Hello! I feel you with needing to break the cycle of the constant waking. I don’t co sleep anymore but have a 17 month old who I’ve been trying to gently wean off the boob for a few months now. He’s now down to just a bedtime feed (which is purely for comfort). Also if he wakes during the night I do feed him because I don’t want to wake his sister up, but he usually goes the whole night without now. He doesn’t sleep through, he does sometimes wake up but rolls over and goes back to sleep.
He had got into a pattern a few weeks ago of the waking every 2 hours and feeding was the only thing that would calm him down. It was exhausting. The key for him was not feeding to sleep. In the exhausting pattern he was feeding to sleep and then when he woke up, wanting to feed back to sleep. Now that I put him down awake and leave the room (I used to stay til he went to sleep), it has had an enormous effect.
Explaining is definitely the key. I know kids are all different but at 16 months he definitely understood. I would say to him at dinner time “tonight when you go to sleep you can have your milk, then you’ll lay down in your bed to go to sleep like a really clever big boy. Mummy will read you a story then I’ll say night night and I will leave you to get to sleep.” When I write that it looks slightly bonkers to claim he understood but he did! Also if we saw someone on tv going to sleep I would say “look Pepi nana is going to sleep in her bed just like you!”. That helped. I would explain it again as we got closer to bedtime, and while he had his usual bedtime feed I’d keep chatting to him about it (to keep him awake mainly). Then I’d do something funny to make him laugh to unlatch, then I’d say “it’s time to lie down in your bed, mummy will read you a story then it’s sleep time and mummy will go.” So that’s what we did, he did moan a little bit the first night but it wasn’t upset proper crying, it was just him being a bit annoyed that it felt unfamiliar. He laid his head down and went to sleep after about 10 mins. Fast forward to this week, so he’s been doing this about a week and last night he didn’t complain at all, just lay down and was asleep within about 2 mins of me closing the door.
This is a mega essay, I’m so sorry, and I do realise all the things I did will probably not work for you because you’re cosleeping and possibly can’t leave him (not sure of your set up!) but I wrote it all out to illustrate how explaining really helped us. I’m sure you explain lots of other things throughout the day? Say he is kicking off because he doesn’t want to get his shoes on…. You’d say “it’s time to go to Toddlers (or wherever), we can’t go without your shoes on. Let’s put this one on first, where does it go?” Etc etc. If not it could be something to work into your everyday because it’s so good for language development for people to talk to them normally.
Last thing I will say is it does all depend on the child. My dd who was bottle fed so I never had to wean her like this, was such a sensitive soul and took waaaaay longer to get into good sleeping habits. She is 4.5 years old now and has only just been ready to go to sleep without one of us sat with her. She still sometimes wakes in the night but all she wants is one of us there and she goes straight back to sleep. If I’d have tried this with her when she was that age she would have been apoplectic and made herself sick with crying. You know your child! Parent the one you’ve got is my main motto in life. I do remember getting rid of bottles through the night was tough for her but we did a similar thing.
But even though my dd was way different when she was a toddler, we did used to explain everything to her too which definitely helped her understand her world.