4 month old and controlled crying/self soothe

[emmak8383]

I call it controlled crying but what we are just trying to do is help our daughter to self soothe. Our daughter is breastfed and has always gone to sleep on the boob. Because of this she is unable to self soothe when she wakes in the night. I am still feeding her during the night but sometimes she has woken an hour later after being fed and we have had to go in to her to get her back to sleep as she obviously doesn't know how to do so herself.
So what we have started now is to soothe her by not picking her up. We rub her belly and shush her. We leave her for a minute or two and then we go back and try again with the belly rub and shushing. Sometimes we do pick her up just in case she needs a burp (even though she has already been burped) and then put her back down to try again.
Let me make it clear that we are not just letting her cry it out till she stops. We are trying to soothe her without picking her up so she doesn't rely on it.
We are just after some thoughts about whether this is too early. A lot of information that we have read says controlled crying should not be done before 6 months or 9 months old.

A lot of these posts don't seem to understand that there are different reasons why a baby might wake and cry in the night.

Of course sometimes they wake and cry because there is something wrong - hunger, teeth, wind etc.

But sometimes they wake simply because they have come to the end of a sleep cycle. All of us come into lighter sleep phases between sleep cycles, and we might wake momentarily. An adult will simply go straight back to sleep (transitioning into the next sleep cycle) and won't register or remember these tiny wakings. However, a baby who has learned that they need to be fed/cuddled/rocked in order to go to sleep will not be able to go straight back to sleep and will instead wake fully. And then they will cry, because they want to be asleep and can't get there by themselves.

This is why parents often find their child wakes at regular intervals in the night - every hour or every 2 hours for example. It's because the sleep cycles are regular lengths, and a baby might wake after every 1 or 2 or 3 cycles.

This is also why many parents find that once their child knows how to self settle (whether taught by CC or not) the night wakings drop dramatically - because when they can self settle, they only wake fully and cry when there is a genuine problem, not just because they have woken and don't know how to get back to sleep.

So teaching a baby to self settle is not the same as teaching them that nobody comes when they have a problem.

By way of example - we used CC to teach DD to self settle. She stopped waking every 90 minutes as she'd previously done. However she still wakes every time she is ill, teething, hungry, too cold, etc.

I should add that some people are very lucky and have a baby who learned very early how to transition from one sleep cycle to the next. (Usually these are the babies who love sleep). Those parents will probably not suffer so much through the 4 month sleep regression. Their child will only wake when genuinely hungry or unwell. For these parents, CC would be pointless. However for those of us whose babies have learned that they need to be fed or cuddled to get back to sleep, CC can be a godsend.

It also seems to me that most newborns can self settle in their first week or so. They drop off anywhere, any time they are tired. Then in their first few weeks, as they get used to going to sleep after a feed, they start to learn that a feed is a necessary part of going to sleep. It's then that the ability to self settle disappears. So it's actually not teaching them to self settle, it's re-teaching them - undoing the feed-to-sleep association that we taught them in the early weeks.

minipie- utter twaddle.

I don't think we teach them that they need to feed to settle back to sleep. It happens completely naturally.

of course we don't teach them it deliberately Rooners, it happens naturally as you say. And at first there's no problem with it at all, it's lovely. The problem comes when you have a baby who wakes every sleep cycle and needs to be fed to get back to sleep (despite not being hungry).

I know some people will say "co sleep and it isn't a problem" but it didn't work for us - I couldn't feed lying down, and I turn over a lot in my sleep.

I also know some people will say "it isn't a problem if you get broken sleep" but it was for us as I nearly fell down the stairs one day when carrying DD because I was so tired. That's when we decided to to do CC.

stroke do you have any specific comments to make, as that isn't a particularly helpful reply?

minipie- can you provide some links to back up your theory?

No, I can't (doesn't mean they don't exist just that I don't have them to hand).

Can you provide any specific comments on what I have said rather than a sweeping dismissal?

You can't provide me with data to back up your claims because there are none.

I don't really understand your request for "data". What sort of data did you have in mind? I don't think many experiments have been done on babies so there's unlikely to be much "data" around.

Please can you explain which particular bits of my post you disagree with, what your view is instead, and (if data is so important) provide data to support your views.

It's not ,e making claims about "reteaching" babies to self settle.

You say that newborns can drop off anywhere- certainly not my experience- my young babies would only sleep on me in the first few weeks of life- they never fell asleep on their own.
After having so much physical contact for the past 9 months it's not surprising.

Did no one else find that they seem to fall into a natural sleep routine, as in about the same time everyday, and waking about the same time in the morning?

Yes mine would only sleep on me too (in fact she slept on my chest for the first 3 months) - you're right to pick me up on "anywhere".

What I meant is that at first they can go to sleep without any of the associations that seem to be needed later i.e. feeding, rocking, motion. They may need to be held (as yours and mine did) but they don't need any further "signal".

minipie of course many experiments have been done on babies and how they sleep, it's a very lively area of research, it's just that there is no evidence that there is such a thing as an ability to self-sooth, or that it develops at a particular time, or that anyone can do anything to bring it about. What you are saying sounds reasonable, apart from the total lack of evidence behind it; once you become aware of that, it starts sounding completely made up because all the consistency it has is internal.

CoteDAzur I bfed and co-slept DD till 2yo so now you know at least one more person! Night time wakings seem to be the norm with bf babies, see this interesting paper: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3951913

Booboo - Loads of people (myself included) have managed to get their babies to sleep through the night via sleep training, so obviously there is something we can do to bring it about. Call it "the ability to go back to sleep on their own without screaming the house down" if you don't like the term "the ability to self-sooth".

I don't know in RL anyone who has co-slept with and breastfed a toddler through the night. I do know there are a few of you on MN It is a big place. There are quite a few MNers who don't ever wash their hair, as well.

Wheredi - Of course. I said the same below but this was news to some.

I have no doubt that sleep training brings about the required effect- but as none of us really understands why it works-and it feels so instinctively wrong to many of us that it's not something I would want to risk doing.

Atthestroke - Your "polyphasic sleep is common in many cultures" put a smile on my face the whole day I just can't think of a sillier and more pretentious way to talk about good old broken sleep. It isn't even the same thing as broken night sleep, of course, which is what I was talking about.

Which cultures might that be where people don't sleep for a long stretch in the night but just have catnaps through the day & night, I wonder? It can't be anywhere where people work 9-to-5.

People can be quite different regarding sleep. I can't sleep during the day or nap and could only cackle in agony when people said I should "sleep when baby sleeps". If I wake up in the night, I can't go back to sleep before an hour or two. My dad is like me. When I was breastfeeding, this meant that I would manage to fall asleep about 15 minutes before the next feed. It was proper sleep deprivation, and coupled with no naps in the day, led me to hallucinate while behind the wheel after a few months.

So yes, I do believe that I could have died because of severe sleep deprivation. If not, depression was looking like a real possibility. And you think death or at least depression would have been worth it If Only Baby Never Cried, not even for a few minutes at a time.

I don't think so.

I WASH MY HAIR!!!

CoteDAzur - if you were true sleep deprivation you would not be lying awake at night for an "hour or two".

CoteDAzur without proper research you don't really know whether what you or other people did had a causal effect on sleep paterns or merely a coincidental one. After all, the babies of parents who do no sleep training also sleep through the night at some point as well.

Japanese culture tends to favour extended bf and family co-sleeping up to about 5 years of age, so perhaps you just know people who confirm what you think is true.

It perhaps depends what you prioritise.

I don't prioritise sleep, necessarily, or should I say sleep that is undisturbed completely.

I prioritise no one crying. I think that's my main thing - I can't stand to hear crying, from my babies, so I'll do whatever prevents or stops that.

Even if it means they 'have' to cry for maybe 2 nights - nope. I could not and would not do that. It would upset me far too much.

I value my time with the children, I also value my marriage I really don't believe children in the bed up to five years old would do any of my family any good.

A link to an article that backs up the link to self soothing and not waking every sleep cycle scienceofmom.com/2012/02/23/the-importance-of-self-soothing-to-infant-sleep/

This forum seems to think that the only acceptable way of parenting is to have your child in your bed and attached to your boob all night until they decide that they don't want to. In the real world people need sleep to function and some children need help in learning.

The AAP has carried out research and as long as they child is well loved and not neglected in other ways, a couple of nights of controlled crying is fine. The arguments about cortisol levels are highly flawed - cortisol levels rise when babies breastfeed too but we just don't know what it means.

It's pure antidote here but this is my experience ...
DC1 bf awful sleeper, up all night, Fed every 45 minutes or so for months. Was too scared to co sleep. Sleep trained (cc) around 5/6 months and it took about a week to crack and she slept through 7-6 regularly.

DC2 bf awful sleeper, up all night, Fed every 45 mins or so. Co slept from 8 weeks till he was nearly a year old. It was bloody hideous. Sleep trained around one. It was horrendous and I have never been so tired for over a year of my life I was so tired I used to slur my words. He sleeps okay now 2 year old.

DC3 ff, great sleeper. From day one he was put down at 7pm and on strict 4 hour feed schedule. If he woke I had a chair next to cot and would shhh pat, use dummy but not pick him out. He gradually spaced out feeds ... by 8 weeks only having one feed around 3/4 am. Now at 12 weeks he sleeps from 7:30 to 7:30. He occasionally stirs but will resettle... I don't go to every whimper.

:)

There MUST be habit associated with night wakings. My DS1, until I gently sleep trained him (no crying) woke every 45 minutes ON THE DOT! It was remarkable.

'This forum seems to think that the only acceptable way of parenting is to have your child in your bed and attached to your boob all night until they decide that they don't want to.'

I think you'll find that 'this forum' is HIGHLY divided about this topic!