4 1/2 month old sleep separation anxiety?

[PuddingPie16]

Hi All!

Really looking for some advice please...

My 4 1/2 month old DS will not let anyone else except me get him to sleep! My DH can spend over an hour getting him to sleep and then he only goes because he becomes too exhausted to stay awake.

If anyone else tries to get him to sleep then he screams the house down and gets himself into a right state! I have left him to cry but it breaks my heart and does not work!

My Mum doesn't live nearby but I am very close to her but it is heartbreaking to see him so upset with her, especially with DH too.

I am happy to walk out the room but he never calms until I take him back. People keep saying "He needs to get used to other people" which I 100% agree with! But he just won't settle.

I love that he is so dependent on me but I will be going back to work in 5 months and he will be at nursery 2 days and my MIL 1 day so he needs to know he is secure without me. We are also going away over night in March and my Mum will be babysitting and I am worried he will not settle for her.

Can anyone offer any guidance please? For the record, he is bottle fed, doesn't nap on me and sleeps in a cot at night.

Thank you x

Hi,

I’m sorry I can’t help because my DS is exactly the same! He will only fall asleep with me and if he wakes will only be settled by me, it’s exhausting and I feel bad for my husband.

People keep saying he needs to be more “independent” but he’s 4 and a half months so I think it’s a bit unfair on him to just leave him to cry ???

My DS is EBF so I wonder if this is related?

Following this thread for advice!!

X

Babies go through sooo much development in 2-3 months please don't try to 'train' him to be less dependent.

You can encourage settling with daddy by choosing days when he is more chilled to let DH have a go at bedtime but also ensure he's doing other stuff for baby too to foster a relationship.

He doesn't need to be independent that young - that's ridiculous and really bad advice. Mine was like this too, and it was hard as I couldn't do anything in the evenings as there was no way he'd let husband put him down. In the end I stopped trying and just let him snooze downstairs for a few hours with me until I was ready to go to bed with him. It gave me a couple of hours to watch tv or whatever. I was told not to do this by HV and others cos of routine blah blahblah.
All nonsense as at around 6 months he suddenly stopped minding who put him down! It was honestly just a phase and one I wish that I hadn't got so stressed over. These things pass....

5 months is a really long time - he’ll probably start sleeping well, and then sleeping terribly again with no warning or apparent reason for the change (at least that’s what mine did still does) in that time.

Are you able to get time to yourself once he is asleep? If so, and other than it needing to be you, I think if it works, it’s fine.
Keep trying different things until you find what suits you best.

I ended up breastfeeding to sleep and semi-co-sleeping for the first year, which I never thought I would, as sleep training didn’t work for us, and I just wanted to do whatever got us the most sleep that night!

I have close friends, with wonderfully content children who did a bit of cry it out type stuff (they could differentiate between whimpering and screaming. My DS just went straight to screaming the couple of times I tried!)

Please don’t worry about going back to work. Babies have this amazing ability to just get it. It took my DS about a month to settle in nursery, after that he took a bottle for first time and could go to sleep independently in a cot.

Sorry. That’s a bit rambling.

The theory is that by forming a secure attachment to you, they are able to develop independence later. And, really, if you think more biologically, it's usually attachment to the mother that keeps a young animal alive.
My DS will drift off to sleep with either of us sat beside his cot but DH has been very hands on from day 1 (and today, while i went out to rowing, he had DS from after breakfast, out for a walk, down for a nap and then fed and just about still happy when I got home). He's 6 months.

You cannot possibly extrapolate from now to your return to work, but my mum makes sure to see DS every week so that he doesn't see her as a stranger (and she does care for him while I do my tutoring etc)