10.5 month old still wakes crying every 1-2hrs. Any outside of the box tips?

[DollyDayDream88]

My 10.5 month old baby always wakes crying/screaming and wakes every 1-2hours throughout the night with prolonged and physically demanding resettling periods. It is not a phase, sleep regression, teething, lack of routine, hunger, belly pain, development, medical condition, undertired, overtired, over-stimulated or any of the standard issues. Though all of these things have played a role in worsening things at times. It is constant. She has always been this way or worse. Never improves for any valid amount of time, or to a significant extent, no matter what we do. And we've worked on and tried EVERYTHING! Routine, sleep environment, day time naps, feeding, health, evening stimulation etc are all excellent. She's been medically checked by different doctors, all perfect. She has strong sleep associations (dummy, movement) and seperation anxiety. This is the main problem. I understand the principles of removing them gently and we've been working towards it with some success but we are still up all night long exhausted, aching and in despair.

We tried the Ferber method when she was around 6 months. It was excruciating, worked partially, but was set back entirely by teething and a change in location. Now she's much more aware, physically strong and coordinated, can sit and stand and is even more vocal. We really want to avoid doing any form of 'cry it out' but the text book gentle methods (e.g. put her in the cot drowsy) all result in her screaming and crying instantly, hysterically and uncontrollably anyway. No amount of patting, rubbing, singing, reassuring will stop her so we just end up picking her up. Result: little to no progress but significantly less sleep and more stress for us.

We are way past our wits end. No 'expert' seems to get how extreme she is and they just tell us all the things we've already read and tried.

So the question: does anyone have any outside of the box advice, tips or experience that might help us? Or does anyone have experience of a 'cry it out' method with a baby like this?

And if you've made it this far in the post, thanks for reading .

Co-sleep? That's what we did and we all slept well.

I also ended up co-sleeping with a baby a bit like this – I hadn't intended to, but she just couldn't stay asleep if she didn't know where I was, woke up genuinely distressed that she had lost mummy!!!! (We knew that was the problem because she'd start reaching out with an arm before she woke, and if that arm encountered me, she'd settle back into a deeper sleep without waking.)

I ended up taking the approach that the first thing to do was get us all sleeping – even if that meant that initially all her sleep was glued to me (and it did) – and then, once everyone had caught up on sleep a bit, slooooowly ease her towards more independent sleep. Progress was uneven (and occasionally backwards, especially when ill or teething), small steps sometimes took ages and then she'd take what I thought was a big step in her stride, but we all got more sleep and there was a lot less crying.

Have you had her checked for ear infections etc? That was a big cause of my son’s awful sleep. But otherwise I agree with above-co-sleep and then work very slowly towards independent sleep from there.

Co sleeping with my 9.5 month old on a mattress on the floor for this exact reason! Its that or lose my mind from sleep deprivation

That sounds incredibly hard.

I was always absolutely against Cry it Out and never did it with our first 2. (Took years to sleep well, but now they both do).

However when our third was 10 months old and I was homeschooling the older 2, she was a total nightmare sleeper. It reached the point where I couldn't get her to nap at all (max 45mins a day after trying all day and her permanently exhausted) not going to bed till 10pm despite everything I tried and waking multiple times each night. I was losing my mind.

My friend who is very attachment parent based suggested the book 'The Happy Sleeper' by Heather Turgeon and we tried it. I stayed outside the door talking through it so at no point did she feel abandoned, the first time was tough but I only let her cry for up to 3 mins not 5 as the book suggests and I can not explain how utterly life changing it has been.

Now she sleeps through every night, and has a 2 hour nap every day!!! None of my children have ever done that with naps, always 30 mins a day from about 8 months.

She has no negative associations with the cot, actually asks to go in it when I'm singing her songs before bed. Never had this either.

I completely accept that there are very heated discussions around any kind of CIO and I was 100% against it before. But the fact she knew I was always there and it has basically saved my sanity means I would recommend the book. The intro makes a lot of sense re. Us getting too involved in helping them to sleep, when really they naturally do.

Good luck, it's just such a tough situation.

Buy a bigger bed and co sleep after their first waking. Find bucket loads of patience from somewhere and catch up on sleep whenever you can.

I'm sorry op. It's rough and draining when your child has broken sleep.

We've tried co-sleeping. She does prefer it but she's a very active and light sleeper so she spends the whole night doing huge turns, sometimes climbing half in top of one or other of us or scrunching herself against the top of the bed. Calming her in place can take ages too. And there are always 1 or 2 occasions when she outright refuses to be calmed in place and I have to get out and pace her to sleep anyway. Also our bed is a small double and the room won't fit anything else. Basically I end up spending the whole night not sleeping at all or in a state of semi-consciousness. I've developed quite a lot of anxiety around her sleep so I have difficulty sleeping but I at least get 2-3 hours a night if she isn't in the bed.

Sleep training is something you have to do several times as children can regress. I would do Ferber or CIO. It's very controversial but she needs to learn how to put herself to sleep without you. Your need to get sleep is also important too. By cosleeping etc you are just dragging out the reliance she has on you to sleep.

Agree with @Buttercupmoon , we have to revisit sleep training every now and again (with less and less stress each time), usually after he's been ill or away so we've been more 'lax' with the routine. Cosleeping also didn't work for us as he'd do 360° turns throughout the night and slept far worse with us than in his own bed.

I can't even imagine what kind of strength it takes to go through that with 3! Respect! Thank you for the advice. I haven't read that one though I've read many books. I'll look it up. I'm just sure that no amount of soothing nearby will work. She'll just scream for hours until she passes out tired or we give up and walk her to sleep drenched in guilt. She's incredibly stubborn and determined and also has very volatile emotions. I feel like any amount of leaving her to cry would be feel like the end of the world for her. But I'm also really not coping. Haven't been for a while. So hard.

She was chcked by a doctor a couple of months ago and everything was fine. But I'll get her ears checked again. She does pull at her ears quite a lot but I always assumed it was teething. She definitely does it more when she's teething. I'll monitor it because she has all 8 front teeth now so we should get a break. Thanks.

Thank you for the insight into CIO methods too. I'd appreciate any more personal stories of people who did CIO or Ferber or anything similar with a baby like this i.e.an instant and hysterical screamer/cryer rather than fussy with a bit of crying.

Elevate the head of the cot to reduce nasal congestion and teething pressure.

Maybe she’s cold - my youngest liked to be seriously toasty at night and didn’t sleep unless wrapped up like a Sherpa.

I think it sounds like you need to get rid of the sleep props, particularly movement. Pacing. Look at it this way, you're going to have to do it anyway because it won't be long before she's too big. You've said you did controlled crying before work a small amount of success at 6m. I would do it again now at 10m. It's a good age to sleep train. From what you've said she's crying a lot anyway so there's a chance it won't be any worse. What you're doing now isn't working for anyone and to me seems unlikely to change. I ended up sleep training both my children. No one sets out wanting to do it but my experience was it was quick, effective, much MUCH less crying than I was expecting, saved my sanity, marriage, and made my children happier.

If you want her to learn to fall asleep and get back to sleep by herself, you will have to tough out the crying.
If rubbing and patting her winds her up more, I would just sit quietly by her bed so she knows she hasn't been abandoned.
Maybe shush her occasionally but don't pick her up.
She will cry a lot and it will take hours the first time.
Be really consistent, bedtime routine, white noise, dummy, into the cot awake and then sit quietly with her.
Once she is falling asleep with you next to the cot you can start moving your chair further towards the door until eventually you can leave the room.

I would say you need to be prepared for the crying, you need to be really strong about not picking her up (or you're just teaching her that she has to cry for a really long time to get picked up) and you need to do it really consistently for a week or 10 days to see results.

Also you can't MAKE her go to sleep, and it's actually not your job to 'get her to sleep'. Your role is to support her to learn a vital life skill here, how to get to sleep by herself.

In the short term, is there anything you can do to make her current patterns more tolerable? I think it's incredibly hard to face ANYTHING when you're very tired. Cosleeping obviously doesn't sound like it'll work for you (its the only way I survive!). Are you able to nap during the day? Do you have someone that can take them to to pram nap or a playground visit or something so you can get some nice quiet time?

I never sleep trained my eldest, who was a HORRIFIC sleeper. Your child will eventually sleep independently whether you train or not. But it may not be for a long time, possibly more than a year.

What approach would you like to take? Anything gentle tends to be very slow, so in the short term you get less sleep so you need some sort of plan to cope with that.

She won't sleep in a pram or anywhere outside of rooms she is used to. She's very alert. We've done all the dark room/white noise/familiar environment/comfort toy stuff, which helped a lot but now they are requirements. She has a baby tent for a bed which goes with us if we ever spend a whole day out. She only sleeps in the car if it's a very long drive and again with specific conditions. The sling works but not on anyone and we're currently in Brazil so it's just too hot. Her grandma is the only other person who can put her to sleep and then only for her naps. Night time is a no go. Sometimes we give up, hand her over in the small hours with extreme screaming. Her grandparents then give up quickly and she ends up playing for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. Necessary, but destroys her whole routine the next day and we pay the price later. I've also noticed that if I nap in our room with her for her long afternoon nap, she wakes sooner. Probably because she can see me when she wakes briefly between cycles.

At the moment we're living with her grandparents (over 3 months, very settled) in Brazil because I don't have any reliable family in the UK and we desperately needed help. So currently they take her first thing so we can sleep because she wakes at 6am and we're dead. It's the only thing keeping us going.

But normally, we live in Germany and have no support at all. We'll return at the beginning of February. We're really lucky because the system there has meant we're both able to take a year of parental leave. I could never have done this alone! But we never imagined that we'd be approaching a year and still barely sleeping. This is why I decided to post here. We really have tried everything. Except returned to CIO methods because we know she will cry to a panic attack level and her grandparents might have a heart attack in the process. We really believed that when we got here, got back a little energy, and worked to create the perfect environment/routine etc like all the advice says, that she'd make big improvements. It made her happier and less fussy during the day time and her naps are easy, but the night is just this major issue for her. It's like she just hates that sleep is necessary.

We're both really terrified of our return when her father will start work again, from home, in a small apartment and we'll have no one to step in. I don't know if I can hold myself together.

Seriously, aim for survival! If grandparents will take her at 6am, then you stay in bed till 10am so you had a decent 4hour block. Take a napin the afternoon - is there somewhere else you can sleep and someone else can be in charge of listening for the baby?

An awful lot can change in a couple of months. Your DD may be ready for some gentle changes to help her sleep a bit better then. Even the worst sleepers improve over time. I find it helps to remind myself that they aren't doing it to be naughty or to make my life difficult, they just can't communicate their needs in any other way.

Turn the thermostat up/thicker sleeping bag. Was the thing that tipped my totally horrifically horrendous awful sleeper into not being quite so bad!

Hello again. Just an update for all the wonderful people who offered advice here and are following the thread or read in the future.

We adjusted her clothing and the air conditioning (no thermostat here, it's 35°c) and made sure she wasn't sweating or cold at night. No difference. We tried co-sleeping again but she wouldn't even let us get her into the bed, even after over an hour of pacing, bouncing and singing. She just instantly started flopping around, sat up and started screaming again. She's got all 8 front teeth now so she's on a teething break and she's eating really well, 4 times a day, and has a schedule designed around her (so she has the recommended amount of nap day time sleep and is not over or under tired for bed) that we follow really well. She also has a nice bed time routine and a calm sleeping environment. She never watches screens and we reduce stimulation before bed time. She only uses a dummy at night and we leave multiples in her bed because she can find them and replace them on her own now. We tried gently breaking the dummy association but this too just resulted in non-stop wailing. We've done everything.

And then it got worse!!! For four nights in a row, after writing this post, she had us awake from 1am to 6am pacing, bouncing and singing. This following two wake ups prior. The whole time, tense and twitching. Every time we tried to put her down she'd wake instantly or we'd get 30 minutes max. Neither of us slept. The morning lie in with the help of her grandparents was barely taking the edge off and I was losing my mind.

We felt that the movement had become an association so strong that she couldn't sleep at all without it, but it was simultaneously blocking her deep sleep, and it couldn't be broken in any gentle way. We had already tried to gradually reduce movement but it backfired. By this point we realised that if we didn't stop it would go on for far longer than we could possibly survive, soon with no help, and it's completely inhibiting our ability to enjoy our time with her. No one was benefiting. So, knowing that we had tried everything to be more gentle and acknowledging our own limit, we decided to go with the Ferber method once more. This was our experience:

Night 1: cried twice for 20 minutes (like a banshee), and one squeak that went no further (she found her dummy). Slept from 12-6am for the first time in her life (she had never crossed 3hrs before)

Night 2: slept in 1 minute initially. Cried for 20 minutes once around 10:20pm and 10 minutes around 4am. Some of this was pretty awful. Cried for 1 minute in between (probably dummy). Didn't wake until 7:40am also for the first time in her life (she liked 5:30 - 6am wakeups).

Night 3: Again 1 minute to sleep (stopped before I left the room). 18 minutes around 3am and we woke her at 7am.

Night 4 (current): again slept in 1 minute. So far nothing...

The first naps (same method) involved a little crying but very little. We always sing to her and rock her until she has heavy eye lids and then put her in her bed. She also fell asleep in her pram for the first time since she was tiny. And during the day she's the happy, energetic, extremely entertaining baby we love and now have more energy to enjoy and care for.

I'm writing in all this detail because we are a couple who have done an immense amount of research, followed two sleep programmes, seen sleep disorder specialists (who told us they had nothing more to suggest) and all manner of medical professionals (it was a bad birth). I have overcome massive psychological challenges and unimaginable sleep deprivation to make our baby feel better attached and more secure. There is a lot of resistance to CIO methods. I understand why. We didn't want to go there either. But, honestly, most of the advice out there is aimed at an average baby. 'Promised 'phases' never ended. Magical milestone ages or skill sets made little to no difference or worsened things. For us, all of the little slow tweaks cost sleep and mental health and never gave more than a few days change - if at all - before worsening again. Most of the people we spoke to, whether friends, family or professionals - unless they spent a night with us - just assumed we were exaggerating. Babies cry. Babies wake a lot. And new parents struggle. But we had never met a baby as challenging as ours. It made us feel very alone and hopeless.

I wrote my post on here in a moment of desperation where I had had to abandon ship, crying, leaving the once again screaming baby with my husband, to go for a walk so I could breath. I hadn't expected such a response or so fast. You clarified last things I could try, gave me hope and emotional support and finally gave the encouragement we needed to take this step. It's only the 4th night and we have two big moves coming up so we expect regression, but it has been so much lighter than we had expected (we expected 1hr of banshee screaming with a limit of 2hrs, several times a night), she is sleeping much more and doesn't seem at all marked by it in her day time behaviour. We feel hopeful and happy for the first time in months!!! And a lot less tired!

So, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but from my side, if you are a mother/father/parents struggling with this kind of baby, feel that you've tried everything but nothing works, but are still on the fence about CIO methods - then just try it. You can always back out. It might not be kind but neither is the alternative.

Once again, thank you so so so much to the people who wrote here and gave any kind of support whether advocating CIO or otherwise. It made the world of difference.

That is amazing news! Can I check what you do about night time wake ups? Mine has woken me every 1.5hrs and usually has a fairly long feed each time but tonight he's done after 5mins. Should I let him cry next time? Am I being too quick to rush in and feed?
I resorted to CIO months ago as I was getting nowhere. I couldn't even get on with Ferber as every time I went in to reassure, he got more angry. It's worked so well for us at bedtime and naptime. I just need to crack the constant night waking now!

Hi. I'm no expert. But as far as I understand in order to do this kind of sleep training you need to stop night feeding (the principle is not to pick them up and to teach self-soothing - impossible if you're breastfeeding), which means you need to be confident that they are mainly for comfort and not for necessity. I've read that if a baby is eating well three times a day then they should be able to go from 7pm -7am without feeding. Certainly every 1.5hrs is not hunger if your baby is already eating solids. The baby should also be over 6kg. If in doubt, ask your paediatrician. I've also read that if you don't feel confident some people include one, timed dream-feed (feed whilst still sleeping or close to) shortly before a time that they usually wake up. I think most people aim for around 11pm - 12am but it depends on your baby, as always. They argue that this will prolong or inhibit the method but, in my opinion, you have to adapt the method to make sure you feel confident and comfortable. I did this the first time when she was 6 months old, plus kept the bed time feed, and I felt that it was the right thing to do. I didn't think it made it less effective.

Our baby is quite little and put on weight slowly so it took us a long time to feel confident about cutting breastfeeding completely. Having a strong routine (we have an actual timetable that includes nap times, breakfast, lunch,snack,dinner, breastfeeds in between and bed time) with necessary flexibility helps a lot with this, because she started eating solids better and her naps became much easier. It also helped us align her breastfeeds to when she wakes from naps rather than when she goes to sleep (to break the association). Most importantly, we felt more in control and secure that we had eliminated all possible issues.

After that we gradually removed breastfeeding from her night wakings, starting with her first sleep of the night because I knew she couldn't be hungry having just eaten dinner maybe an hour before. This was actually easy. Not so much the night wakings. My husband really stepped up here. We share a lot already but I always resorted to breastfeeding because, in my exhaustion, I would do anything to shorten or diminish the fight to sleep (often didn't work anyway), which meant our baby often wouldn't accept being comforted by him, which then doubled back on me throughout the night. It also made him feel very useless. So when we started dropping feeds he pushed through when I couldn't and encouraged me not to give in. It was hard but our situation was already horrendous. In our case, she never loved breastfeeding and in reality the fight was rarely lessened anyway so it was better than I expected.

We now know we would've sleep trained regardless but taking these steps first helped us feel more confident in our decision and perhaps helped her too, to not feel like she was losing too many things at once. By the time we knew we couldn't handle another night, she was down to just one night feed and then the final wake up feed. So to sleep train we stopped feeding completely. She breastfeeds when she wakes in the morning, and after each of her two naps. But they are much better feeds than the constant and random ones from before.

I think doing the Ferber method rather than CIO is often more about your psychological comfort than the effectiveness of the method. We wanted her to know we were still nearby but that this was the new deal. Her screaming did intensify each time we left the room again but I like to think that the length of time that this continued overall was lessened by the security these visits gave. It's hard to know. Like I said before, you have to adapt the method so you feel confident and comfortable.

Good luck 🙂

Well done op. I've ended up in the same place with both my children who were also terrible sleepers, I mean I didn't temporarily move to Brazil but everything up to that! So you have my full understanding. I think you've absolutely done the right thing. Not just for you but also for your child.

@DollyDayDream88

We've tried co-sleeping. She does prefer it but she's a very active and light sleeper so she spends the whole night doing huge turns, sometimes climbing half in top of one or other of us or scrunching herself against the top of the bed. Calming her in place can take ages too. And there are always 1 or 2 occasions when she outright refuses to be calmed in place and I have to get out and pace her to sleep anyway. Also our bed is a small double and the room won't fit anything else. Basically I end up spending the whole night not sleeping at all or in a state of semi-consciousness. I've developed quite a lot of anxiety around her sleep so I have difficulty sleeping but I at least get 2-3 hours a night if she isn't in the bed.

Can you fit a small double in her room?