Night time crying and older siblings

[Posey]

Would be very interested to know how people have coped with a baby crying or screaming at night and its effect on older children. Its bad enough for the parents but what about older ones who have to go to school. How can you do controlled crying if they share a room or if the rooms are next door to each other. And what about the neighbours? We live in a flat with neighbours on all sides.
Thanks for your opinions!

Hi Posey, my dd and ds are 18 months apart and I tried really hard to get to ds before he woke dd but after tying myself in knots I just let him cry and he has never woken dd. If you have got older children, then I would say that they are going to have to get used to it, even if you stop the baby crying to much for the first 6 months eventually you are going to have to let it scream, may as well do it earlier and give yourself a break.

As far as living in a flat is concerned I think a baby sounds MUCH louder to you if you are worrying about who else can hear! I hardly hear mine during the day but if they throw a wobbley in the supermarket it reverberates off the walls!

Perhaps if you are really strict with the controlled crying in the early days (from about 3 months) the night times will settle a lot quicker and you can be more lenient at night.

When my DD was born 14 months ago we (me, DH, DS1 (then 10) and DS2 (then 8.5)) lived in a little tiny modern 3 bed end of terrace house. The walls were paper thin so we could hear the boys having a normal volume conversation in their room (shared) downstairs in the lounge ! We were lucky in that our DD has never been much of a one for crying but she did go through a fairly short stage when we were doing cc (about 2 weeks). DH used to get really frustrated and yell at me because he was convinced that DD was waking the entire street ! Goodness knows what I was supposed to do about it but still.

Anyway I fully expected the boys to complain about their sister making such a racket but they never mentioned it once! She woke DS2 up for about 10 mins once, that is it. I also apologised to the neighbours for it once and they too said that they hadn't heard a peep (which is odd as we could always hear them having sex!). We were able to buy a much bigger house (twice as big), but to be honest noise from DD wasn't our reason. We just needed more space (we had planned to put house on the market pre-pregnancy but we weren't expecting to catch so quickly!).

Thanks very much everyone. Sounds like dd will not be as disturbed as I thought,so feel a bit happier about letting ds cry a little more at night before going in to him.
Looking forward to some better nights!