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?

well chocolate i was a DREAM sleeper as a baby, from a very young age, 6wks i slept straight through the night for 12hrs solid, but as an adult i find it hard to sleep, some nights i go to sleep easily others not and i often wake in the night and can be awake for hours, sometimes i get up and get a drink of water etc. its irritating as hell, esp when the baby IS actually sleeping soundly and yet i cant sleep, of course by 6am i feel ready to drop off, and then the kids are awake 6:30-7am!

interstingly my sister was a crap sleeper as a baby, but as an adult is a great sleeper, so the opposite in our family to what you are proposing.

and i like others think babies cry for a reason, i will not leave my babies to cry. even going in and out at 5min intervals is cruel i think, babies CANT tell time, all they know is that they are upset and no-one is there to comfort them :(

Okay, I will caveat that by saying that since becoming a mother I wake a huge amount more in the night but I also think that your sleep changes in motherhood. However, on the whole I go back to sleep.

I agree with Ormirian - I don't think sleep is a learned skill either. You can't learn not to wake up. You can learn to not bother other people and just go back to sleep by yourself, but I think that's also something you realise as you get older - just as DCs realise as they get older that they can do various things by themselves.

If it was possible for people to teach themselves to wake up at certain times and go to sleep at certain times, we wouldn't need alarm clocks. This is why I think it's so ridiculous the view that feeding a hungry child at night as a one off will suddenly make them realise that they can be fed in the night, so they would wake up on purpose for this. It doesn't make sense.

Tell that to my husband then who had sleep lessons in his (non-UK) school where they learnt relaxation techniques and other things about good sleep hygeine (30 years ago)!

I don't think all problem sleepers are caused by parenting, absolutely not. Some children just don't sleep. However, there are children who could sleep better due to some parenting practices, I'm thinking of my friend who spent 2/3 hours every evening lying next to her PFB every night, til they had the second, whereupon the husband had to also lie next to the baby to get them to sleep, resulting in no-one sleeping very well at all and the parents not having an evening together for several years. Plus if the husband was away, they all firmly believed the youngest wouldn't sleep. Training your older toddlers to be highly reliant on your presence to get to sleep seems odd to me (and it is still not sorted now). There's a big difference between a young baby and an older toddler to me.

I am sure everyone has fed a child milk at night as a one off (I know I have!) but I am referring to the children that people post about who wake 2/3 times a night allegedly hungry and the parents are desperate to stop night feeding. Erm, if you want to stop night feeding make sure they eat enough in the day and stop feeding at night!!! The child will respond by crying because they protest at the change and know this is the easiest way to brake their parent especially in the night!

Everyone wakes at night - children learn to either roll over and go to sleep or they learn that if they shout loud enough, mummy will come running with a boob or bottle. Every parent can choose how they want their child to respond and lots are happy to offer milk into toddlerhood. They are not the ones posting for help because they are happy with the set up. Others want to break the 'habit' and breaking that habit is hard and is most likely to involve some tears.

Chocolate - your theory is great but you need to meet DD!

She eats loads during the day but still wakes in the night for milk - not at the same time so it isn't habit.

She will scream until she is fed. And if I try water she goes ballistic at me!

As I said before - CC worked a dream with DS and he was sorted after 3 nights but DD is a different proposition! She is capable of self settling - she always goes down awake and sometimes she wakes in the night and will settle herself again. But when she wakes hungry there is nothing to be done! She just can't seem to do more than 8 hours without food.

I think that babies learn routine. So if they routinely wake at 2am and you routinely feed them then you've just made a rod for your own back. If hamsters can learn routine then I'm darn sure babies can.

Thing is to get them into a routine that suits you, rather than them. You cannot function as a human being if your baby decides that nighttime is wakeful time, feeding time and play time and that during the day is nap time. So try to reverse the routine by keeping them occupied during the day, controlling how long they nap for and when and not going straight to them in the night.

I hate to say it but as far as sleeping goes, Gina Ford did have it cracked.

Agree with rhubarb. gina all the way in my house and it is not about cruelty. I haven't let my baby cry to sleep once, it isn't an either or scenario. There are ways to settle a baby without using a boob.

I find it odd to read tha babies do not learn patterns, as that is exactly how getting them into a routine works...they end up needing sleep at the same times each day. I also know if i wake one night for a pee at 4am then the next few nights i do exactly the same.

Didn't work for us! That book made me a nervous unconfident wreck. How can anyone believe that every baby needs exactly the same sleep/feeding requirements? That doesn't make sense.

If someone wrote a book saying every adult needs 8 hours sleep, waking at 7am every day with x/y/z quantities for specific meals, they'd quite right get a face.

Very interesting article about the reasons children protest sleep time:

here

Iggly, I think her point was that babies need routine. You tailor the book according to your baby (that's what I did) but the main points were a morning nap, a midday nap and a late afternoon snooze that you gradually cut out.

If you do things at more or less the same time every day then this is what the baby learns. Just as my dd's hamster knows that every morning he's going to have a trundle in his wheel and every evening she changes his food. It doesn't have to be bang on time, but more or less.

I think there are 2 things:

• Some babies are worse sleepers than others (don't I know it!)

• Yes, some mothers make their own lives hard - typically in my experience by sticking to some methodology rather than going with what works for the child.

YANBU....havent read all the posts but my DS is a crap sleeper.....he is 9 and bedtime still a nightmare.

We should have dealt with it when he was a baby, we didnt, and yes it is totally our fault. However, DH was and still a crap sleeper and my mum was an insomniac so he didnt have much luck to begin with.

We have def made a rod for our own backs though, without a doubt!

Of course babies need routine - but whether it needs one from a few weeks on is debatable, especially as their needs change so quickly.

I have the (older) gina ford book - it didn't talk about tailoring it to individual babies - I remember getting utterly confused by it when DS didn't follow the pattern.

Only when DS got older did the idea of more structured naps/meals work for him. His routine now is pretty set but it took while to get there!

I wouldn't compare my child to a hamster though.

Would you not? I do all the time!

I used GF from the age of 3 months with dd and from newborn with ds and whilst you are right that she is pretty rigid, I found that the structure and routine worked for me and the kids. Ds was trickier as he was a much hungrier baby, so I accepted that whilst breastfeeding he would get hungry two or three times during the night until I put him on the bottle. But this was purely wakenings for feeds and nothing else.

She worked for me. Most baby books encourage a routine, GF didn't come up with the idea. It seems logical. Which is why I used the hamster analogy. Most creatures adapt some form of routine and can be taught a good routine. So to those who say that babies are too young to learn routines, well actually no they're not. They CAN learn a routine but it's entirely up to the parent if they can be arsed teaching it one or not.

Some parents like co-sleeping and feeding on demand right up until the baby is a tot. And if they are happy to do that then fairplay to them. But if they complain and won't take advice, then there's not much you can do.

I liked that, Nan.

(I liked the one about "core gifts" as well)

There's no need - Humans are creatures of habit

I think routine vs handling sleep issues are two slightly albeit linked issues. I believe that sleep begets sleep and all that. I would have fed DS on demand but reflux meant it wasn't to be from about 12 weeks old. He was still a pants night sleeper!

I co slept with DS until he was 5. I would put him in his own bed, and he cried and cried until I got him out and put him in bed with me. When he was old enough, he got out of his bed every night and got into my bed. Quite often, I didn't wake up when he did this.

DS now goes to bed and sleeps very well. He sleeps through anything and never gets in my bed, even if he is not feeling well.

It usually works out in the end that your children end up getting themselves to sleep and on the odd occasion that they do wake in the night, they get themselves off to sleep again.

DS doesn't shout downstairs to me, or demand food in the night. He does however climb over stair gates. (Some things never change )

Agree with that article. It so blindingly obvious why small children don't want to go away from us at night that I don't really understand why we are all so hung up on making them do so.

yy Orm

I remember being literally rigid with fear, so scared that i couldn't even call out in case the evils came.

i remember my mum used to pretend she was a good witch and told me she had put a special sleeping spell on me at night to give me nice dreams. One night I really wanted to get up to go to the toilet but didnt want to break the spell, i remember screaming and screaming for my mum..she didn't hear me as she was watching the TV thinking I was asleep..I still remember that night to this day...about 37 years later.

Me too. There were things under the bed, behind the curtain, lurking in the passage way. And of course eventually I went to sleep. Perhaps that was OK because that is the point of training kids to go to sleep - so they don't piss off their parents. My parents were lovely, loving people, indulgent in some ways, but it never occurred to them to deviate one iota from proper bedtime rules.

dd1 good sleeper
dd2 crap sleeper. now age 9, still doesnt need much sleep
dd3 ok sleeper. likes a lot of attention and cuddles at bedtime.
dd4 dreadful sleeper. up several times a night. co-sleeps with me and dh still a few times a week, now almost 3.
ds. fantastic sleeper. been going 7-7 since 8 weeks old.

all have been breastfed. all parented the same way, all had the same sleep 'routines'. all co-slept/co-sleep.

but do you know what.

i love them all, and the fact they all need different things when it comes to bedtime isnt any elses business but my own.

YABU.

No op I don't think it is learned, if it was everyone who has done cc with their child would have kids who sleep throgh the night which is not the case here looking at the replies of different posters. To say it's learned is very simplistic and fails to take into consideration individual factors. Prior to cc how do you explain how some babies sleep throgh the night at an early age and some do not?