So, why do you wait until 6months+ before attempting cc/cio?

[cruisemum1]

I have absolutely no intention of doing this (just yet anyway) but my dh is always banging on about it and I want/need to be able to give him a real reason other than my protestestations that it is damaging at too young an age as they do not understand anything other than they are being abandoned etc.

cruisemum1,

I can't find the age of your child on this thread but from the title I am assuming that he is less than 6 months old and 100% breastfed.

If breastfeeding him to sleep works he must need the milk, hence whatever 'sleep training' you try is setting yourself up for failure.

What I found with my daughter, is that if she didn't get enough nursing sessions in during the day, she would wake up more frequently at night.

This peaked around the age of four months old, when she fed less during the day. The world was far too interesting, she would latch off if she heard or saw anything new and everything was new and hence she was getting a lot less milk per nursing session.

I found that offering the breast more often during the day and especially in the evening equalled longer better feeds and she took in more milk, which meant longer periods of sleep at night.

HTH

DS is 10 months this week and Cruisemum I have to agree with Babies. If no sleep training you are doing is making any difference at all then it does sound like he s still needing fed either that or you are not giving anything enough time to work. You said you have usd no cry sleep solution and it never worked because it does take time and it is a gradual improvement. Sleep training can be compared to discipline in the way that you can get so caught up in trying to get results that the baby/child ends up confused because the goal posts keep moving as there are so many different things tried that none are stuck to long enough to see results I do think that whatever road you go down you have to be consistent or do nothing at all.
DS and DD were not fantastic sleepers as small babies but they did gradually improve by themselves in their own time. I have read reports that sleeping through is a natural developmental stage like walking etc and that babies will do it in their own time and from my esperience there may be a hint of truth in it.

hipmummy/kittypants - ds will not take a dummy (so far!) I do offer one eveyr now and then to see if he has changed his mind but to no avail.
babies - ds is 24 weeks and i am currently trying to wean from bf to ff. he is also partially weaned to solids and has three small meals per day of pureed fruit/veg/babyrice - the usual, which he seems to love! he is wakig in the night, i suspect, as he is using me as a dummy. i let him have boob day and night when he roots for it but this is leaving me with no 'routine' and i need one for both his and my sanity!

We are just starting to wean too, it is fun

As most food has less calories than milk. I breastfeed my daughter before offering solids, so that her calorie intake stays high.

I don't want to fill her up on food during the day, else she won't have the calories needed to stay asleep at night.

But saying that we are doing Baby Led weaning and so she only gets a small amount of solids which she can self feed and milk is 99% of her diet.

Also we only offer one sample of food per day at the moment, just to check for any allergic reactions.

Today it is banana and gosh is it messy

Have you read the No Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley? It's quite hard work, but it does work.

have read ncss - twice. not seen any improvement as a result of it though. the only thing that really applies here is the pull off thing but it seems a bit ineffective tbh. What was your situation and what did you use from ncss that worked? very inetersted

To answer the original question: DD was 4 months and waking up three times in the night to bf when her pediatrician told us "Either you teach her to sleep through the night NOW, or she will continue to wake up in the night until she is 2 years old". Something about sleeping habits getting solid after the first six months and it being very difficult (if not impossible) to change after that.

She said a four month old baby drinks enough milk at one sitting to last her through the night, and that she wakes up to feed not because of NEED but because of HABIT. Having lived in a predominantly Muslim country for a while, I could understand what she meant: Muslims who fast every day in the month of Ramadan wake up at 2 AM every night, eat loads, then go back to bed to eat or drink nothing until sunset the following day. After Ramadan is over, they STILL wake up at 2 AM with rumbling bellies, although they are not fasting in the daytime anymore. After a couple of nights of waking up, tossing and turning, and going back to sleep without eating, the habit is lost and they sleep through again.

[I know, a baby is not an adult. I am just giving an example of a similar situation in way of explanation.]

Anyway, we stopped night feeds that day. DD would wake up wanting to be fed and we would rock her, kiss her, pat her, hug her, do everything to get her back to sleep without feeding her. We had two tough nights but she slept through the third night and has been sleeping through ever since.

At no point have we "abandoned" her. We were always with her when she cried, but there would be no feeds.

DD is now 18 months old - a very happy, bubbly, cuddly kid who still goes to bed easily and sleeps through the night. I don't regret not having waited for her to sleep through on her own. I am a better mother since I started to sleep well, and she is a happier and more alert baby since she started to sleep well.

Hope that helps those of us who might be considering breaking the night feed happy of their little ones. Not trying to say this is the best way, just posting our experience. If you are happy to not sleep more than a few hours at a time for years, more power to you.