You cio or your child wakes up forever

[Newsenmum]

Posting for traffic and a wide range of views. Never sleep trained my six year old. Hell and sleep deprivation for many, many years. He still needs cuddling to sleep and is in my bed the second he wakes. There are sen needs so maybe that’s part of it but loads of separation anxiety, despite me doing everything possible to stop that!
Nearly two year old needs feeding, cuddling to sleep. Wakes every hour when sees Im not there. Tried comforting her in cot, being there but shushing and other methods but just really upsets her.

I guess my question is, how on earth do you all do it? Every thread I see goes on and on about how demonic it is to let your child cry. What do you do then? Genuinely?

Absolute nonsense ‘cause problems into adulthood’ 🤣🤣 it’s only in the western world we even countenance leaving babies to cry. In the rest of the world infants and children are comforted at night, often sleeping in the same room as parents. Are they all going to have problematic adulthoods?

Lots of us manage to parent our children without ever leaving them to cry - because we believe it’s wrong.

I completely agree. What a load of shit that poster put. A 9 month old is not developmentally ready to settle themselves FFS.

I just spent time cuddling my babies until they knew they were safe and were able to fall asleep on their play mats. It took about 4 months with both where I had to hold them all the time. All. The. Time. So, 0.44% of their lives and 0.88% of mine I held a baby non stop.

And then never had any issues with them being able to fall asleep independently. So totally worth it.

Totally. You know someone is a harsh parent when they say ‘only a comfort feed’ as if providing comfort isn’t important to our babies. My 2 year old started reliably sleeping through at 20 months when SHE was ready, but I’m so glad I was there fo breastfeed her and cuddle her at night when she was teething or woke in the night etc. It’s a short time in the grand scheme of things and I’m delighted that, as her mother, I’ve done my utmost to make sure my child has never been distressed unnecessarily in her short life, and that includes never leaving her to cry.

And for those who think I must have been exhausted the last 2 years - nope. A child waking once in the night to be breastfed takes about 5 mins, you do it basically in your sleep if you cosleep and you get chunks of sleep either side so no one suffers. It’s not ‘parent v baby’, you can be attentive to your child and still healthy and happy as kids naturally wake much less as they get older. Western sleep training culture just tells us otherwise- we have to ‘train’ our kids to sleep? Nonsense.

I am not saying this is the case for everyone as obviously OP has a more extreme scenario and it sounds incredibly tough, but all the replies making out you’ve ‘got’ to sleep train are nonsense.

tbh in your situation I’d cosleep OP especially with the youngest. They will likely sleep through then

My son woke a lot as a baby, he was breast fed to sleep. Basically you need to teach your child to fall asleep so if they wake up they can put themselves back to sleep. I stopped offering feeds first then I started to lay him down partly awake and cuddle him. Then lay with hand on chest, sit with hand on Chest. And basically over 3 weeks just kept moving further away from him until I was leaving the room

I think it is important to say there is no right way to do this. I never left my babies to cry but as they got older it was important for my own well being not to be upstairs putting them to bed for ages. It’s not going to permanently damage them whatsoever. But I think you should do the thing that suits you. I wanted a couple of hours to myself in the evening. Do what ever suits you.

Sometimes it isn’t even what suits you, but what the new baby needs. You can do two things at once in some situations but there are plenty that you can’t.

There’s definitely an inbetween. Mine has never been left crying but has also never slept in our bed. She’s happy and confident, plus sleeps well. We’re also happy as we’ve slept well too!

She slept in our room for the first six months and that was very difficult as we’d all wake each other up moving around, coughing, snoring/grunts etc.

I had the exact same approach as you with mine. Breastfed him to sleep, fed him in the night, fed for comfort etc. he’s now nearly 8 and is an excellent sleeper and a very confident and resilient kid. Far from making him ‘too reliant’ on me, it’s had the opposite effect it seems!
Although obviously I can’t account for his personality and that he may just be that way inclined!

Great for you but my child would never have slept for long stretches in her own bed, and I wasn’t prepared to put up with endless sleep deprivation, (or to leave her to cry, which I think is wrong ) so cosleeping was the natural solution.