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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To not know what to do about DD - sleep related

7 replies

Fourinthemorningthoughts · 14/10/2024 15:43

My DD slept fairly well as a baby but now she is 15 months and it’s gone south. She is refusing to go in her cot and gets hysterical when put in it. I’ve tried staying with her but she wakes up as soon as I leave the room. She’s been co sleeping and i hate it.

I guess I need to do some form of sleep training but dreading it and I’m feeling unsure it will ever be effective. I’m so so tired. Help?

OP posts:
InTheRainOnATrain · 14/10/2024 15:51

I’d consider sleep training, and it’s a personal thing but I’d take 3 nights of Ferber over weeks or months of a ‘gentle’ method that has her wake up crying when she realises you’re trying to sneak out, but only once I’ve ruled out everything else.

What are her naps like? 15 months is the typical age for the 2->1 nap transition so hopefully it could just be a case of cutting down on the daytime sleep. Does she have her first molars yet? If not then again this can be a typical age for them to come through so perhaps try a dose of nurofen before bed, specifically nurofen not calpol as it lasts longer. Any other big changes like starting nursery? Does she eat enough at dinner to not be hungry?

Makingchocolatecake · 14/10/2024 22:19

Sleep on her floor for a few nights?

Hankunamatata · 14/10/2024 22:28

Pick up put down for me, extending time eaxh time. Soul destroying while doing it but worked after a week

Beamur · 14/10/2024 22:42

We moved DD into her own room at this age as her sleep was getting worse and I was on my knees with exhaustion.
As I had been bf all wakes had been done by me. So, I sent in DH.
By the 3rd night she slept through. I thought she'd fight more but was delighted to finally get some sleep!

BertieBotts · 14/10/2024 23:17

How do you get her to sleep?

Are you doing the floppy arm test before you try to leave?

IME it is possible to get them from cosleeping to sleeping in their own bed without doing something like controlled crying, but it did take a lot of hanging around and feeding to sleep and 78927923 attempts to put down on my end. But the most important thing was to stick to what I had decided, because basically, when they wake up and they are expecting you to bring them into your bed, they will cry for you to do that because that is what they always have done.

When you can successfully resettle them in their bed, whether that is with camping out, or CC, or PUPD, or ssh-pat, or feeding them to sleep then lowering them into bed fully asleep or whatever, they will at first wake up at the end of their next sleep cycle, and their immediate response will be to cry for you because they expect you to come and take them into your bed.

But the more times you keep resettling them in their own bed, they get used to that and it becomes easier to do it successfully too. It's really crucial to keep building in these experiences, because after a while what you'll find is that they start to wake up and rather than go "I need Mummy" they just turn over and go back to sleep, because they are used to being in their own bed for more of the night, so it feels familiar and normal to them. In fact after a while, DS3 started to ask "Mummy Daddy bed?" and I would say "No, in your own bed" and he would basically go sod the boobs then, point to be put down in bed, and ask for his blanket to be drawn all the way up to his chin and then he would just go back to sleep Grin

I am a total wimp who gives up on everything, so I had to sort of train myself, in that at first I set a goal of keeping them in their own room until 1am and then I slowly brought this later over time - this worked more slowly, but it did still work, I think it was the repetition of the resettling in their bed and also me learning that it was possible for me to soothe them without bringing them into my bed. If you are less of a pushover than me, you can probably do it much quicker.

With the older two kids I waited until they were over 2 to do this because I was waiting for some mystical sign that they were "ready" but I did it at 16 months with DS3 and it worked exactly the same. Perhaps a little slower because I happened to overlap it with starting nursery.

Fourinthemorningthoughts · 15/10/2024 07:55

That’s really, really helpful @BertieBotts . Thanks. Genuinely appreciated.

OP posts:
ByTealShaker · 15/10/2024 07:59

We did sleep training - was the only way we were ever going to get some sleep.

We did quite a friendly version of it, and my son did cry, but as long as he wasn’t hysterical we let him cry / moan for up to 10 minutes, and 9/10 he would fall asleep at around the 8 minute mark. I could tell if he clearly was upset and so I’d go in to comfort him, but still put him down to go to sleep. Eventually there were more sleep-full nights than sleep-less. Now he’s in a toddler bed it’s a whole different ball game!

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