To ask how to sleep train an older child?

[ExhaustedMuch]

Gonna preface this by saying I don't want a debate about sleep training/not sleep training, thank you. I've read the research myself (and have a degree that involved reading medical research).

I'm posting for traffic. Moving my 13 month old DC into their own room. Still breastfeed to sleep so want to stop this. DC wakes up maybe once or twice before midnight and has also got into the habit of taking a milk feed at 5am. I allowed this habit because the 5am starts were killing me - DC goes back to sleep if offered breastmilk.

But I'm tired and fed up. It's time to sleep train. Not that keen on just shutting the door on DC but I would do it.

I'd like to hear your experiences of sleep training a toddler please.

Hi @ExhaustedMuch we slept trained earlier than you with a fantastic sleep coach who works with children up to 3 years old. Happy to put you in contact with her via PM if you like?

We went from BF to sleep and up all night to sleeping through the night on night 3.

Hi, Lyndsay Hookway on instagram has some really good posts about improving sleep. She’s not sleep training as such, and if that’s the route you choose to go down that’s fine, but always good to look into alternatives first.
Her methods include something called habit stacking where you introduce a comfort (could be a teddy comforter, a blanket, patting their bottom) before removing the thing they currently rely on. So I’m your case, instead of stopping breastfeeding cold turkey, you’d introduce a new comfort and let them get used to that before stopping feeding.

We have just done gradual retreat for our 19 month old successfully

I did with my 13 and 14 month olds. I just night weaned so I would go in and settle (without holding ideally) once the habit of needing milk to go back to sleep they started to self settle/or not wake up.

@Rosieposy89 What is gradual retreat?

@mamabear199 If it costs money, we cannot do it.

@Coffeeandchocs Thanks, but I am happy with the research on sleep training.

Thanks everyone for your input. I wish we had sleep trained when she was younger. I wanted to do it when she was six months, but then she started nursery and has basically been permanently sick since then, so there hasn[t been a good moment, unfortunately!