To think night weaning doesn't mean sleeping through the night?

[Horehound]

I was set on starting to night wean my boy (17m) and thought that when he does this he will then sleep through the night. But it's just dawned on me that actually he could still wake up and want to be cuddled or something instead.
As I understand it sleeping through is a developmental milestone so if he hasn't reached that yet am I still in for nights of broken sleep?

I don't want to do controlled crying or cry it out.
Aibu?

Yabu - your child will sleep through if you night wean.
Yanbu - there's every chance he will still wake up.

@Megan2018 I didn't know there was an 18month regression :o :o argh

I wonder if he is going through it now because his sleep has deteriorated! He had occasionally slept 6 hour segments but seems to have got drastically worse recently!

He might not get an 18 month sleep regression, they don’t all have it.

The new house might actually be a good opportunity to introduce new routines. You could talk to him before about when you move to the new house he will have a new room etc and DH could do bedtime in there and go into him when he wakes?

My DD slept through at 18 months, apropos of nothing, still night fed and waking 5+ times a night. Wakings did reduce a lot after she figured it out for herself. Night-weaned at 19 months. Still wakes up, anywhere between 1 to 3 times, with occasional sleep-throughs.

It’s actually MUCH easier to get her to sleep without milk. Previously she’d happily sleepily guzzle but reject all notion of being poked off the boob or put back in the cot. Now milk is off the menu, all she needs is a pat/shhh/cuddle/to be plonked on our bed and stick her feet in DP’s ear and her fingers in mine.

Method wise:

I never got on with shortening feeds because I never found the feeds were a consistent length to begin with, plus I couldn't cope with clock watching when half asleep. Came to the conclusion breastfeeding doesn't really work like that and this is ridiculously stupid advice from sleep consultants who are just transposing a method from bottle feeding.

Separating breastfeeding from falling asleep had no effect. Whereas it defo did with my older one, but he was in a single bed rather than a cot so he still had me there.

Adding a comfort object, familiar song in the hope that he'd be able to rely on these sleep cues rather than breastfeeding - no effect. He is totally unbothered about whether the other cues are present and only cares about the milk one.

Gro Clock is nice and he likes saying goodnight to the sun, but he doesn't wake up, see the blue star and go back to sleep. I think this will be of more use when he's a bit older.

Semi successful:
Having a kind of "curfew" for his bedroom - I try whatever it takes (repeated feeding, ssshing, back rubbing, etc) to keep him in his own room until 3 or 4 am and only bring him through to our room at that time. To be honest I get fucked off with this if/when he doesn't settle at all so only ever had a success rate of about 50%. What's keeping me going here is the thought "This is only going to be harder when I have a bigger bump". So if you don't have a deadline in the same way it might be tricky.

Sarah Ockwell Smith method recommended to me on reddit and then I read it in her book :o For this she recommends feeding as normal at bedtime, but then for all night wake ups delaying milk on the first night by 5 minutes. So you do whatever comforts them for 5 minutes and then if they are not settling, give them milk. The next night 10 minutes, the next 15, etc up to a max of 30. I was a bit sceptical of this because IME nothing comforts DS2 if he wants milk. But I managed to get to 7 minutes (I was too much of a wuss to attempt 10 on night 2!) and found that he was comforted, even though it wasn't really what he wanted, by being sat down and rocked. He still cried during it, but not in an escalating way and he wasn't constantly scrabbling for milk - he did a couple of times. This is what I'm planning to pick back up over the next couple of days.

For some reason, clockwatching this end of a feed is easier for me and so I have stuck with it better.

@Horehound is he still in Leap 10 or is that finished for you? I forget how far far ahead you are from us.
Felicity’s sleep still so up and down I’m not sure I’ll notice the regression

But in all seriousness- for us I am waiting until weaned in the day before contemplating nights, and suspect that’ll be post September at least. Teething seems to equal extra milk here.

Oh @BertieBotts you are doing so well, it sounds hard though and I expect my son will be similar!

@Megan2018 I actually deleted wonder weeks app so have no idea! He was born one week early on 21st aug was due 29th

My daughter stopped breastfeeding overnight at 3, but still wakes regularly a year on

@Megan2018 downloaded it again and it says leap 10. 11 days left of fussy phase

@Horehound I think you are still in leap 10 then, probably near the end though.
We have 25 days left based on 12 Sept due date

Cross post!

@Horehound embarrassingly I ended up getting a sleep consultant. The old me judged the new me HARD!

But she made me realise i was approaching it all wrong. We sleep trained on these rules:

1. Whatever method you use at the start of the night you need to continue with throughout that night (including who goes in to them)
2. Support should be gently reduced, never increased, so you need to start with lots of it
3. It should be so gradual they don't really realise you are doing it

In practice this meant on the first night I rocked, patted and shushed til he was asleep again. I did that everytime he woke. Think he did about 9 times. I cried. 2nd night I did exactly the same. He woke 4 times. 3rd night the same. On the 4th night, I didnt rock but i did everything else. I did the same for 2 further nights. Then I stopped patting. Then I put him in his cot but patted and shushed. Then I just shushed. Then I was just in his room.

I did each stage for 3 nights. She said go to 5 nights if necessary. By the end, it really was very very easy - the wake ups significantly reduced very early. Never did he think he had been abandoned - no Romanian orphan rubbish. He was much much happier when he knew what to expect. Honestly I wish we had done it sooner.

I do wonder if all this feeding on demand produced all these terrible sleepers.

My mum breastfed up every 4 hours and never had such sleep issues.

All my friends who feed on demand having non sleeping kids until 2-3 years old... myself included!

@OverTheRainbow88 I worry you are right. All our modern bollocks about leaps and developmental stages... didnt seem to exist 30 years ago. That or we were all left to CIO and our parents have just erased it from their memory

I nightweaned DD around 15 months and it definitely helped. She occasionally woke for water or if ill but not so regularly as before. She also started eating better and more in the day.

I don't think demand feeding is the issue so much as forming bad sleep habits (or habits that are less conducive to good sleep).

There's also been a fashion for some very guilt-inducing twisting of attachment theory (I'm looking at Sarah Ockwell Smith) by people who make a living out of frightening women they will damage their children if they ever let them whimper. If your baby self settles or sleeps through the night it's someone developmentally inappropriate or evidence of neglect

I made loads of mistakes with my first baby but did lots of things differently with the 2nd & 3rd and they were much more settled and slept through by about 9 months.
Really simple things like, feeding on wake up not when they're tired. Giving them lots of sleep cues like dummies, snuggly blankets, white noise, sleepy music.
Getting them used to napping in different ways and different places and not reliant on being held or fed.
Always putting them down awake.

I never had a strict routine and always fed them when they were hungry though.

StacySoloman thing is, you can do all those things and still have a terrible sleeper. Sometimes it's just babies personality. DC2 was a dream, would go down awake, self settle and slept through by 10 weeks. DC1, well, different kettle of fish- would not sleep unless he was on someone, from birth so not bad sleep habits- I was in hospital for 5 days after him after the blood loss and they put me in a side room because he was such an awful sleeper. One of the midwives said she'd never seen one as bad, the health visitor referred him for tests he was so bad! He'd scream until he stopped himself breathing (in the car, in the pram, in the cot, on the play mat). Nothing wrong with him, just very very clingy.

9/10 it'll be bad sleep habits but there are those awkward little buggers who just won't comply no matter what!

I was huge on encouraging good sleep habits from birth with my two. It consumed me as I simply could not cope with the lack of sleep and turned into a bit of a monster during night wakings. So it was in everyone's best interests that they sleep. My first slept 12/13 hours straight from 8 weeks or so and still does four years later. My second only slept through the night at 2.5. She went to sleep easy, no rocking, holding or feeding to sleep or any of that hair-tearing shite but she'd still wake at least once for a feed. Short of letting her CIO there really wasn't much else to be done but get on with it until it eventually stopped one night. She's still not as consistent as her sister though and randomly wakes for no good reason - some times she'll go back quickly other times she's wide awake for a few hours. So although good habits definitely help, it really does come down to each individual child IMO.

@StacySoloman - we do all those things. Makes no bit of difference to night sleep. Baby settles himself to sleep in cot every night alone fine, still wakes up 2hrs later, repeatedly. Baby sleeps in pram daytime, not fed to sleep.

Mine does the same as above. If he’s woken overnight, and not taken out cot and held or fed, he literally starts a combination of screaming, vomiting, holding his breath, banging head etc.. it’s not a case of leaving him 5 mins to see if he settles.

Yes, some just are bad sleepers whatever you do.

@OhToBeASeahorse my gran liked to tell everyone about how my mum was a great sleeper... turned out that she used to just get put outside in a pram to nap, if she cried they just left her out there until she stopped again! Classic 40s/50s parenting.

@StacySoloman I agree about Sarah O-S. I can see some of her points but a lot of what she talks about has no direct evidence (and is all based on a slightly twisted concept of what 'attachment parenting', as the phrasing implies that this parenting approach is rooted in child development research and it really isn't). In certain circles now everybody is so focused on 'meeting their child's needs' at every stage and leap etc. I can't help but think it might be mainly bollocks. Yes I can see why it's probably not a great idea to leave a 3 week old baby to cry for hours but I don't think anyone was ever really doing that. Our parents, and their parents, were all mainly encouraged to feed at scheduled intervals, sleep train, get into a routine that works for the family etc and most of us don't seem to have suffered any trauma from it. Whereas my generation - now we are parents - are all so obsessed with meeting needs, being gentle, attachment parenting etc that we're all big messes of stress and tiredness because we have been guilted into thinking we shouldn't try to get our babies to sleep 'well' because that must be evidence of neglect. I'm not sure that is helpful for parents or babies.

There probably should be a middle way, agreed, but it does give me the rage, I'm sorry, to see morals applied to sleep - what use is it really to label feeding to sleep or on demand or co-sleeping or whatever a "bad habit"?

Yes of course it is a habit, in the sense that it's what the baby's used to, but labelling things as good/bad is just unnecessarily combative and makes people feel bad. It's a habit that perhaps is no longer wanted or that somebody wants to change. That doesn't make it bad. It might be perfectly fine for someone else. It might have met the need (of the parent or baby or both) at a younger age.

Same with all this "negative sleep association" bollocks and other phrases like it.

And a lot of stuff written in support of sleep training is genuinely heartless and cruel, and not evidence based either. I'm not against sleep training per se, but I don't like the name, I think it's cruel to ignore a tiny baby who is distressed and doesn't understand why you're not coming, and I am a bit jaded and naturally suspicious that most people going on about sleep training are referring to methods that do involve an element of this. Perhaps I'm out of date, but certainly this is where a lot of the hostility comes from. It feels utterly wrong to do this,and I don't even like reading about other people doing it. I have changed my stance a bit on methods where you're with them, offering comfort that perhaps isn't the exact type of comfort they wish it would be, but I still think it's important to be responsive and observant of the child's response. A lot of sleep training is just formulaic and doesn't take this into account.

My twins slept through the night solidly from 6pm-7am once nightweaned.

DC1 was night weaned when I stopped BF at 19 months. He didn't sleep for more than three hours in a row until he was over 2, and was still waking up at least every second night or so until he was over 3.

DC2 is 17 months and has technically never been night weaned - I would still feed her is she really wanted it. But she has slept through consistently since 6 months, and even before that she would only wake up once per night - even as a newborn she would do 7 hour stretches at night.

Same parenting, completely different children! The night weaning (or lack thereof) made no difference to either child.

@BertieBotts I agree, the moralisation (not sure if that's a word!) of infant sleep and feeding is not helpful to anyone. On both extreme ends of the spectrum there are a lot of issues, and i have been on the receiving ends of both types of people e.g. 'helpful' family members that tell me about how their children slept through from 6 weeks and mine won't because I'm indulging them and getting them into bad habits, right the way up to people who have openly sneered at me for weaning my 21 month old 'before she was ready', stating that they are totally committed to 'meeting all their child's needs' etc etc. I have tried to strike a balance - I could never listen to my child scream and cry in distress without going to her so I never tried any of those methods, I just couldn't hack it. But at the same time we did reach the point where something had to change, and if I'd continued to just 'follow her lead' then I suspect I'd still be up 3-4 times every night with her whilst also being 6 months pregnant and totally exhausted.