"My baby self settles to sleep". Help me out here. What does this even mean and how do you do it?

[Germanwife]

What do people actually mean by this? Left, right and cente, all I hear is "put your baby down drowsy but awake", "my lo selft settles and sleeps through the night" etc.

Well, I'm having an epic battle with DS's sleeps. He is ten weeks old and has just stopped nursing to sleep. He also no longer responds to any of our other strategies - rocking, swaddling, patting, shushing, singing, white noise, the sling... This is both for bedtime and nap time.

I plan to follow the No Cry Sleep solution and The Sleep Lady (their plans start at 3 months plus) but in the meantime, since nothing settles my DS anymore I thought I'd try to teach self settling.

So I started putting DS into his Moses basket for bedtime and nap time, drowsy but awake (we watch his sleep cues and the clock to make sure he's not overtired) - but he cries and then screams. I know everyone says be prepared for some crying but today he cried for 45 mins in the basket with us next to him patting and shushing. He did not fall asleep. Every time we do this, he just becomes agitated and wide awake, then we have to try and settle him.

I cannot think how else to teach this self settling. Am I missing a trick? Do you literally just put your baby down and walk out? How often/long do I have to do it? How did you decide when your lo is ready to learn to self settle? And if he keeps crying until he settles, how is this different to CIO? (Which I do not want to do).

Can you try a few days of long pram walks to try to get him caught up on sleep? (he's probably built up a bit of an underlying sleep deficit iyswim.) Assuming he sleeps in a moving pram? Then after a few days of catch up pram naps you can go back to trying to settle him at home and it should be easier.

I used to live in a townhouse and our room was at the top. I would put DS down to sleep drowsy, go downstairs and then he would cry a little. But often by the time I'd schlepped all the way up two flights of stairs again he'd have stopped crying by the time I got there!

So I used an egg-timer and let him cry/grizzle for up to 5 minutes and then go up if he was still crying. He rarely cried for more than a couple of minutes, but it felt like an eternity! The egg-timer helped me stop myself from rushing in just as he was about to self settle. I figured if he was a second baby he would sometimes have to wait a couple of mins to be seen to, so 5 minutes wouldn't hurt.

However I didn't ever cuddle him to sleep, I always put him in his Moses basket awake after a feed from day 1. If he cried, I would cuddle him to comfort him but put him down again before he was asleep. I think if you're going to do attachment style parenting where you hold them all day long then it is probably hard for them to get used to sleep alone at night.

I shall find out with DS2 whether it was all down to my excellent parenting or if we were just lucky to get a good sleeper!

Will he nap in the pram or car? We have a schedule of walks which structures naps for my little sleep fighters.

They have an older sibling, so nap on the school run, and we try and keep up that schedule at weekends/holidays, not littlest is a bit older she is a bit better at napping without the buggy.

minipie and tewi unfortunately he seems to have stopped falling asleep in the pram and the sling too. We just came back from a walk and he was wide eyed the whole time. Might try extending the walks to an hour to see if it helps.

scmalex I suspect you are right!

Oh dear. I remember that when DD was at her most overtired, it would sometimes take up to 45 mins for her to fall asleep... and that needed to be 45 mins of constant movement, no stopping at all (if I had to wait to cross a road I had to rock the pram). And then I had to keep walking or she would wake. A blackout shade helps, try putting a dark scarf across the pram?

It does quickly get better once you start getting the sleeps in though and the overtiredness dissipates.

The whole "leave them to cry/grizzle for a few minutes" or self settling to a musical star would never have worked for DD when she was in overtired mode.

I think there are some babies who are just a bit "wired" the whole time. They don't do drowsy, they go from alert to overtired very quickly, they tend to fight sleep, they also need a bit less sleep than the average baby (but not none which is what they seem to think!) Mine was like this and I've read of quite a few like this on MN. "Duracell bunny" babies. Once they get mobile they are on the go non stop.

It's too easy to fall into the trap of thinking you're doing something wrong or you have a defective baby. It can make you feel desperate on top of tired and worn out from the constant feeling of being on duty.

Babies go through phases of finding the world incredibly exciting, and it's possible that yours has begun getting really stimulated by what he is noticing in his environment just recently, and doesn't want the movie to end. It's all shiny and new for them.

A blackout shade for the pram is a great idea, minipie, I will have to investigate this! Atm, DS is distracted by blank walls so you and mathanxiety are probably right about the Duracell baby/world fascination issue.

Thank you mathanxiety, for the reassurance, I really was beginning to think I had done something completely wrong. I'm hoping its a phase, but it's difficult to see the wood for the trees when, as you mentioned, you're on duty 24/7!

No honestly it is nothing you have done wrong, babies are just different.

I have friends who used to wake their babies up because "the routine" said it wasn't nap time. And they'd complain about how hard it was to keep their sleepy babies awake . Meanwhile I was and at their sleepy babies, I couldn't get mine to sleep for love nor money.

I wasn't doing anything different from my friends, we just had very different babies.

My dd would not sleep without us rocking and pacing. It would take longer and longer to get her down. The older she got, the heavier she became. I was really worried how we'd wean her off it.

We started to reduce the pacing to a smaller area. Reduce the rocking gradually etc.

One day at 20 weeks she cried and wriggled when we did it. After losing patience with her, I wrapped her up, stuck on the dream sheep, popped in dummy and left. 3 minutes later she was asleep! It's like she'd had enough of us trying to get her to sleep.

Self settling to me is being placed in their bed and falling asleep themselves. She squirms and whimpers a bit, but konks out by 20 minutes. She wasn't ready for this until then.

It isn't the same as self soothing, which I define as waking up in the night and getting back to sleep without help. I could well be wrong though. Isn't it sleep training that is done for older babies who shouldn't really need a night feed? Such as cc?

bluebeanie, I think the theory is that getting off to sleep alone when they go to bed teaches them how to return to sleep when they partially wake in the night.

Sleep training can be for a number of things, including self settling. We used CC to get (one of) our DTs to go to sleep herself after we noticed that she slept better on the nights where we were slow returning to her if she started crying when we put her down. She was just crying for a couple of minutes and then conking out and getting a better night's sleep so we decided to sort of formalise that by doing CC IYSWIM. She still took a night feed up till I think 13 months, when we got fed up with it and got the sleep book out again!

minipie you are spot on. I was also looking at friends' babies who fall asleep by themselves throughout the day!

bluebeanie do you think the dream sheep helped?

Also, thank you all for helping me disentangle the whole self settling thing. I just kept coming across advice such as "put the baby down for a nap, sleepy but awake" which was a complete mystery to me (as I always wondered, "then what..."?)

This discussion has also been hugely helpful in helping me realise that people who have very young self settling babies are rare and that this is something more sucessful with older babies (which most books/advice/friends with sleeping babies don't clarify).

haven't read it all but totally agree with freebuttonbee

all babies are completely different.

some need a little extra reassurance to feel safe enough to sleep. some don't.
however once I realised this and understood it (ds is a very anxious sleeper) I worked with it and decided to proactively cosleep. not necessarily the easiest way but gave us all more predictability and consistency. now, he is quite capable of nodding off beside me at 14 mo. but with all the talking, walking, learning, teething and catching bugs he's doing he naturally often feels a bit clings. I still bf to sleep but he's not always bothered so I pretend I'm asleep and he copies apart from the run up to walking where he'd practice manically for half an hour in the dark in his bedside cot before flopping down exhausted

I found this helpful too uncommonjohn.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/self-soothing-possibly-the-biggest-lie-ever-foisted-on-parents/

sorry this was more useful uncommonjohn.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/the-real-self-soothing-its-not-what-sleep-experts-think-it-is/

Thank you for those links darjeeling, had a read and how brilliant to hear that :) will be sending these links to all my friends and relatives who keep telling me just to put the baby down and let him get on with sleeping!

A very interesting blog, Darjeeling.