Help needed - putting down 5mth old awake

[minimouse88]

Hello ladies - our 5 month old DD settles herself to sleep fine at night, but won't for her daytime naps. My health visitor told me yesterday to start putting her down awake and to leave her to cry until she sends herself to sleep. This goes against every instinct as a monther, and the longest i have lasted is 7 minutes. She starts choking and cyring inconsolably. Can anyone offer any help or advice, or tell me what worked for them?
(Frantically pulling my hair out!)
Thank you x

It's hard work but after about 3 days CC worked for us and I've never looked back since( Iknow most frown apon Cc though). DD will now quite easily play and sing in her cot at naps and at bedtime and will eventually fall asleep. She hasn't cried to sleep at all now she is used to self soothing etc..... Put her down and keep checking on her and shhing her, patting etc..Sure someone may be along with better advice though!

Good luck!!!

This probably isnt what you want to hear but we did CC as well. Like Fifilottie it took 3 days but DS now goes down awake and self settles. He does sometimes start to cry as I leave the room but stops when I've left so I've learnt to walk out!

We had the same problem. DS absolutely refused to sleep in his cot at nap time but now goes down fairly easily with a little bit of burbling before hand.

We tried doing the pick up/put down method from the Baby Whisperer and it worked wonderfully.
Another thing that helped enormously was learning about 'mantra crying' which is basically learning the difference between the cries.
A 'mantra cry' is the one that they use while self-settling and sounds a bit like a mantra (uh....uh...uh) rather than the waaah of being genuinely upset. If you get the DC up while they're trying to self settle it makes it worse.

I'd definitely recommend giving pu/pd first.It made a world of difference for us and we managed to avoid the heartache of trying controlled crying.

pu/pd faqs

Hello ladies - thank you so much for your help. We may resort to cc if pu/pd doesn't work - thank you MotherofHobbit! just tried pu/pd and after attempt number 5 she was 70/30 asleep/awake on me and then went fully off to sleep as i laid her in her cot, so thank you thank you thank you! how long did it take you to get pu/pd to fully work and your ds was fully self soothing? its also interesting what you say about the mantra cries - she already does this to some extent but we didn't know the official name for it! xx

We saw an improvement quite quickly (within a day or two). He isn't completely self soothing yet, he goes to sleep by himself most of the time but still needs occasional intervention
.
It's made a world of difference though - we were at a stage where he was screaming himself to sleep and we couldn't get him to sleep even by cuddling/bottle etc. I think it's also helped his night time sleep.

Good luck

thank you mother of hobbit. have a good (and peaceful) christmas x