9 month old has never slept through the night and we are losing will to live

[SLEEPDEPRIVEDHELP]

Hello,

We have a beautiful baby and love him dearly (we're two women FYI and I'm not the birth parent, my partner is still breastfeeding) - but he has never successfully slept through the night in 9 whole months and it feels like no matter what we do, we can't seem to get him to.

We're at breaking point - and it's really affecting our lives and my ability to work.

We used a sleep trainer but to no avail - we've even tried cry it out and he just will not stop crying and go back to sleep. We've tried introducing comforters. Essentially only way he'll kind of sleep through the night in a way that causes least disruption for us is for my partner to breastfeed basically all night.

Here's how a typical night goes:

Bedtime 7 or so: goes to sleep pretty easily, but will start waking and need soothing back to sleep from about 45 minutes in to his sleep and then can expect maybe 2 hours uninterrupted sleep if we're lucky. Then constantly waking from midnight.

During a particularly busy period at work for me, we fell into a pattern of my partner/birth mother breastfeeding him during the night just so we could get some sleep and then I would take over from 6.30am/7am until I needed to leave for work so she could get some unbroken sleep.

We've me doing the nights so now he doesn't expect breastfeeding but still will not stay asleep or go back to sleep with either co-sleeping or extended periods of time soothing him back to sleep.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as we are walking zombies by this point.

Sadly, I think it's quite normal for 9 month old babies not to sleep through the night.

Mine certainly didn't!

I found that Co sleeping was the best way to maximise everyone's sleep

Now they're teenagers I can't get them out of their bloody beds!

Sorry, I think it sounds totally normal for that age. My kids are rubbish sleepers at 3&5, but most friends I know also had children still not sleeping through until at least 2, often with many wake ups.

I also think formula could work. If you were formula feeding or if your partner expressed instead of breastfeeding you could share the night. Someone does 8 to 2 and the other 2 to 8 or something similar. I don't know about formula making your baby sleep better but at least if you did formula you can both feed through the night.

FWIW I disagree with people saying this is normal at 9 months. I know no one whose baby hadn't slept through at least a few times by 6 months

Been there done that. You poor things.It's very normal and you're not doing anything wrong. Tips:- Breast daytime then Formula at night as will keep him fuller. White noise, try a few. Noise played he would have heard frequently when your partner was pregnant (it works, well it did with my boys and girls) things like tv theme tunes and hoover noise, sensory lights for the ceiling, moving back into your room or try another room or another part of his room (who cares where he sleeps as long as he does and you do!), Bare feet, found mine were bothered alot by babygrows with feet,they want them free to wiggle and play with I always found,baby massage before bed with lavender oil, stroke them to sleep tedious but worked with one of mine). My lovely you could try all this and more but some babies, children and people just don't sleep and when they can't tell you why it's just terrible, I know how hard it is. I once watched a programme on adults with insomnia and porridge helped them sleep!? No idea why, try that, try anything but don't chop and change routine to much as it'll make it worse. Cry it out is horrible, don't do it. Have a night away so each of you can sleep when you can as sleep deprivation can make you ill, I ended up in hospital ill from sleep deprivation with my first as I didn't listen to advice or accept help, felt I had to soldier on then collapsed with exhaustion one day. Just be kind to yourselves, if help is offered but family or friends take it..good luck!

This sounds really tough but unfortunately completely normal at this age. Co sleeping is a good option to maximise sleep but I’d also suggest looking at the BASIS website run by the infant sleep researchers at Durham university as there’s some great resources there. Professor Helen Ball on YouTube has some interesting lectures and Lyndsey hookway on instagram might be worth a follow. Hope you are getting more rest soon.

Hi my daughter is almost 11 months and since 4 months has woken up hourly.
a Couple of nights a month we might get a 3-4hr stretch and I try and replicate everything but it’s just a fluke.
however it gives me confidence that she can and will sleep through when she is ready.
I breastfeed.
the way I survive is by feeding to sleep every time she wakes - I tried for a while to not feed each time convinced by the things I had read that I was forming a bad habit.
but breast milk contains the sleep hormone at nighttime- if it wasn’t biologically normal to feed to sleep it wouldn’t be in the milk.
anyway if I don’t feed her to sleep it’s 30-90 minutes of no sleep for any of us. So she wakes I feed she goes back in her cot which is still next to me. We repeat this until the wakes become more frequent than hourly and then I co-sleep.
this is where we actually get the most sleep as she will often do 3-6/7, but I ache from staying in one position and sleep light.

check out Hey Sleepy Baby on Instagram- she is awesome. She has a highlight reel ‘red flags’ so you can rule out anything else that might be bothering him.
to give tie for example, ear infection, low iron, enlarged adenoids.

Sounds normal. All babies are different but none of mine slept through the night at that age. DS1 and DD were probably about a year old before sleeping through and DS2 was FOUR. Yes, I was basically a zombie.

I would think about a dummy if he needs to sooth back to sleep, stealth nappy change at 11ish if he's waking up wet. I wouldn't bother trying formula if breastfeeding still going well - it made no difference to my kids sleep.

Chin up. He'll grow out of it eventually.

DS first slept through the night ( ie 7.30pm to 5am without a wake up) at 18 months old. However he did have periods between f 8 months old and 18 months old of waking once at about 2/3am for a quick breastfeed then he went to sleep again. Those periods were bliss compared to his usual routine of constant wake ups and not settling back even if breastfed . These good periods pretty much coincided with him having a strict sleep routine of always being home for a nap in his.cot in a quiet room after lunch and also not being ill.

If either of those two things went wrong (as they did quite often).then his sleep deteriorated terribly . He also has a terrible period between 11 months and about 14 months old starting when I went back to work for 3 days a week. He started waking for a lot of feeds to o make up for not taking much milk during the day ( he didn't like any sort of milk other than breast milk really and wouldn't drink much from a bottle or cup). I also assume he missed me during the day .

He then proceeded to wake up between 4.30am and 5.30am evey morning until he was about 6 years old.. Even now as a teenager he is usually awake by 10am at the latest . The early mornings were fine though as long as I got a chunk of uninterrupted sleep. The lack of sleep is terrible and I still remember the desperation of those first 18 months.

Now you're doing the nights are you giving him a bottle? What worked for me was stopping breastfeeding during the night; last breastfeed at bedtime and then bottles in the night. After about a week started water instead of formula in the night time bottles and ds started sleeping through not long after. Whatever you try good luck!

I want to also add since reading a few more comments on the formula suggestion.
we tried it- it didn’t change anything except make my boobs really sore.

just remember sleep is biological and cannot be trained.

sleep training - trains the baby not to cry out because no one is coming.

None of mine slept through until I stopped breast feeding them, sorry!! All stopped about 8 months, just because I’d had enough (and DS2 for a tooth - ouch!) and they all slept through pretty much immediately from then on. Once waking in the night isn’t as much fun, they don’t do it 😂

*Got a tooth

Agree with this! Still BF my 23m old and can count on one hand how many times DC has slept through. It did get better for us around 11m though once teething was mostly out the way and DC naturally went down to one wake-up in the night, I dragged baby into my bed, fed back to sleep lying down (maybe drifted off myself - I made sure the bed was co-sleeping safe just in case) then plonked baby back in their cot for the rest of the night.

Waking up just 45m after bedtime suggests overtiredness to me, have you played around with nap and bedtimes?

My children were thankfully all good sleepers but my first grandson has very poor sleep. My dd is constantly sleep deprived. Dgs woke up twice every night until he as about 18 months. Then he dropped to one daytime nap and then only woke once a night. Her DH goes to child Friday, Saturday and Wednesday night and DD does other nights. He was four before he slept through night. He has since been diagnosed with ADHD. He sleeps a bit better if they physically wear him out during the day with swimming, park run, scooter riding etc.

This may or may not be helpful, but have you tried:

Shifts:

• Parent A sleeping 6pm-1am in spare room with earplugs and headphones while Parent B (working parent) looks after baby
• Parent B sleeps 1am-8am then goes to work, Parent A breastfeeds 1am-8am

Formula milk:

• Switching to formula. Apparently it keeps babies fuller for longer so they wake less hungry overnight

Help:

• Switching to formula and then getting a night nurse
• OR grandparent overnight help

£££

• Babies are supposedly soothed by sucking, swinging, ssshing. Have you tried giving your baby a dummy to soothe them to sleep, putting them in an automated rocker, playing white noise.

That's all I can think of! Hope it helps x

1. You're doing brilliantly, both of you.

1. Perfectly normal not to sleep through. My 2 year old is only just starting to occasionally sleep through - sorry to break it to you!

1. Some babies sleep, others don't. Try not to compare yourself or your baby with others. The people whose babies do sleep tend to think you're doing it wrong. You're not.

1. I found cosleeping worked for me. My DS2 was up a little like yours every night. It's shit, but doesn't last for ever. And I found I could sleep when feeding. Eventually when he could understand, I said no to milk at night. He could have cuddles, but no milk. (Was maybe 18 months-ish). Slept slightly better after that.

1. No great advice, but a lot of solidarity. My first two have been appalling sleepers, but I hope we're coming out the other side. Just in time for DC3 to be born next month. Questioning my sanity...

Just wondering... does anyone else also struggle with information overload? I read so many different things mostly on IG about sleeping habits that suggest my baby should be sleeping in her own room after she turns 5 months (3 months old right now) but then also read about co-sleeping. All of this just makes me more confused.
Do you ever become good at setting expectations? I feel I'm building up expectations that will be disappointing

I sympathise - I know it's tough - but I'm another who thinks this sounds normal.
To be honest, I don't think any of my children consistently slept all night until they were at school. Well, I don't suppose they were actually asleep all night even then (is anyone?) but they'd reached an age when they could generally manage to go back to sleep without me or DH being woken.
I know it can feel overwhelming when you are in the thick of it but you're normal, your baby is normal and it will get better. The night wakings will get less frequent with time and in all likelihood you'll also get more used to it. It probably feels like it will never end just at present, but it will, honestly, it will.
I know far more people whose children were waking in the night at this age and older than who were sleeping through, but often people don't talk about it. We're conditioned to think "good" babies sleep through from an early age, so if ours doesn't, they're not good, which probably means we're not good - we must be doing something wrong. But that's rarely the case. Mainly they're just babies being babies.

You have children and you don’t sleep properly again for ages. If they aren’t waking up to be fed it’s needing a wee, monsters, illness..
I would expect a 9 month old to be still waking up. If they don’t that’s great but more surprising than if they do.

It blows my mind that anyone would suggest formula as the solution. It doesn’t even make sense because it’s still feeding the baby & if the suggestion is that feeding is the problem well that’s the same difference.

Babies are tiring. That’s just the name of the game unfortunately. He’ll sleep when he’s ready & you'll get through these tougher days.

It is normal for babies to not sleep through the night at 9 months. You need to change your expectations I'm afraid. My daughter didn't sleep through the night for about 3 years.
Just make sure YOU get to bed early so you can at least get enough sleep. Even if it is broken sleep.

Are you me? This is exactly our experience too!

OP, I'm currently sitting up breastfeeding my 9 month old. He's never slept through. Some nights he'll go from midnight to 4/5am, other nights he wakes every couple of hours. On nights where he's particularly unsettled, I'll try the dummy and rocking him but if neither works, I just feed him.

My daughter was the same. She first slept through the night at around 13 months when I stopped breastfeeding, but at 3.5 she still regularly wakes and needs help going back to sleep.

Sympathy though - sleep deprivation is so tough. I've just returned to work and I'm really struggling! It will get better, but everything you've described is totally normal at this age.

My DD is 2 (and was breastfed until recently) and has slept through the night a handful of times in the last few months. I feel bad saying it's developmentally normal when you're finding it so tough, but some of them are just not solid 12 hour + sleepers. Mine is one of those!

At 9 months I don't think I would have got more than 2 hours without feeding her, but we coslept as it helped ease the pain of it all and my sleep was marginally better. Only at about 18 months could she last from 7pm - midnight without a feed 🤦🏽‍♀️ and I would class a 4/5am wake here as sleeping through the night tbh as it's so many hours uninterrupted. I think solid chunks of 4-6 hours+ are the dream. But we didn't get that til 18 months + and as I said, still not sleeping through now at over 2.

You need to break the habit of feeding at night last feed at 10pm then no more till morning. He is essentially using the boob as a dummy.

Sorry but I'm with everyone else saying it's normal. I actually have a five year old who has only ever slept through the night a few times, so... I also have a two year old who didn't sleep through until after she turned two and a seven year old who slept through at 8 weeks old and never stopped.

My point is that there are lots of degrees of 'normal' sleep for babies and children, but a nine month old (especially a breastfed one) who wakes in the night is totally normal.

Sleeping in shifts helps, as does a scenario where you each get a night off. With my middle child (the one who never sleeps!) we used to occasionally give the other a full night off and deal with the baby by ourselves and then swap. It seemed easier to deal with a bad night if you knew you were off the hook the next one. Works well at weekends. This is easier of the baby will take a bottle obviously.

Also a dummy can help. It's not for everyone but desperate times...