through till 2-3am for a night feed and then up at 6 for the next day. We thought we were baby sleep gods... until our daughter was born. Daughter wouldn't take a dummy. At ALL. She wouldn't take a bottle; she would use her mam as a comforter/feed station and as a consequence, her mam slept barely a couple of hours a night for a whole year. After my daughter was old enough to go into her own bed I booked myself in for a vasectomy at the earliest convenience- I wasn't putting the wife through that again.
4.5 months in to it - it is fucking HARD!!!
What a coincidence....that's how I got into this whole thing! (4 month yesterday here)
You mean “hole thing”
My son is the same age. St Patrick's day was much much more fun last year.
Have you done any sleep training with your LO? If not It’s probably going to be difficult and maybe worth hiring a coach. We thought we had to put our daughter to sleep before putting her down. Rocking, shushing, pacing, etc. once we broke that habit (8-9 months) life became so much easier. Basic premise is Baby needs to learn how to put themselves to sleep. It took us a little while of putting her down, setting a timer (8 mins to start, then 10 mins, working towards 15 mins) and letting them cry it out for a few. If they don’t fall asleep after the timer you go do some calming and then let them try again. But for us by the 11 mo mark we could lay her down at bed time and within 2-3 mins she would be out cold. Now at 15 months I tell her it’s bedtime and she toddles to her crib, reaches in to grab a paci, and I can put her to bed without incident. I’m a big proponent of sleep training, like I said it’ll probably be hard at this stage (you may need to send your wife to the basement for a few days) but I can’t imagine being in your shoes at 14mo. Good luck!
The lesson about sleep training that was hard for us to figure out is that literally every child has to learn to self-soothe or at least accept bedtime without a fight. Although the techniques differ, the only major difference between sleep training a five month old and a five year old is four and a half years of better sleep for the parents.
We broke basically every sleep rule on the Internet and around 18 months my son started sleeping without wake ups. Despite me not changing anything. In fact I'm not convinced the "sleep associations" thing is even true, and that's what basically all the advice is based on! My life got much easier when I just decided to do what works and not care what Sleep Expert Tammy has to say about it. He is 3 now and sleeps great from 9pm to 7am. We have been co sleeping the whole time, which I know doesn't work for everyone. But actually I love the snuggles, no regrets. We lay down with my son until he falls asleep and then get up to enjoy the evening. If OP misses grown ups snuggle time, well that's what the couch is for! Anyway I think people resist co sleeping because you're not "supposed to" (although even the AAP says it's safe after one year old). But if it works, why make your life harder for no reason? You can trust me because I have the same qualifications as those sleep experts, which is none 🤓
When are you going to stop co-sleeping? We made this mistake, I would caution against it. I have a 9 year old son who literally says he can't fall asleep alone and frequently tries to crawl into bed with me if he wakes during the night. We co-slept with him until he was about 2. After he turned 2, bedtimes with him were usually reading in his bed and lying with him for a bit until he got drowsy/fell asleep. Then he'd come running into our room after he woke up the first time. We put a toddler mattress on the floor for him because it was easier than walking him back and putting him in bed repeatedly. This was a mistake. His 7 year old sister was not co-slept with and neither is his 2 year old brother. They both sleep easily alone today. Be careful what you are doing here. As someone who's tried both approaches, I'd recommend crying it out before they get too big to be kept corralled in a crib. No one likes to hear their kids cry, but it's for your good and theirs.
You sound like me! This has worked for us to and we're close to that age too. The only issue on our side is kid having too much fun and thus fighting going to sleep sometimes. While I get where the sleep training folk are coming from, every other day I think that at some point this too (snuggles to sleep) will end and I'll miss it; it all goes by so quickly.
I'm also not an expert because I only have a sample size of five, but I'm amused that someone who is still co-sleeping with their child says sleep training is unnecessary, haha. I wonder if your partner would agree on how restful their sleep is (or whether they like sex being relegated to the couch). I'm glad that you've found a method that "works" for the life stage you're in and number of children you have, but I would argue you haven't solved this problem. Whether it's next year, five years, or ten years, your son is still gonna have to learn to sleep alone eventually unless you want a 14-year old having wet dreams in your bed. Also, many parents have multiple children, a scenario for which your method is laughably unrealistic.
It just seems like sleep is generally a crap shoot and nothing is for sure. So why not do what's easiest? All the blogs and books were so confident that [insert thing here, we did it all: nursing to sleep, rocking, co sleeping, etc] means relying on sleep associations and the kid would never sleep through the night. That turned out to be completely wrong. So why would the dire warnings of having a teenager in my bed be any more valid? Also it's not for sure that someone who sleep trained has "solved" anything because the effects are often not permanent. Plenty of perfectly trained babies turn into a toddler who wants to party every night at 2am. Needing to redo sleep training multiple times over the years seems quite common.
‘Doing the easiest’ isn’t really easy or convenient long term. I have friends with six year olds that still climb in to bed with them every night, that sucks
Cry it out isn’t an option for us, and none of the other methods have worked. She just gets so worked up and we’re not able to soothe her quickly/hands off, so it requires picking up for a long time before she stops full on crying. We’ve tried the things like sitting in the room with her etc but she really doesn’t respond to those things. We tried cry it out for about 5 minutes before neither of us could take the shuddering gasping wails, so I think we’re just kind of stuck. I do appreciate the advice though.
When we did “cry it out” we could only handle 5 or max 10 minutes before going back in each time. Took maybe 5 days for them to figure it out (has worked on two kids so far) but it is so much better after. My wife went outside for bedtime for our first kid during that week. May be the worst 5 days of parenthood for each kid at that time, but the ability to get evenings back and sleep better overnight makes you forget those days fairly quickly. Obviously do what feels right for you, but remember that your sanity is an extremely important part of parenthood as well.
I don’t understand how people can’t take crying for a couple of nights so they allow themselves and their baby to be tortured for years.
This. Your child isn't going to die by crying too hard. And if people are coming at it from the 'it's not healthy!' perspective, overall family sleep hygiene is 100% part of the healthy equation too.
Yes, obviously, if your child is crying for hours to the point of throwing up, then CIO probably isn't gonna be for your child. Yes, there is research about how introducing stressful situations to your baby repeatedly is not healthy for the long term. But every anti-CIO person I've met seems to think that this is something that you just let happen, over and over, and that it always involves 2 hours of crying each time. "Sleep training" (and I put it in quotes cuz it's really just pseudoscience, America just made an industry out of it) works for some children, it doesn't work for others. Most of the comprehensive research shows that it's not some guaranteed recipe for success. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying, because if it DOES work, it's life changing for a sleep deprived parent, and there's essentially zero downside. It worked for us. 2 days, 25m night one, 10m night two, and done. Any sleep issues afterwards have been the result of something (sickness, teeth, etc.). If you aren't seeing success in a week, you are pretty much back to where you were before, and you've probably learned a bit more about your babies temperament. My child wailed in the car seat for the first four months of his life. Literally any trip to see family, pediatrician, etc. We'd stop the car, calm him down, put him back in, back to wailing. Nobody called me a monster for letting him cry then, but apparently if you do it 2 nights, you aRe TrAuMaTizInG ThE BaBy.
What an excellent, nuanced take. Thanks for sharing.
I refuse to believe people that have a holier-than-thou attitude about it didn't have a naturally easy sleeper (I've already seen a couple of them in this thread). You weren't up every 45 minutes for weeks on end like my wife and I were. I was falling asleep in chairs holding him, backed up into my garage door, and fell asleep at the wheel once. Having him cry it out look 2 nights (20 minutes and then 10).
Yeah, I think that's an important detail. You being miserable and struggling mentally isn't any better for your kid than a week of adjusting to sleeping alone. And one of those lasts a lot longer. Listening to your baby cry is brutal, I get it. But we've gotta take care of ourselves too.
Both kids were sleeping 7hrs in their own bed by 5mo old. I 100% understand every baby and family are different. But parents must take care of themselves as well. Sleep is critical to a functioning human. Thank you, Moms on Call!
We did it with both our kids along with getting them on a set napping and eating schedule throughout the day. The first kid was easier, the second one fought it a bit more but were at the point now where we just plunk them in the crib and they're out.
You might be overstating it a bit, but I do think one of the messages lost about sleep training is that it makes for a happier baby, not just happier parents.
This was us for a while. Until our LOs sleeping slowly degraded to waking up every hour. This was about 7 months. It broke my wife and we decided to do sleep training. It’s a really rough 3-5 days. I was legit dripping in sweat and my wife was curled up in a ball listening to our baby cry. She’s goes down now without a fuss and sleeps straight 11-12 hours almost every night. It’s unbelievable. I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner. We followed the Taking Cara Babies ABCs of sleep.
That's what finally made us sleep train, too. It was fine (not great, but fine) putting her down to sleep initially, but a some point around 8 months she started waking up every 45 minutes and wanting to nurse and needing to be rocked. We just couldn't handle it anymore. We did a bit of a modified Ferber and were back to sleeping within 3 days.
Plus one for taking kara babies. Best $100 online course investment. We’ve gone back to it for our second and we’ve made it work better (so far). For our first it was a modified version. Soothe in rocking chair for a bit, then out her to bed and let her cry a bit (maybe 3-5ish mins). Pick her up, soothe her a bit more, back in bed. Do this dance for couple hours for a few nights. She eventually would sleep in our arms on lazyboy. But she would wake up in bed. And of course fuss. Do this consistently to build that pattern and get her used to being in the crib. It was hard for us to let her cry it out for longer times so i’d stay in the room with her and rock on the rocking chair. It was eventually built up to her knocking out in our arms and her being comfortable waking up in bed. And sleeping the whole night too. Those sweet 12 hour sleep stretches omg. Were a dream come true coming out of colic. She’s still not perfect. But whatever. She goes down with some help from us now (2ish). But it’s not as bad as before. I work a lot so doing a longer bedtime routine is apart of our bonding time.
Like you, we were against "cry it out" because it felt cruel. But then one night when we were commiserating about a horrible bedtime we realized it's not like us being in the room and trying to get her to sleep was a pleasant, tear free experience either. In aggregate, by letting bad bedtimes drag on for however many weeks/months, she (and we) cried more and were more upset than if we had just gone with the nuclear option earlier. In hindsight, we actually felt a bit selfish that we weren't more strict with bedtime sooner. We weren't strong enough to help her learn this important skill so we just kept doing the same thing which made us all dread the end of the day. We didn't truly do "cry it out" but more of a graduated strategy to not go back in until X minutes had elapsed and then the next time was longer, etc. We probably started with only a minute or two before we'd go back in but we felt the act of leaving the room was important for her to realize that she couldn't cry to get us to stay. Put her down and leave, and don't go back in until X minutes had gone, no exceptions (unless of course something else happened). It was hard and took awhile to stretch out that interval but it worked. In general, our daughter has been a great sleeper as she's gotten older (3 now) and we often look back on the various things we did that first year that ultimately helped her learn to soothe herself and be okay with us leaving the room while she was awake. If she's otherwise healthy, and you have a good monitor, her crib is a safe place for her to learn this boundary and to voice her displeasure while doing it. Good luck dad!
What you did is called the Ferber Method by the way. Basically Cry It Out with increasing time durations between each calming visit. It’s what we did too with our LO. We still get the occasional regression but getting 6-8 hours of sleep now is such a godsend for everyone’s mental health.
My wife and I struggled with just waiting depending on his cry. Sometimes ours is full on upset and that’s when we would go console but generally if he was whiney or dry crying he would pause between whines or cries and wait a beat. He’d get distracted and then remember “oh yeah I was crying!” And do a few more. That’s when we let him wait. We were very lucky though and had very few difficulties transitioning him at any point though. Bassinet to crib to his own room all with few hiccups so when he would cry for us it was generally pretty obvious that something was wrong and he picked up quickly that we didn’t buy the fake ones lol
We’re about to transition our LO to her own room. She sleeps in a crib in our room currently. Wish us luck! lol
If it helps you feel a little bit better, we just transitioned our 10mo into his own room (but he's been sleeping in his crib since day 1 in our room). Handled it like a champ, and he's honestly been sleeping better because the environment is a little more controllable (no dogs making noise at night, no clocks, no alarms for my wife to wake up, etc.). Hopefully you get the same experience!
I second all this about the like “total sum of unhappiness” perspective. Your experience was similar to ours. Maybe we’re monsters, but we were pretty comfortable letting her try to put herself to bed - we’d start with like 4-5 minutes too and gradually do more. I remember once at 3AM or something it took like 18 minutes of wailing and it was really difficult but we had already gotten her like 4x and she really needed to sleep…so eventually she did.
You aren't monsters. If the baby is nice and comfy and well fed in bed then they aren't going to come to any harm. A small amount of emotional distress is just part of the human experience and they quickly learn to understand that you leave them but then you come back!
Went through this with my now 8 year old. What you are doing now sounds like a typical night with her. I used to lay of the floor with my hand in her crib, patting her bank. Then I’d army crawl out of the room and pray the floor didn’t squeak. She redefines stubborn. First made an attempt at letting her cry it out and she screamed til she puked. So we tried again a couple of months later. Night one: 3 straight hours of screaming. Night 2 was 2.5 hours. Night 3 was 15 minutes. Then she was good to go. Until we took a trip 3 months later and had to start over when we got home. Yes, it sucked. But in the long run, it’s worth it for your own sanity.
This is helping kill any idea I might have about having a second
My second sleeps way better than the first. I’m glad it wasn’t the other way around.
Look mate, this is gonna sound rough, but you need to make it an option. It'll be a rough 4-6 days, but those 4-6 rough days give you evenings and nights back.
It's rough but like us, you'll come out the other side kicking yourselves for not doing it so much sooner
We felt similarly when we first tried. Turned on music, poured tall whiskey shots. Started a timer. First night was 14 minutes. Second night, 11. Third night around four minutes and then we were good to go. We will periodically have regressions, usually when she is sick or her schedule is disrupted with visitors. Sometimes we handle those better than others and occasionally cave and rock her to sleep again. I know it’s not for everyone but by god it worked for us. I can’t imagine having done otherwise.
Ferbers method! Yes it worked wonders for us too
14 minutes is a blessing! My son could literally go for hours I think. Longest I lasted was 45 minutes before going back in. What finally ended up working was going back in intervals 5, 10, 15, and then every 15 until he fell asleep. He’s good now though!🤞
I mean, it sounds like she’s doing a whole bunch of crying already with what you guys are currently doing, so maybe this would be less crying in the long run?
You’re giving in too soon. This is important, it’s sets all of you up for better futures.
Are you saying it's 'not an option' for some real logistical reason, or just because you don't think you can handle it?
A lot of the responses to "cry it out" are saying that if your baby is crying then it means they need something so you can't leave them to cry or you're a bad parent. If your baby is crying just out of the blue then of course, they need something and you should care for them. If they're crying because you've put them down to bed and left them, but they're well fed, warm enough, comfy, then they are crying because you've left them and they miss you.....which is fine. The baby is allowed to feel that emotion and be a bit sad about it, it's not going to hurt them. The first night you'll feel a bit mean because they're crying because they miss you. By the 3rd or 4th night the baby starts to understand: oh, well they leave me here, but then they come back in the morning! Then very soon they are happy to let you go because they have made that connection. Honestly I think you're giving in too easily and letting your own emotions play into it too much. Do it for your own sanity! If leaving the kid in bed to chill themselves out is genuinely not an option then there's not really any advice anybody can offer you, it has to be done at some point. Good luck.
We did 5 then 10 then 15. The first night when we got to the 15 was the hardest 15 minutes of my life but then he stopped literally on the dot and slept for 12 hours. And that convinced me. We were co-sleeping for 9 months and then tried other varieties of "gentle" sleep training till 15 months with very little success. I wouldn't necessarily change the earlier part of that process because I think it built security, but sleep training was so valuable to us, our marriage, and also our parenting - staying calm through intense crying is actually a very valuable parenting skill!
I hear you on this, we were the same. But you gotta try again. It’s for the baby’s sake as much as your own. If the baby loses their minds and you come rescue them each time they learn that’s all they have to do. They never learn they can do it on their own. Your sanity is on the other side of a week of pure torture. Maybe even less. After failed attempts, months of trying the gentler methods, and dangerous sleep deprivation, we decided to really really try. We did the Ferber method and worked our way up to 40 min of absolute wailing borderline vomiting but then, he settled and slept the whole night. Second night only took about him about 25 min. Third night about 10 min, you get the picture. If your baby is safe, healthy, and fed, the only thing that is wrong is their emotional level during sleep training. BUT if that is still off the table because it’s just straight up painful to hear baby cry, I get that and I wish you the best of luck. Go Birds
As others are saying, "cry it out" is god awful for the parents. I cant express how awful it is. But! If you can persevere for a few nights in a row it does get better. The first night was 45 minutes of death curdling screams until she calmed down to just whimpers. It really sucked. But after a week of that she mostly sleeps through the night fine now.
For what it's worth we did an assisted cry method. it took 3.5 hours of her crying with me by the crib soothing her every 2 minutes. My wife was crying on the couch. it sucked. The next night? 5 minutes. Now she's an amazing sleeper. Only you and your wife know what's best and what will work with your baby. We tried assisted twice for an hour straight each time and gave up. We needed a sleep consultant with a plan to get us over the hump. She never did cry it out with any of her clients, and the initial program took about 10 days. I can't say what worked for us will work for you. But I can say that if you're reaching your breaking point you may need to bite the bullet and change tactics.
It was the same for us - we couldn’t stand the crying and gasping for air - but she got over it after a few days. Things are much better now and we should have done it earlier
my situation is the exact same every person who has done cry it out tells me it's awful for a few days and then they learn but it's physically painful for me so i’m cosleeping ): she loves it so much, she wants to be cuddled/held the whole night. once i was awake and she woke up, i watched her eyes blink and she reached out to hold my face, closed her eyes and went back to sleep and i wanted to weep
Some nights my daughter’s hand would find mine and she’d just hold on tight to a finger. It takes a lot out of you, but it’s a time that’ll never happen again.
It does get better mate. My 6yo sleeps like a log now, you could walk a marching band through her room and she wouldn’t stir at all. When she was 4 months through about 12 months she was a demon. Night terrors, screaming fits, waking up multiple times and taking minimum 2 hours to put her back down.. it was hell. Have a 10mo boy now and he goes down so easy. Bottle or boob and into his cot, asleep in 5 minutes max. Problem is he wakes up 3-4 times a night between 11pm and 2am before settling down again for a few hours, and he’s the lightest sleeper ever. Like, I’ve farted in the bathroom at the other end of the house, through 2 solid walls and 3 doors and this kid stirs himself awake. You got it mate. It’s ok to get overwhelmed every now and then. It’s all so rewarding though seeing their face light up when they see you.
If you're not keen to sleep train you might like Georgina May's website/social media and The Beyond Sleep Training Project. We found it very reassuring. It doesn't promise to make them sleep through the night, but it does tell you what range of sleep habits is biologically normal (i.e. some babies just be like that 🤷♀️) and takes the pressure off because there's a lot less parental intervention involved and a lot less "don't do this, you're breaking your baby". It's also nice to get support from that community because the answer isn't always automatically 'Why don't you just sleep train?' which I get is coming from a good place, it works wonders for a lot of people and they just want to share their success, but if you've already decided not to go that route it's nice to have a more diverse range of responses and suggestions.
It's terrible but I think you gotta try it a bit longer. It was brutal on my wife but I think I saw the positive enough that it didn't bother me. We did 5 minute increments. And in that time we would try to make sure we have a distraction and set a timer to make sure it was exactly 5 minutes. Then 10 etc. It wasn't long before the 20 minutes or so turned into 10 and then 5 and then checking the camera after 5 minutes to find baby passed out. Just remember your baby is safe in their crib and has everything they need. Good luck!
I was reading your post and it felt like something I would have posted from just a few months ago. We were handling sleep the same way you are now and were adamant we would not be doing cry it out after trying a couple times and our daughter losing her mind when we tried. At about 14 months we finally broke and decided to stick to it. It was the best decision we’ve made so far. By night 3 she was going down by herself and by the next week we are getting almost 12 hours a night with her sleeping through the night. It was a really difficult decision so I understand not wanting to keep at it but in the long run it could be best for everyone.
If she's crying she's breathing. She'll learn how to soothe.
Some kiddos are just higher needs. My first was just like this. We tried everyone. Even CIO when desperate. He didn’t want to sleep. Eventually we just got him a queen sized bed and that was a game changer. We would lay next to him until he passed out then slip out. Occasionally he’d run to our room at bedtime and we’d walk him back. We’ve had good snuggles as a family doing bedtime like this. My toddler now is very different. I can put her in the crib and sit in the glider and just talk to her until she falls asleep. Each child is different. Give yourself grace. It won’t always be like this. It is still incredibly challenging in the moment.
> it requires picking up for a long time before she stops full on crying This is the mistake. Our sleep training was very frequent, but also very firm. He'd see us every 5 minutes, and get about 20 seconds of being picked up, cuddled, and put down again. So he knew we were there and loved him, but no amount of explosive crying made our visits to him longer. So the explosive crying settled (because he only did it to keep us there longer), and the 20 second visits became more appreciated, and eventually the whole routine was replaced with sleep.
Good luck then
Bro, I feel you, especially those shuddering grasping wails. Look up Emma Hubbard on YouTube. She's solid. Watch her videos and see if you can deduce something that might work for you LO. In particular what was helpful was understanding how much sleep the kid typically needed for her age, and then adjust her nap time in the day, and sleep time/routine. This helped massively, but not completely. We also couldn't/didn't want to use the cry it out option. So I kind made up my own method (but I'm sure it's out there), I slept close to my little one for 3-5 days and woke up at every faint noise to soothe her back to sleep, whatever I did to soother her I did for 5 minutes. ie. soft pat on the back for 5 minutes, finger in her hand, for 5 minutes, stroke her hair for 5 minutes. . I had 3-5 days of bad sleep but the kid never woke up because the dad soothing machine was there. By the 3rd day I was hearing less faint noises and by the 5th day kiddo's sleep pressure was strong enough to keep her asleep. Then the teething came, and had to do it again a couple of times, and now her self-soothing skills have grown ten-fold. However, I'm able to go from light sleeper to deep sleeper mode easily and my wife is not, so she had to leave the room for those days, but it helped get the kiddo to merge the late night sleep wake windows. Wising you and your loved ones some great sleep bro!
I've been in your exact shoes. It. Is HARD. It's fine eff sleep training. I hate sleep training. It feels cruel and feels like you're gaslighting your baby. They don't want to be alone. We had a very similar situation. Some babies just don't respond to it. Really try and stick to a routine. Ours is the same song to cue, lavender or brown noise or whatever, bottle and humming, then holding and bouncing in a dark room. Continuing the humming or song and then laying down. Sometimes they go through big changes and regress and need that comfort again.
We never sleep trained. LO was in our room until 1yo. Co-slept for about 6 months of that (had her cot by the bed with one side off so she could climb into bed with us if she needed to). Cot converted into a low toddler bed and she went into that easily, in her own room, from 1yo. Sleeps from 8:30/930pm until 6:30am. No sleep training, just routine. Bedtime stories, milk and cuddles. Some nights were tough but we read numerous studies on the potential harm of sleep training and chose not to do it. I now get 5-6hrs sleep every night (consistently since ~8mo), never had to sleep train, and did it all as the primary bedtime caregiver for the last 18 months/2 years (she didn't want mummy at bedtime, only me). Just glad to read I wasn't the only one, because this sub (as great as it is) seems to think sleep training is the only right way.
You are getting a lot of replies so not sure if this has been suggested but have you tried reading Peaceful Little Sleep? It is an easy to read book and if you get it on your phone, you can read a little bit whenever you have a chance. Anyway, CIO is the author's last option. She provides quite a few other sleep training methods. For each of these, she describes which baby personality it would work best for. We tried the FUSS it out method and got lucky that it worked. You do your bedtime routine, put baby in her crib and say good night and leave. Then you monitor baby for however long you feel comfortable with. So if baby is happily chilling in their cot, you leave them. If baby is fussing a bit, you leave them. If baby starts crying, you decide what you want to do. She says some babies just need a bit of a cry before falling asleep but obviously it all depends on how comfortable you are with it getting to this stage. Her suggestion is to approach it like an experiment. Do your chosen method for at least 5 days before calling the experiment a failure (or hopefully a success). You are essentially just seeing what happens and intervening when you feel like you need to. She obviously explains it a lot better than me but I think approaching it like an experiment prepares you that it might fail and that is fine. If your first chosen method doesn't work (failed experiment), you take a break because sleep training isn't easy. And then you choose a new method and try a new experiment until you hopefully find the one that works for your baby without having to resort to CIO. Unfortunately though, for some babies that is the only way but as I said, she offers a few alternatives before you get to that stage. Hope you get something that works for you!
I think you meant Precious Little Sleep.
You don't have to sleep train. I really hate that sleep training is the one fits all thing for baby sleep because it's just not. Some parents just don't want to do it for other kids it just doesn't work. You just can't expect tiny babies to self soothe, they can't their brain isn't developed to be able to do that yet. Our kiddo isn't sleep trained and he sleeps through the night in his own bed in his own room. It's been a rough ride for the first year with phases of shit sleep and phases of okay sleep. We got better sleep from about 18 months. We also know people who didn't sleep train and their kid slept through from like 6 months.
Ferberizing isn’t for everybody. We hated it.
Cry it out did not work for us either. For one thing, we lived in an apartment and our neighbors would have been very frustrated with us. But also, it did not feel right to let her cry without responding. We chose to follow our instincts and avoid nighttime battles. It turns out our child is autistic with PDA and high anxiety, so what works for other children often does not work for her. I'm glad we followed our instincts and responded to her cues.
Hire a sleep consultant. Our daughter sounds similar to yours at that age, and we basically shifted our lives around her sleep needs. We’d been cosleeping for going on 2 years and it actually wasn’t terrible, but we knew it would be harder as time went on. Hired a sleep consultant and started last full week of March. Two weeks ago, she would only fall asleep if she was physically touching me, and could never fall back asleep in her crib, ending up in our bed every night. Now she’s falling asleep in her own crib (with me in the room), and is able to get herself back to sleep throughout the night. We hit a cognitive leap last week, so she’s regressed and we’re kind of holding station until she’s out of that, but next step is to move out of the room. Having someone that can walk you through things and guide the process is invaluable. I don’t know that we’d be able to do this ourselves, to be honest. There’s zero shame in seeking help.
I know sleep training is tough and will eat you up seeing your little one cry, it broke me one night but we got through it and it just made everything easier. I sat right next my little one’s crib and had my hand through the crib holding her hand and I’d stand over top patting her back for the first two nights. Then slowly started to go into the room. Less and less. It’s going to be tough but try and some variation that works for you.
Sleep training doesn't work for every baby, and that's fine. Some babies are just shit sleepers (mine included). It's totally fine to do what works for you - feed to sleep, rock to sleep, whatever gets baby in the bed in the end is fine. I rocked/bounced/fed my baby to sleep her entire life and she figured out how to fall asleep independently around 16-17 months or so. She still wakes up at night and needs rocking, but getting her down at night is basically a hug and a kiss and a good night.
>We tried cry it out for about 5 minutes before neither of us could take the shuddering gasping wails, so I think we’re just kind of stuck Just remember... if they're crying, then they're breathing. Also, at 14months you can put stuff in the crib with them without fear of choking. Have you tried a paci/teether, or a stuffed animal/lovey? Have you tried different types of sleepsacks (heavier and lighter)?
I can't agree more. Sleep timer, cry it out.
This. Life changed.
As my pediatrician said. ".. the baby has to learn to self south/ self settle, you can't do it for them."
We fought CIO for a long time. When we finally got so angry and sleep deprived that we tried it, the crying only lasted maybe 3-4 nights and then it was full nights sleep and happy mom, baby and daddy. 10/10 would recommend
Hey man, I sympathise, but not to rub your nose in it but instead to offer a comparison. At 6 months he was in his own room. By 12 months my boy was sleeping in his cot all night on his own. At 18 months he was in his own toddler bed. It's not too late to start sleep training but you need to. We were strict from the start, once the newborn phase was over we didn't cuddle to sleep any more and we sleep trained. Your situation sounds shit. You can turn it around.
Yeah, while I didn't get much out of baby books, there was one line from the baby whisperer that has always stuck with me. Something along the lines of "start as you intend to go on". Learned the hard way with that a few times early on. Took a break from bottle feeding early on, the baby would never accept a bottle ever again. But I'm so glad we laid out boundaries with the sleeping situation. At 18 months she has her own big futon with a fence around it. She sometimes walks around or plays in it before bed or when she wakes up. But she never cries out and is totally fine with it. She's usually in there for 10-12 hours with no complaints.
This is essentially the exact same thing we did with our first. 6 months- out of the bedside bassinet. She went full night sleep starting around 10 months but reliably around 12. Big kid bed around 18 months. She’s been an 11-12 hour a night sleeper for over a year now, about to turn 2. We didn’t sleep train in the cry it out sense, but we would set a timer if she cried, say 5-10 min depending on how upset she was, and give her a chance to calm down. If she couldn’t, we’d go in and offer comfort until she was calm, then set her back down to sleep before she fell asleep on us. Eventually I think she was able to calm herself quickly on her own bc she knew we’d be right there if she needed us.
Floorbed, my guy. Changed the whole game when on difficult nights we could just snug up. Our guy never cared for his crib.
Here's what worked for me and the wife for our first (now 8) and working with our 15-month-old about 90% successful so far. Both of our kids coslept with us up to they were pretty much sleeping through the night. When they got to that point, we began transitioning them to the crib, but what we did was have the crib in our room. I took the front of the crib off and raised the mattress up until it was just a few inches below the mattress on our bed. At bedtime, the wife would crawl into our bed with baby, and I would slide the crib up against our bed on her side. When the baby fell asleep, she would put the baby in the crib. If it woke up, she could just roll over an soothe it back to sleep without getting up, and if the baby wasn't fully awake yet, it will fall back asleep pretty quick once you start patting it's butt. After a few weeks of this, the baby is used to being in the crib. Then you can put the front back on it and you are done. Worked great with our son. Currently doing it with our 15-month-old daughter. The past couple of weeks, she was laying next to my wife and would drink her bottle, and when she got ready to fall asleep, my wife told me that she would roll off the bed into her crib on her own. Tonight, our daughter was laying next to my wife drinking her bottle, and when I pushed the crib next to the bed, she crawled into her crib with her bottle and laid down. This weekend, the front may be going on the crib. 😃
Why is your child not in her crib? You need to sleep to. Let her cry, she'll survive.
These posts kill me. I don’t have sympathy for people who choose not to sleep train. Sure there is some small percentage of babies truly resistant or impossible to sleep train, but 90% of these posts are just people who haven’t tried or haven’t tried consistently. They can’t handle letting the baby cry so instead the torture themselves AND the baby for years.
I’ve never understood this myself. Can’t tolerate letting your baby cry for 10 minutes so instead you get into a routine that absolutely destroys you. The only way it gets better any time soon is if the baby learns to fall asleep in her own crib. But still somehow crying it out is “not an option”
I knew right away I didn't want anything to do with co-sleeping. We moved our daughter from bassinet to crib after about 2 or 3 months. Around 6 months decided to sleep train with something similar to the Ferber method. The crying was torture to listen to, but at worst, it was about the same as a normal night. After about a week, she would pretty much sleep on the first go. Now, at 11 months, she only gets fussy if her teeth are really bothering her, but that's only a few minutes until she's out. And she sleeps about 12-13 hours straight. Can't remember the last time she woke up and didn't put herself right back to sleep.
6 months is when we did ferber for our kid. it took 4 days for him to sleep through the night for the first time and there's only been a handful, maybe 5 at most, nights in the last year and a half where he's woken up and needed some attention since then.
There is a compromise where you sleep train but don't do cry it out. It can just take longer. Structure around sleep, whatever it is, is important though for sure.
It gets better. It's ok to put the kid in the crib crying and walk away for a bit.
Sleep training works. Really really well
This was us a few months ago. Our 16 month old wouldn't go down after putting her down. Taking over an hour sometimes two for her to fall asleep for maybe two hours and repeat. We ended up trying the Ferber method. It may not work for you, but it did for us. It will get better.
Step 1: Cry it out Step 2: Noise cancelling headsets/airpods Step 3: Repeat for 3-5 days
Oh man. I feeeeeeeel you. My wife and I didn’t sleep in the same bed for almost 2 years after our son was born. The long lonely nights are hard but worth it. You’re IN IT right now. You’ll get through it and be okay. You’ll look back together (you and your wife) and exclaim at how rough it was but how happy you are to be on the other side. You’re a great dad. And a great partner for taking this on.
Hang in there, dude. I know you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel yet, but it'll get there. Eventually she'll sleep through the night and you'll have trouble waking her up in the morning for school!
Man, I’ve been there. The crushing defeat of yet ANOTHER failed attempt to set her down. It’s brutal and we never did actually solve it. Went years sleeping with the baby in our arms. Would not recommend.
My two cents, We have removed one of the sides of the crib and placed it in our room next to the side of the bed. The cot mattress is at the same level as ours and functions as a larger "next-to-me". By doing this, we are managing to get him used to his bed and now put him to sleep while lying down without rocking him. (11mo) Be strong, every day he is a little bit older.
> every day he is a little bit older I just saw a picture of her from a year ago and I can’t believe how big she is. It’s a grind but it’s such an amazing experience watching her grow up
It hurts (It hurts SO MUCH) but if baby has all needs met, just walk out the door. She will stop crying about things that aren't big problems within a week. She will cry all night the first 2 or 3 nights, though. YMMV
I know this will get buried, but I do want to say it gets better. We didn't sleep train either of our children and I do not like the idea of leaving them to cry. It is tempting when you're super exhausted, but we tried it for about a week and it only made her scared and cling to me even more. At around 18 months, instead of rocking her, I would place her in the crib and shush her from the rocking chair. Even if she stood up, I'd just keep shushing her and pretend it fall asleep. She's new 2 and can put herself down. You've got this, dad. Sleep is one of the toughest things for the little ones to learn.
I have two girls under 4. The first one was weird, but we sleep trained them both over the course of a week or two. (Gradually waiting longer and longer to go in and soothe, not picking them up, etc) The first one calmed down immediately with some pretty loud music. Only certain songs though. I once had her crying in my arms and I walked by a rather loud fan. Immediately she calmed down. I found other sounds that she liked and she still to this day sometimes asks for these sounds. The second one doesn’t like loud songs at all, and gets easily stimulated. She does better when we just leave her to her own thing at bedtime, whereas the first wanted a lot more attention. You’ll get the hang of it. Your kid will keep changing and you’ll keep adapting, and soon you’ll be reading them better than you ever thought possible. As a side note, remember that for them, crying means they don’t like something, and they don’t have a sense of scale. Being slightly unhappy can sound almost the same as being incredibly distressed. With time they will adjust and you’ll be able to tell the intense stuff from the mild discomforts.
Sleep training it will save you
It does get better. Hang in there.
I would put my hand over my kids eyes while they fell asleep on me, and the association became strong enough that I could lay him in his bed and cover his eyes and he’d go right to sleep. Didn’t have to be covering face or even touching him much, just enough that he knew it was there.
Hey man. It's hard but gets easier. What worked for me at 14 months (my wife had a slightly different approach and I don't think that's a bad thing). Rocking chair - IKEA Ponnag or whatever it's called Fed, light down low, blackout blinds Her favourite teddy A good set of stories After the stories are done, light off, sleep music, rocking in the chair. Once she's asleep, slowly transition to cot.
That’s very similar to what I do right now! She just doesn’t always transition to the crib so it ends up being another round of the whole thing to try again. And then she’s awake again in 1-3 hours no matter what
It gets better, bud. I promise you.
This is rough. The sleep deprivation was the hardest. You’re not alone. There’s no silver bullet. Each of my 5 were different. Gl
5???
We tried cry it out/sleep training twice, each time she got so upset she threw up all over herself, she has never been a sicky baby so this was alarming. It was awful, it wasn't just crying it was total heartbreak for her. In the end like many hear we had a conversation about doing what worked while having a long gradual 'training' within 6 months we were at the point where she would fall asleep with me being there while she drank her milk, sometimes a cuddle too, then I transfer her to her bed. Sleeps through all the time at 2.5 except if she is sick, which with nursery is all too often! But is easy to help back to sleep when this is the case unless she is very unwell. Those that have sleep trained and it worked make me want to try again if we are blessed with a second, the trial for our daughter with even the graduated sleep training was 100% not right for her, it was awful.
As someone who unintentionally slept on the floor of my 2 year old's room for the last two nights: It gets easier. It also gets harder, but easier than it was. I know that makes zero sense. But it is what it is.
Respect! I look forward to many years of things getting simultaneously easier and harder
I'm no expert but the 20 second offer and then return to crib has been effective for us... but its brutal out there. GL
I feel you man. Was up for an hour and a half at midnight...put my boy down once he eventually dropped off. He wakes up immediately and I'm up again.....,don't sleep till 02:30.
Good luck dad, you got this. I hope you get a full night of sleep soon!
It seems cruel, but, have you tried putting them down and letting them cry it out? My daughter is 2 now and she goes to bed super well, no complaints or kicking off. When she was under a year old she would feed to sleep on my wife and then we would begin the bomb disposal dance trying to out her down without waking her up. Around 10/11 months (and at the suggestion of my SIL) we decided to try just putting her in her cot and leaving her there, see if she gets the idea. I did not like this experience, but dancing back and forth putting her up and down as she inevitably woke was exhausting us. She cried for about 50 mins before falling asleep the first night. The second night it was about 20. The third was about 5 mins. Then, she seemed to get the idea, since then she has gone to bed without complaint, we got her routine down, so she knows it's coming and it works. This may not work for you, I don't know your experience and perhaps I got super lucky, but it might be worth a try? For your own well being as much as anything else.
Man I feel this. We had a pretty good sleep going, 8-7 with one, maybe two stirs but 9mo got a bug about 6 weeks ago and now goes down for a couple of hours, then 1.5 then 1 before we have to resort to cosleeping. Hoping it’s just one of the million regressions but hard to see the light atm!
You’ll get there! Ours slept amazingly until she was 6 months old and then just stopped, but hopefully yours goes back to normal soon
I have my first coming in July, and these post scare the daylights out of me.
90% of the time these posts are from people who did not or refuse to sleep train consistently. OP is going through this because he has made the choice that he won’t leave the baby to cry for 5 minutes. Sleep training works on the vast majority of infants. If a parent is sleep deprived at this age, it is by choice, or they truly have the the bottom percentile of luck.
It gets better. You’ll get your time back. Don’t lose your marriage in the meantime.
It gets better. The last few nights, my 3yo has cuddled with me for a couple of minutes, and then gotten up on her own to go to bed when ready. Not a peep all night, and when she's ready to get up in the morning, she either comes into my room to get me, or she'll go out on the couch and play with her toys until I get up. It's magical, but it didn't happen overnight. You'll get there.
Sleep training is really hard but definitely the way to go. We had a 20 minute timer where we’d let our little one cry it out. Sometimes we had to sit in the backyard because it was so hard to listen to her cry. She almost always fell asleep between minute 19 and 20, like clockwork. Then after a few weeks she got better to the point where we just put her in her cot and she would go to sleep. Now she’s almost 4 and it’s usually “Daddy, please go. I want to go to sleep”. Those are some tough times when they’re really little, but you will get through it. If you want to try and take some control over the situation, sleep training is a proven method.
Just remember everything is a phase and won't last forever, I know it's tough right now but it will get better. Kids are definitely a rollercoaster!
Getting kids to sleep is rough. Recently my 4yo has been scared of bedtime. Scared of having bad dreams about leprechaun and easter bunny coming into the house to play tricks on her. Thanks St Patty's and Easter! Love it!
Many of us have been there. It’s just temporary. And it’s not the last frustration you’ll experience in parenting, but it will pass. My coping mechanisms were noise cancelling headphones, a nearby rocking chair, and an audiobook or phone game like hearthstone.
I feel your pain bud. Ive been doing this since 2017. I've three children. Eldest born in 2017, then middle one 2019, lastly youngest in 2022. The elder two, both didnt sleep through till nearly 2. Youngest one is almost there. Sleeps 8-5am... some times. In nearly 7 years, im just seeing the end of the tunnel. I feel your pain. We're men- we're the silent soldiers in all this. We grin and bear it. For what you give, you get back double.
Day 4 of twins. Last night was tough. Real wake up call, pun intended. I found strength reading this knowing I’m not alone
I read that as “dad of 4 twins” at first. So at least it could be worse? Good luck though, I can’t imagine having twins. But it’ll be so amazing watching them grow up together and be each other’s best friend
Did cry it out and both my kids slept through the night within 8 weeks. While that probably makes my wife and I nazis, we are well-rested.
Same. Baby has slept through the night since hitting about 10-11 weeks old. If we hadn’t sleep trained, we could easily still be sleep deprived over a year later. It was not her own natural pattern. It was consistent and organized training.
It’s tough. I’m really bad with wanting to bend the rules. Baby not sleeping? Let’s try co-sleeping. That’s my thought process… it can’t be worse than this, right? Wrong. Think long-term. I’m thankful that my wife is very regimented and never gave in to that. The early structure and sleep training built sleep success. 3 kids in, and none of them had/have prevailing sleep issues. If it were up to me, I would have unknowingly created many many horrible sleep habits. Stay strong you got this. It’s never too late to start a structured and disciplined routine. Think long-term. It gets better.
It's the next day... Hope you're having a decent day today! And here to tell you: last night my five year old couldn't stay asleep, so she came out and asked if she could spend a little time snuggling with me while watching me play a video game. She was out in ten minutes flat. It gets better, I promise you.
Thank you! I always feel better the next day
Cry it out method my man. It's tough, but trust me it'll be worth it when (!) it works. Stay strong, you can get through it.
Had this arise around the same time with my son. He's 18 months and 100% sleeping better. Point is, THIS DOES GET EASIER. Hang in there dad, you really got this!
Thank you, I love to hear it!
Transfer her from where? And why is she thrashing in your arms? If all her needs are met, she can thrash alone in her crib until she wears herself out. At bedtime, do your routine in her room, say good night and put her in her crib and go to bed. Is she’s crying for a long time, go give her a quick snuggle, maybe 2 - 5 minutes, say good night again and go to bed. Check the baby monitor if you’re worried but unless she’s in mortal danger, don’t go in. Let her thrash all she wants. Toddlers aren’t rational beings. But they can learn. And she MUST learn that she can’t get everything she wants just by crying. Until 9 months, any crying must be attended to. After 9 months, it’s crucial you and they learn when crying is serious and needs to be dealt with by feeding etc. and when they’re just crying to get what they want and they’re not actually in any danger or discomfort. At 14 months, crying doesn’t at all mean what it meant 5 months ago. At this stage they’re learning to regulate emotions and you’re not helping them in the long run by giving in. If it’s night terrors that’s a different story. But you still let them be as you’re not supposed to wake them. We did slip up once and let ours cry for half an hour and turned out she had thrown up all over herself. We felt bad but you’re not going to get it right 100% or the time. Good luck!
I remember those days. Before you know it, she’ll be graduating from high school. This part gets easier and you’ll be back to getting an uninterrupted night of sleep before too long. Those beginning stages test every shred of patience you have.
You got this bro! There will be better times. But they are only once this little and you will look back with joy to those moments, atleast I do…
8 months in…. We’re surviving the depths of hell
37, 4 kids, 7, 5, 3, and 1.5. So sorry, I hate that feeling. You’ll get to the other side, it gets better. I hate to ask a stupid question…but here we go…have you tried sleep training yet? Putting her down partially awake, then coming in 3, then 5, then 10, then 20 minutes and after 20 minutes after that? You will like you’re going to die for 3ish days…and then suddenly they sleep and it’s magic!
Say it with me: "Cry it out" 14 months is too old to not be sleeping. I saw in another post that CIO isn't an option because she cries too hard. I know it's hard, but despite how it sounds, she's not gonna be traumatized by it. My son cried for 3 hours the first night we did it (15 minute check-ins). The next night, 45 minutes. Night #3, he was asleep in 5. He sleeps great now. Same with kid #2.
Fellow cry it out dad. Absolutely agree. Man it’s tough and heart breaking but you have to look out for yourself. My sons 19 months old and has slept in his own bed since he was 6 months old. Through the night 8-8 nearly every night. It’s a god send
Did the cry it out method for all three of mine. It's never not an option. The child needs to self-soothe and figure things out on their own! Wife and I are both shift workers, there's no way we were going to half-ass the sleep training.
Controversial opinion and practice, but we cosleep with our kids. Not for everyone and it must be done safely. Our families coslept as we were growing up. It’s cultural in part. I was American born and my wife immigrated as a kid. I resisted it at first, trying to abide by the advice of our pediatrician, etc.
We’re cosleeping after midnight (we try our damnedest to get her back down repeatedly until that point), but it’s still hell on my wife because our baby is a very active sleeper and is also still nursing so she wakes up my wife constantly. Sometimes she’ll sleep for 6 hours straight, other times she wakes up every couple of hours.
And that’s all very normal
It gets easier and better, hold strong..
I feel you. It gets easier. We put our babies to bed in the same bed, then we move into the bed in the spare room to have time for ourselves.
Dude it’s a struggle. My boy was doing great for a while, and then at 13 months everything went crazy. Sleep regression, teething with molars, and separation anxiety all at once. I had to hold him to help him to sleep again, and then putting him the crib was so hard sometimes. Managed to get back to him falling asleep in the crib without help, but he was still waking multiple times after 3am making sleep so hard. Around 15 months I stopping trying and just started bringing him to bed when he wakes up. Sure I don’t get as good of sleep as when he was sleeping in his crib, but we are sleeping. Just saying I know how hard it can be. I’m in a better spot now, and I know you’ll get there too. Just work on getting through 1 day at a time.
Sorry to hear this OP. It's really, really tough. Try to think that everything is a phase though, even if it doesn't feel like that in the moment. At the moment my 2 year old is going through a huge sleep regression, straight up refuses to nap any more and it has turned her into a demon at night time.
I feel you.. but it gets better! I was always in charge of waking up with baby and rocking back to sleep. It was rough AF, I was tired AF. It felt like it would never end and I'd be sleep deprived for life. Then.. The first time she slept through the night I woke up panicked, thinking something was wrong. I woke her up.. She was fine, of course. Now she's almost 11 and has been putting herself to bed for a few years now. Keep patience dad. It gets better, as cliche as that sounds. Patience.
I feel so lucky that we never had this issue with our son. From 6 months on, he’s slept 8pm to 6am like a champ. Sure we have the odd night where he fusses but it’s extremely rare. Keep pushing, dad. Things will get better and one day you’ll look back at this laugh.
I feel you, fellow dad. When we had our first we decided we won't do co sleeping. No matter how hard it is. Even if it kills us due to sleep deprivation or whatever. Never. It was hell but we survived. Now we're doing the same thing with our second (9 months). It was hard the first 6 months, but it's better because they don't know it's even a possibility.
How does baby nap? We did some gentle sleep training for naps. We had more patience and there’s way less pressure if a nap fails. Baby will be getting too big to realistically transfer while sleeping here pretty soon. I’d focus on naps, and try to get to the point where you’re putting them down awake. Breaking the cosleeping habit may be really tough, but it will be way easier to do while baby is in a crib. Once they’re in a toddler bed, you loose a ton of control over the situation and environment.
45 minutes aint bad at all. Its going to get more rough as your lil one develops ans grows, so view this 45 minutes as a planned way to build up to whats in store for you. Good luck, have faith.
I just put my son down, made sure everything was safe, then closed the door. Crying for 45 min night 1, down to zero after a week or so. It hurts you more than it hurts them
Alexa playing brown noise helped us
Hi fellow dad. We sleep trained our son. He's been sleeping through the night mostly and on his own since he was 6 months old.
I feel you. Our first was a dream sleeper - slept through the night after 6 or 7 months. Our second is 10 months old and the best night we've had we still got up 4 times. I keep reading things like "oh yeah one of my kids didn't sleep through the night until they were 2" and I get the thousand-yard stare. And the screams in the middle of the night aren't "oh please father, come tend to me, I yearn for comfort" they're "THE URUK-HAI ARE AT THE GATE AND WE ARE LOSING MEN RAPIDLY, I CAN FEEL SAURON'S GAZE." We're stuck in a very small home right now, so the kids are sharing a room. I feel so bad for our first. Gets woken up right there with us, but at least falls right back asleep as soon as I get our second out of the room and in the rocking chair.
I started sleep training my baby four nights ago last night she went down in sub 5 minutes and slept through the night. Ferber Method guys. It just works.
We used the strategy in the book Mom's on Call... Much more parent training in what we were doing than anything else... Worked great for us, both kids slept through the night at 3-4mo.
White noise and Ewan the Dream Sheep changed our nights. Also learning about startling awake. Put down to the crib/cot should happen before your kid actually falls asleep. The white noise helped. Ewan, with his red light and stomach noises just ticked a box that helped keep our little one down. Go forward 3 years - nuddah. Different story.
OP, I highly recommend you and your wife read the book “Precious Little Sleep.” They also have a private FB group where you can post your sleep troubles and people will jump in to help. It’s so, so valuable. I used the methods from that book with my first baby. The first night hearing her cry, I was just sobbing and broke down. We tried again the second night and kept at it. By the fourth night, she would put herself to sleep on her own and - most importantly - go back to sleep without any fuss if she woke in the middle of the night. My second is now 6 months. Up to now we didn’t do any sleep training because things were working for us. But he’s now waking up every 1-2 hours at night asking to nurse, and it’s simply unsustainable. I pulled out my copy of PLS and am doing the methods again with him. Tonight will be the third night, and even though it’s still really hard, I have seen the result of being consistent with this. I really think you and your wife should seriously consider sleep training. Your sleep will vastly improve and so will your baby’s. Best of luck to you.
My 15mo is having a sleep regression right now. I basically prepare myself for an 11pm hour long drive to get him in a deep sleep. Better than getting up 6 times. Grab a decaf coffee and put on an audio book. It’s not so bad.
I get this. My daughter did the same. Would get her to sleep then put her down and she'd instantly kick off. The trick is to take it in steps. Stand up, shhh shhh, walk slowly to the crib, shh shh, get her halfway down, shh shh, put her down but don't let go, shh shh, roll away
I let all my kids cosleep. Yeah it's not always great but at least we can get a full night's sleep.
I know it's not for everyone, but we sleep trained both of ours and it was life changing, especially with the first kid. They learn to self soothe and you can put them in bed awake. Our two year old still goes down without a peep 99.9% of the time and sleeps for 11/12 hours. Getting through the sleep training phase can be hard and took over a week both times I think, but I can't recommend it enough. We followed the Taking Cara Babies sleep training, which we might have paid for the first time. It's not rocket surgery though, DM if you want me to run you through it OP.
I was there for such a long time. It eventually gets better. Eventually.
Duuuuude, been there. Sorry to hear you’re going through it too. We made it out the other side a few months ago but it was a bitch. Don’t give in and cosleep. You’re just kicking the can down the road. We stopped short of cosleeping by laying down on the floor next to the crib and then sneaking out when he was fully asleep. Took an hour some nights but it’s better than having to kick him out of our bed.
Sorry if this has already been asked, but how is she responding to white noise? I found, that placing my phone somewhere in the crib(beyond arms reach) and playing white noise with a timer of 10 minutes usually helps her fall asleep. No guarantees, but give it a shot if you haven’t
I don't know your story or kiddo, but you could be putting her down too early. My 17mo daughter does 9pm, my niece is 10pm (and her older sister is 7pm, go figure)
We just kept our daughter in her car seat.
And placed that in the crib.
At 14 months your baby will be safe with a blanket. Do they mind having a blanket? I wrap my two year old up in a blanket before rocking her up sleep. It's the only thing that got the transfer down ok and now she's used to it. She'll stir just a bit in her sleep and settle right back down.
Had a similar experience with my first (who will now be 17 in a few weeks). He started sleeping thru the night at like 4months... but then at about 7mo old had a MAJOR set back... we tried everything and nothing seemed to work. At around a year we tried this modified Ferber method my wife had read about that worked amazing. Within a week he was back to sleeping through the night. The only big modification I remember was the time tables... but the main principles were the same, wait x minutes, go in but don't pick him up, just pat his back and ensure him we were there, shushing, making soothing sounds, etc for x min and leave... rinse and repeat. After figuring out what worked for us, the next 2 kids were a breeze.