Hello my baby is 6 months old and I've been forced to co sleep and feed him every 2 hours. Now trying to break that sleep association but we're by no means fans of letting him cry. It's a very sleep resistant baby, will do anything to resist sleep, doesn't really look tired, shows sleepy cues for 3 minutes and then it's again wide awake for 3 hours, and even if you try to put him to sleep in those 3 minutes, he will cry, kick and scream. So that idea to "reassure him" doesn't really work, he will cry until we give him a toy to play with or boob to fall asleep with.
So I read somewhere that one way to very gently sleep train would be to teach them to fall asleep rocking instead of the boob, next holding instead of rocking, next putting hand on him instead of holding and so on. The problem is, we're stuck on step one. Every nap and nighttime is about 30-90 minutes of trying to get him to sleep and him kicking and screaming. Often it ends up in the way that I feed him while rocking and trying to keep him awake while I take the boob out and he continues when being rocked - but I'm not sure if that will bring anything. Just rocking it's really like there's no end, and he's already missed a whole nap since we were not able to put him to sleep for 3 hours.
Should we just push through or is what we're doing counterproductive? I don't want to cluster feed until they are 1 year old, I'm exhausted. But this feels counterproductive. It's been 3 days only, but he had so much less sleep since then. The good thing is, he stopped waking up constantly at night, and wakes up only once (then I feed but try to make sure he is not sleeping when I finish, and then he falls asleep quite easily).
And yes we're not fans of cry it out. I tried Ferber for one night but I had the impression he just got traumatized around sleep and now it's even harder (before he would occasionally fall asleep in my arms and now just starts screaming). Or maybe it's coincidence. Anyone has real life experience with this? (Not just theory).