How to stop co sleeping

[Purplestarballoon]

My DD is 10 months and she started off a great sleeper, even doing full nights and self settling, but from 5months she just stopped sleeping unless she was being held. I started cosleeping with her and gently introducing her own room when she got to 6 months.

Now she’ll go down in her cot but after
40mins (her sleep cycle) she’ll wake up screaming and I’ll have to pick her up to settle her and get her back down. After doing this on repeat from 7-11pm I just give in and bring her in to sleep with me so that I can have some sleep.

I know the answer is probably to take this option away but I’m so tired I can’t face a whole night of this. Plus it really disturbs older DC.

I don’t like cosleeping as I feel like I can’t relax and sleep properly and I miss sleeping in the same bed as my DH (who has to go and sleep in with older DC).

She has a consistent bed time routine and is breastfed.

My question is has anyone had experience where DC grows out of needing to cosleep naturally or do I need to bite the bullet and train in some way? Should I try night weaning? I’ve got her 10month health visitor review soon but I don’t hold out much hope of help there. Hoping someone will come along with some tips I haven’t tried that magically transform DD back to the perfect sleeper she was 😭

With breastfed babies, you can't night wean entirely until at least 12 months (most need a little longer, mine still needed one night feeds until 16 months). But she doesn't need BF every 40 minutes.

What we did around this age is send my DH in to do the settling. If baby woke before 1 or 2am, DH went in as I knew he wasn't hungry (he would just shallow suck to go back to sleep). After 2am, I went in. He was very angry at first but i guess then decided waking for dad wasn't worth it so night wakings went down to 1 or 2.

My DS also always needed a bedtime closer to 8 pm. 7pm only worked if he was sick or something. Otherwise he would wake loads.

Is she walking yet? My DS was cruising at 10 months so was using more energy.

And how is her food intake? We do a little porridge at bathtime to help keep my DS full.

@SoSadandTired7 Where do these whacky ideas come from? My DDs were breast fed and slept 8 hours at 12 weeks. They were obviously content! They had food from 6 months though (as did all babies!) although DD2 ate little, she still slept! So I’d feed her more food. I can truly understand you don’t want a screaming baby, but breastfeeding seems to produce one person babies and my DD2 was too attached to me. So I’d feed from the bottle and food. You might just need to have her cry and settle herself eventually. Bloody hard though.

@OhDear111 what exactly is so whacky to you? Breastfed babies should not be forcibly night weaned until 12 months according to pretty much every health advisory out there. If they sleep, fine. But you're not meant to force it.

And "sleeping through the night" has different definitions. For some it's 6 hours, for others it's 12 hours. My son couldn't do a full 12 hours with a boob around 4am until 16 months when he dropped it by himself. No crying involved. You think it's whacky, I didn't think so. He was an excellent eater as well but he was extremely active so made sense.

And I know plenty of formula babies who are terrible sleepers. Statistically breastfed babies and mothers actually sleep a little more.

"Pretty much every health advisory out there"...citation needed.

@bouncingblob It’s presumably about allergies. The things dc hardly used to get but do now in vast numbers . So mums feeding food to babies is blamed. Everyone weaned from around 4-5 months only 30 years ago, adding in taster foods carefully, over many months. All babies had food. One of mine wasn’t keen so I had to breastfeed longer. Truly not fun. We have just become slaves to fad routines and “advice” in this country and forget that even a short while ago, we took advice but didn’t kill our babies with food.

A waking baby could be hungry. Try food. Worth a go.

Both mine naturally just grew out of it and slept all night in their own rooms. But the time after 10 months is rough for sleep and I would not make things harder on yourself now than it has to be.

I put mine to sleep in their own rooms from about 8-10 months and brought them in when they woke up. Unfortunately, they woke up until they were 3 ish. One co-slept until 5. Because I got more sleep with them bringing themselves in to me than 4 trips to settle them all night.

I think you probably need to pick your hard. Would you sleep better alone but waking up 2-4 times a night or would you sleep better with one eye open and co-sleeping? Can your Dh do some of the nighttime settling? If you’re going back to work, it will be a shared job anyway so might as well let him crack on and do half of each night.

I think you’re confused, this baby will be eating food in the day. The PP isn’t saying not to feed the baby food in the day, she’s saying it’s normal to need milk in the night still.

I had a baby like this OP and it broke me - absolutely broke me. I was so, so exhausted from lack of sleep that I genuinely don’t know how I was able to function. I spent a lot of my days crying out of pure hopelessness 😢 Life seemed very bleak and the situation wax affecting my relationship with my baby and it was hugely impacting on my marriage, all we did was argue. It was horrible 😔

When I hit the point of knowing I couldn’t cope any more and that we were at breaking point I paid for a Sleep Consultant appointment and it was the best thing I did.

I went completely cold turkey by moving the baby into his own room, stopped night feeds and sleep trained. I won’t lie, it was a difficult week but the results were incredible, home life massively improved and everyone was so much happier.

You have my sympathies OP as I know how incredibly difficult it is.

I did what got everyone the most sleep. So we carried on cosleeping until 2 and a half. But I always put them down for the night in their own rooms in the hope that the wake ups would gradually get longer apart. They didn't. He needed his adenoids removed and then he slept through!

@fableless But it isn’t normal baby is well fed and content. She seemed anti food to me. I’m only suggesting supper! Obviously sleep training could help but you have to grit your teeth.

Breast milk is also far higher in calories than a bit of broccoli.

Thanks all for your replies. She’s a brilliant eater, has 3 meals a day of healthy whole foods so I don’t think she’s hungry.
The thing is, when she’s in the bed with me she sleeps for 5 hour stretches so I know she can sleep well.
Thanks for the advice, I think @mindutopia you’re right, I need to pick my hard.
@LondonLady1980 how old was your baby when you sleep trained?

There are some really weird posts on here about food and feeding! Agree with pp that night weaning before 1 isn't recommended (obviously if they sleep through then they've naturally night weaned), it's because they get their nutrition from milk until one. Anyway. My eldest child was like this, in our bed feeding all bloody night. Around ten months I moved him onto a floor bed in our room and just got in with him each time he woke and fed him back to sleep but then got back in my own bed once he was asleep. Then just after his first birthday we moved the floor bed into his room. Tried night weaning at 14 months, carnage. Tried again at 18 months and it worked, and he instantly went from 5 or so wakes to 1 or 2. Sleep is developmental though so tricky to 'blame'it just on one thing i.e. milk. For us the floor bed helped set the boundary on sleeping in our bed iyswim. Good luck!

Hi there

if you know how much your baby sleeps on average per 24h this is really key. We all have a “sleep budget”, and some babies need more sleep than others. If you track sleep average it for the last 5 days to give you an amount she is sleeping per 24h, then cap her day sleep to leave you with a 10-11h night. the “false starts” and frequent wakes in the first part of the night you describe are textbook indicators of being undertired and lacking the sleep pressure to stay asleep.

We did this and then sleep trained at 5 months using the sleep wave method and it was a game changer.

so eg if your baby is sleeping on average 12.5 hours per 24h, have a 10.5h night and 2 hours of day sleep.

anchor your day in the morning - pick a wake up time and stick to it regardless of how the night has gone. Don’t worry about lost sleep for a few days while you get this sorted.

ensure st least 4 hours awake before bedtime. Last feed to end minimum 30 mins before baby into the cot.

we carried on with 1 night feed until 7 months and then my baby dropped it on his own. It’s not true that breastfed babies must be fed overnight til they’re age 1! You might find that once you have independent sleep your baby drops the night feeds on her own, especially at 10 months with good solid food intake.

We did it when he was just over 9 months old.