to think that parents contribute to the sleep issues?

[ChocolateBiscuitCake]

Disclaimer: I have two DC who have not always been brilliant sleepers and go through patches of wakefullness at night/early in the morning (!) but...

I have been reading some of the sleep threads and am really surprised by the number of people who have older babies or toddlers who sleep SO badly whilst claiming that they don't know how to improve the situation and won't do any form of CC.

From my experiences, babies have to learn how to sleep well and they do this by you setting up routines and helping them along the way. If you feed your 12 month old milk in the middle of the night, they will keep waking for milk in the night. If you bring them into your bed, they will want to be in your bed. If you have to lie down and hold their hand, they will expect you to be there holding their hand if they wake up.

Nothing changes overnight and teaching your baby/child to sleep well takes patience and consistency. But leaving a baby to cry for 5 minutes is not going to hurt it and ignoring a toddler whilst you drag them back to bed and not give into their ridiculous demands is not difficult. We are the adults!

AIBU to think that some parents need to be a bit tougher rather than find some miracle cure for poor sleep habits?

Taking your example op there will always be people despite very good tuition who will find maths hard as their brain has developed a different way it does not mean they have sn it's not one of the skills they are good at. You cannot develop a one size fits all theory as people are different. I willsometimes wake up for a drink if I am dry I cannot get to sleep, but you can we are different

Chocolcate yes it may be obvious to you that all those things in your OP are creating a rod for your own back, but when you haven't had more than 1.5 hours unbroken sleep in an 8 month period and are averaging 4 hours broken sleep a night you start to get a bit desparate, and add on top of that 2 DCs sharing a bedroom and you do what you can to get them back to sleep as quickly as possible with as little fuss as possible....

With hindsight I can see that I did help to create many of our horrendous sleep issues we had with DD2 but you get to a point when you do what you can to maximise sleep for the family and if that means milk or sleeping in your bed that is what you do.

And then when the dust settles and you have the energy to tackle it you try to sort the sleep problems...but they can be deeprooted by that point and take a lot longer to solve.

You cannot blame all sleep problems on lack if sleep training some might be. To ignore individual differences is very simplistic and does not explain eveerything. In that case every parent who does cc with their baby would have kids that sleep through which is not the case

I can never understand why everyone thinks sleeping in the same bed results in better sleep. It might for a small breastfeeding baby (not my dd1 who hated being close to anyone, but other children). But having a wriggling toddler or older in the bed would keep me awake, then my husband awake, and the thought of having two or more in is awful to me. I still do it when they are ill/need a cuddle, but my sleep on those nights is significantly disrupted and I feel bad the next day. The child never seems to sleep so well either.

There's some evidence that co-sleeping with partners ends up with less high quality sleep etc than if you sleep separately, why should that not be the case with children over a certain age (late toddler/early school age onwards)?

LeQueen - I know you aren't specifically aiming this at me, but I would say we did try a lot of things, one being sleeping in the living room for a month so DD2 could have her own room. It isn't practical to send an older child off for weeks on end to GPs.

Our DD2 became a bad sleeper due to awful reflux as a baby. She also shares a room with her sister which provides more challenges now with her still being a not great sleeper.

I am so tired most of the time now and DD1 has started school and needs her sleep that if at 5am DD2 comes into my room I let her climb into my bed I turn the other end and sleep top to tail and try for us to all get back to sleep. Yes not great but for now we manage with this.

I think that there is a lot of competition sometimes between mothers and one upmanship on who has a harder time, and in my experience people who are having a really bad time underplay it, I never wanted people to know quite how bad DD2 was as I was embarrassed, people who overplay it are often like you say exaggerating.

It is a very demoralising situation and we have had some very dark times due to lack of sleep and there isn't always a simple solution.

Its not that I disagree with the op she is right in some respects but it cannot be applied to all children.

Agree wholeheartedly with LeQueen.

I have been blessed with two great sleepers. Some of it is undoubtably luck, but a lot is consistency IMO.

When I have had periods where I have been less than firm with bedtime routine, it has ALWAYS ended in weeks if not months of disaster which have to be undone.

For example, when DD was about 3 she started waking up early and coming into our room (at about 5.30am). We were so knackered as DS was about 3 or 4mo, that we just let her. Within DAYS she was getting up before 5am, and excitedly running in. When it got to 4.15 (within a week of starting), we realised we had seriously fucked up! We told her that we would love to cuddle her once it was daytime, bought her a sun/moon clock and told her to stay in bed until 6.30 at least. It took WEEKS to undo what it took days to cause, but a month later she was getting up at about 7am, and has done ever since.

We had the same thing when she went into a bed from her cot at about 2yo. The procrastination was just unbelievable and threatened to go on into the night. After a few days, we realised the only way for her to get a decent sleep, was for us to kiss her goodnight, leave the bedroom and telll her we weren't coming back in, however much she called us. If she had something to tell us, she had to tell us before we left the room, as once lights were out that was IT. After a week we'd got somewhere, and she was a lot less tired, miserable and grumpy in the day.

It seems harsh, but its a lot kinder than facilitating hours of faffing which result in ridiculously tired DCs!

or being self disciplined/consistent enough to sleep train is just asking far too much of them, they just aren't wired that way - and deep down would prefer to suffer the sleep deprivation

??? Sometimes I think people ignore the posts that don't say what they want them to say. No sleep training here, and no sleep deprivation. I get between 7 - 10 hours per night consistently every night. We have never had tears at bedtime and I breastfed through to 15 months, working full time from 4 months old, with a work day starting at 6.30 a.m. and finishing at 7.00 p.m. so I really needed my sleep. Any form of sleep training would have been unbearable and made life an absolute misery at a time when I really needed to be top of my game. Doing something that took weeks would really have been making a rod for my own back.

So for all those who think that non-sleep trainers are having sleepless nights or are not self-disciplined, maybe we haven't had to be because there isn't a problem because we accept that babies, like adults, will wake during the night. There is no such thing as 8 hours unbroken sleep - humans aren't designed that way, we just don't remember the wakings the next morning.

I really appreciate that a lot of recent posters won't have read the whole thread but...

as many have already said, a thread like this doesn't therefore apply to you worldgonecrazy because you have not posted on a sleep forum about how desperate you are to get your older baby/child to sleep.

Just look at the current sleep threads and then perhaps you can relate it to my OP?

I sleep trained DS - he sleeps well. I was a big believer in teaching kids to self settle etc

But DD (14m) will not be told! Honestly, I have tried - I am completely open to CC etc but she just won't do it. I have tried everything and not just not the odd night here or there. i have spent a week getting no more than a couple of hours sleep a night while she screams blue murder at me because nothing but milk will do.

Honestly, if one of you perfect parents wants to come round and show me what i'm doing wrong I will be very grateful!!

I just can't help thinking that the fact that she is running around all day (and yes it is running not toddling) and she is tall for her age - she just needs more.

If it takes almost months to sleep train, I'd argue that maybe isn't ready or something else is up. Sleep training is successful when it's quick - because baby doesn't need a night feed for example. However if baby isn't getting it, maybe they do still need it and hence protest.

I think there is a balance, very few people are extreme one way or the other...that way madness lies!

We had DD in a Moses Basket next to us from birth, and when she got to around 3 months we co-slept through to around 10 months. She fed a lot (putting on a pound a week at one point) so it made sense for all of us. We did a bedtime routine with her from around 6 weeks which involved bath, feed, dress etc then into her basket, initially downstairs with us and then upstairs when she got a bit bigger. We continued this even when we co-slept and she slept on our bed without us and we just joined her later.

At 10 months she got fed up and needed more space, so we bit the bullet and put her cot next door (it had been redundant in our room as she hated it) and I packed DH off to sleep elsewhere a few nights. As it was, she did take a little longer to settle for a day or so, but nothing major. She went from a co-sleeping, semi-swaddled little baby who slept on her back to a big girl who slept in a cot, unswaddled on her side almost overnight. But I have to say, there wasn't much work on my part bar a few slightly more sleepless nights, she was ready for it. Had we tried it a month earlier, I don't believe she would have been ready.

Now she is 14 months and despite her cough which keeps her awake at the moment she is not a bad sleeper. She is still fed or rocked to sleep, but will go down awake (for DH, but not for me oddly). We still do the same evening routine and she goes down well. She won't normally stir until early morning, at which point normally a quick resettle is all that is needed. DH is quicker than me, if I go she wants a feed. Sometimes she sleeps through to 0530, 0600 which is pretty good. At the moment she is going through a phase of waking at around 0400 and taking ages to resettle, this is something we're working on gently but we'll get there.

So, I guess the point of my rather long waffle (apologies, DH is trying to convince me to buy a yacht/boat so I am looking busy) is that most people are not an extreme. We don't do crying at this age (we will listen when she wakes to see if it is a grizzle or a full on, awake cry) and we're happy with that decision. When she is a bit older, and able to understand what we're telling her and communicate her feelings etc then I will be happy to be harder if required.

PS: My wise health visitor told me that up until around 2 it is better to accept that babies wake, their needs are valid even if they aren't physical. She said the happiest parents are the ones that are parents to the children they have, not constantly battling to make them what the books say they should be.

As I have said about 5 posts back: this thread therefore doesn't apply to you either Ninkynonker.

...Just look at the current sleep threads

Oh I know, I was there pages back, I was just, you know, joining in. Scuse me, I'll bugger off again then! I think I was almost agreeing with you as well, just saying that there aren't necessarily extremes.

Noooooo! Didn't mean it to sound like I was saying bugger off! Sorry! Come back (especially if it means you don't have to talk about boats !)

I just didn't intend this to be a bf/co-sleeping/hand holding v. routine/CC debate because I realise that any way a parent chooses to parent is right for them and works in most cases. My point was that in some of the recent sleep threads, the mums sound so desperate it is heartbreaking. But in reality their actions don't seem to be helping their current issues. In fact a lot of their actions seem to be making them worse, because in those cases, the children are not responding positively.

Haven't read the whole thread, but wanted to add my twopenneth!

I totally understand why some parents leave their kids to cry, and if there is no conflict with their values, then fair enough. However, I happen to think that it's the wrong thing to do. My reluctance to try cc therefore had nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with strength - I was tempted at times, but I resisted the temptation.

My dd was a terrible sleeper, and I could easily have posted on a forum for advice. However, I would have been seeking advice that was aligned with my value system and the kind of parent I wanted to be. Is that so wrong? I might have been sleep deprived, but I didn't want to do something that felt so utterly wrong to me.

The health visitor and a few well-meaning friends all kept telling me that I'd end up doing cc in the end. Like the OP, they assumed that I didn't have the balls to just do what I had to do. But I preferred to do things differently. I never left dd to cry, but she has no sleep problems now and my values as a parent are intact.

OP, your first post seems both ignorant and judgemental. If you feel that cc works for you and your family, then I have no argument with that. But why tell people who are already run ragged that it's their own fault because they want to do what they feel is best for their children?

I'm still here! (He has now decided waitin a year or so would make sense...we only sold the last one last year cause we didn't use it enough )

My eldest sleeps 8-8 without a peep. Did this since about a year old. Started sleep training from birth, when would settle back to sleep immediately after a feed at 3-4 hour intervals, night weaned at 6 months at exacly the same time I took him off the boob. Refined it from 9-12 months of age. Fuck me, I was knackered with all those trips down the hall.

DS2 Oh. My. Word. 5 months old. Started sleep training a week ago. Has been co-sleeping. Start night with great intentions. At 2am, I feed, and promptly fall asleep, waking up with baby at 6am in my bed and then back to sleep until 8. He is a crap self settler, doesn't want adummy (I didn't want hime to have one, am re-considering way to late) wants boob to sleep.

IT IS ALL MY OWN FAULT AND I AM KNACKERED

ps new halloween name!

Why is sleep such a sodding competition? What if we swapped it for something else? Like potty training for example ...

I'm really surprised by the number of people who have older babies or toddlers who still wear nappies.

From my experience, babies have to learn how to use the toilet and you do this by showing them and helping them. If you let your 12 month old wee in their nappy, they will continue to wet their nappy. If you let them poo on the floor, they will continue to poo on the floor.

Nothing changes overnight and teaching your baby/child to be continent takes patience and consistency. But letting a baby wee on the floor isn't going to hurt it and scolding a toddler when they poo on the floor so that they know they're being ridiculous is not difficult. We are the adults!