Controlled Crying method

[Roc1]

Hi! Would like to get some advice on using the controlled crying method for dd who is 4 and half months.
She has gotten to the stage where she will only sleep after feeding and as soon as she is put down wakes up which means back to feeding and repeat. I am now looking to get her to sleep without feeding but that seems an impossible task too. Last night she cried for an hour and I gave up and fed her. And she slept off within 5 minutes.

I just don’t feel I can continue with feed to sleep as she literally ends up hanging on me all day and I spend most of my day trying to get her to sleep as she wakes up as soon as she is put down. She also tends to feed/comfort for nothing less than an hour after which I hold her for another 20 mins before I can put her down.
Any suggestions would be great, thanks!

Can you feed her lying down? I used to do that, but I co-slept. Controlled crying always worried me. I believe it gives the message no-one's there so no point in crying. Or you could feed and then rock a while, then put down. Sit nearby and reassure, hand on tummy sort of thing? Good luck. It's a challenging time, babies. Mine are teens and they keep me awake now in different ways!

4 months is too young for controlled crying or leaving her to cry alone for prolonged periods. You are trying to move too fast and skip to the end bit of self-settling without feeding, without giving her anything else to help her sleep. Leaving her to cry is not teaching anything and will make nap time a distressing thing.

You need to work on her falling asleep without feeding.
I would start by feeding her on waking from every nap so you have a routine of sleep-feed-play-sleep.
Does she have lots of sleep cues at the moment? Dummy, special snuggly or blanket, sleep music or white noise etc. You need lots of things that signal 'sleep time' and use them consistently for every nap and bedtime.
First try getting her used to falling asleep without feeding - so in a sling, walking in the pram, in a baby swing - with all the sleep cues. Once she can fall asleep for eg in a pram with her blanket and dummy you can start putting her in her cot with her blanket and dummy.
At first she will probably protest so I would cuddle or rock her in you arms with her dummy/blanket until sleepy then lay her down and shush and pat her to sleep. Stay with her all the time soothing her - if she gets distressed then pick her up and cuddle her but lay her back down once she's calm and before she falls asleep in your arms.
Once you get to the stage that you can put her in her cot with all her sleep things and shush/pat her to sleep, you can start just putting a hand on her with no patting, then just sitting by the cot til she sleeps, and then just putting her down and leaving her to self settle.

Too young to sleep train. They do feed a lot. Stop trying to get her to sleep, perhaps?
Trying to get them to sleep is only usually a thing for firstborns; subsequent children sleep wherever and whenever.

We did a kind of shh-pat method which had some tears but not leaving them for long. It worked well but ours were a bit older. I think the advice is 6 months earliest. Our eldest was born 3 weeks early and interestingly it didn't go as well with him as with our younger DS who was born at 40 weeks and totally ready. I co-slept with both til they were 6 months old.

@CherryRoulade

Too young to sleep train. They do feed a lot. Stop trying to get her to sleep, perhaps? Trying to get them to sleep is only usually a thing for firstborns; subsequent children sleep wherever and whenever.

Totally disagree with this It was even more important for me that 2nd/3rd/4th borns napped well and slept through as I was busy in the day! It's only the 1st one I had the luxury of holding a baby all the time and being awake half the night!

Your little one is going through the four month regression, controlled crying is not a good idea.

Thank you all for your repossess and I will definitely take things on board. I do feel she is still quite young for sleep trying and don’t believe in letting babies ‘cry it out’ but I suppose the past days have been really difficult and just wanted to try anything that would get us back into a better routine.
Example. This morning she woke for 8am. And been trying to get her to have a nap which meant a cycle of feeding put down wake up repeat and did this till just after 1pm and she has now finally settled (in her cot). She will now sleep for about 2-2 and half hours. But this is really late and she should be on her second nap by now. I take her to the room by 6.30-7pm and then we sort of repeat this cycle where she wakes up as soon as I put her down. So I really feel I don’t have much of a day. Mind you it has only been this extreme for a week now was not always this bad.
The other thing that worries me with feed to sleep is her possibly over eating. She also has reflux so I don’t think that really helps.

@minniemango I have tried sleep cues... but it seems my baby will literally not settle unless there is a booby in her mouth. She has also refused to take a dummy but sucking her own fingers does not do the job either.
She will fall asleep after a walk with her pram and sometimes will carry on sleeping in it. She eventually also falls asleep in a carrier but once I take her out to put in her cot she wakes up and sometimes I will shush her back to sleep And if that does not work feed to sleep.

@crossstitchingnana We don’t co-sleep so feeding while lying down is something I only feed when she was newborn but I do try to shush and pat her to sleep or walk around rocking her in my arms but again most times one I put her down she wakes up and I end up having to feed her anyway.

@CherryRoulade I dont force her to sleep I just attend to her cues of tiredness which most times is about every 1 and half to two hours. When I leave her longer than that it often just turns into a cry anyway and I have tried to put her in a swing or her bouncer but she tends not to drift off on her own. Think she has only done so 3 times to date but when she was about 2 months. Think she really knows what she wants!

I have tried sleep cues... but it seems my baby will literally not settle unless there is a booby in her mouth
Its not something that works instantly, you need to persevere with it and do it at every feed/nap. Choose a comforter and snuggle her up with it every time you feed to sleep or rock her to sleep in the pram, and soon she will associate the comforter with being relaxed and sleepy and it replaces feeding.
If she will fall asleep in the pram you can try rocking her to sleep in your hallway.

minniemango Not sure we disagree - I meant with a second and third they just had to nap wherever they were. No carrying them around and persuading them into a cot; if you were in the car, they slept in the car, if you were in town, they slept in the pushchair.

minniemango thanks will keep trying and be consistent with it. Hopefully it will work eventually.

At that age we found the “sleep ladder” approach quite useful. Paired with trying to break the feed-to-sleep association (I’d literally wake DS up if he was falling asleep. Not rudely awake, just enough that he was aware I was moving him). He would cry, and we would respond, we just wouldn’t immediately respond with milk (as long as we knew he wasn’t ACTUALLY hungry!).

Every 3-5 minutes, we would go in and reassure him we were there and we loved him but now it’s night, and night is for sleeping. After 3 tries, we would stroke his back instead. After 3 tries of that we would pick him up, rock him back to calm, and put him back down. Only after 2-3 tries of that would I feed him. We found this method worked after a couple of nights - we cut down from 6 feeds per night (ridiculous!) to 2 (much more age appropriate!). It didn’t cause too much stress. There was a lot of crying, but it was crying because he wasn’t getting his first choice, not crying because he feared we’d abandoned him. :p

Later on (older than a year) he was still waking up once or twice a night and at that point we used some controlled crying without feeling too much guilt. I’m happy to say he’s now 2 and sleeps brilliantly 7:45-6:45, and seems very healthily attached to us. So do whatever works for you. :-)

@UpToMyElbowsInDiapers Thank you for the suggestion. I will definitely be trying something along those lines but think I will now wait a bit longer till she is a few months older.

I wouldn't feel happy letting them cry it out.

We did a routine & I would guess you're letting her sleep in too late & putting to bed too early. Some babies need less sleep so DD would do 12 hours 7-7 and DS would only do 11 hours so either 7-6 or 8-7.

If you're not getting her up til 8 I would imagine the nap is later & she's just not tired at 6.30/7.

Could you try later bedtime, get up earlier then nap 12-2.

I'm glad you're thinking of waiting, op. I am not a fan of cio methods at any stage but especially when a baby is so very young.

@converseandjeans So for the past week since she just does not want to be put down her routine is a bit all over the place to what it was previously. She is waking up more often and then not staying asleep. So it’s set her bed time/ wake up time back.
Previously she tended to sleep by 7.30/8pm wake up about 10pm for feed then sleep till about 1/2pm then wake again at either 4/5ambto feed or sleep through till 7/7.30am. Then nap again 9.30/10am but her first nap became more of a struggle and has become later more like 11am. She would then normally have a 2 hour nap by 1pm. And a very short nap before 6pm.

However, all that seemed to have gone out the window the past few days because she just wakes up the moment I put her down in the day. And at night is now waking every hour.

Even though it is frustrating for me it’s more worrying knowing she is definitely not getting enough sleep atm.

She might be developing a skill and having a "regression".

Stick with it. Don't do CC as you already know it's too young.

Could you try using a dummy if she needs the sucking for comfort to get to sleep? Mine took a while to get used to it, I just kept gently trying it, but once she got it it was amazingly helpful. The NUK ones worked for us. Otherwise, I recommend the book 'the no cry sleep solution'. Finally, a little hand hold for you. This age is so difficult for sleep. They grow and develop so quickly at this age - either you'll find something that helps, or she will grow out of it.

Controlled crying is a form of crying it out. Personally I didn't use any kind of sleep training. But if you are going to, 4 months is far too young. 4 months is well known to be an age for sleep regression.

@Cindersrellie I have tried a dummy she won’t have it. However, will try again and give it to her when she is sucking her fingers but still in a happy mood. She might be more receptive to it then. Will look into the book thanks.

@AntiHop Yes I do agree it’s a bit young. Think I was just in a moment of desperation.

It is so hard when a baby is so reliant on feeding to sleep but, honestly, just take the pressure off and accept it for what it is - she's a tiny baby who wants to sleep snuggled up to her mummy. It's difficult because you never get a break, but I genuinely did some serious damage to my mental health trying to get my DD to nap 'properly' - your DD might be similar to mine in that she's just not up for sleeping alone!

I know that doesn't help when you're looking for solutions, but the best thing I did for both me and DD was just accept that my baby wasn't great at sleeping and nothing I could do would fix that. We tried CC when she was 7 months old, it worked temporarily but as soon as she was teething/unwell etc and needed comfort, we were back to square one. Just before her first birthday she started taking naturally longer naps, I then night weaned her and she's been a pretty good sleeper since. It is so hard, but you might just need to give your DD time.

Too young. I don't believe in sleep training breast fed babies before one year old. They are truly hungry in the night.

[quote Roc1]@AntiHop Yes I do agree it’s a bit young. Think I was just in a moment of desperation.[/quote]
You sound exhausted

It's really hard when it's your first baby to work out what's going on and there are so many messages out there about what babies "should" be doing. Follow her cues - she's still so little and if getting her to sleep for your own sanity means the boob, then I would do it. As previous posters have said, it's likely she's going through the 4 month sleep regression. Hang in there and look after yourself anyway you can, get more help, do less, whatever it is that gets you through. I found Sarah Ockwell Smith and the Beyond Sleep Training Project to be incredibly helpful in explaining what normal infant sleep is - it changed how I view my (now a toddler) baby. Don't put yourself and the wee one through the stress of controlled crying.

@WildGeece Thanks. Have had a look into the sleep training Project.