can you do controlled crying on a 5 and a half month old and.........................

[MandyBOO]

can you tell me the correct way to do it please?

nope
too young
give him/her another month

Agree with SW.

I did this.

Put down. Left for 1 min, went in.

Left for 2 mins, went in.

Left for 5 mins, went in. Then 10.

The idea is you leave them for longer periods.

We rarely went beyond this.

Had to do it again after a holiday or illness occasionally.

It worked well for us, but I know its not for everyone.

ds1 woke up and cried zillions of times in the night. When he was 3 months old I asked paed, who said he was physically capable of sleeping 8 hours. That night I fed him at 11pm, he went to sleep, woke up a bit later and cried. I didn't go, he cried for 1 hour 15 minutes then went back to sleep and didn't wake up til the morning. He's slept through the night ever since apart from illness and some crossness at arrival of ds2. He's now a very well-adjusted 5 year old.

Ds3 is 8 months and still wakes up, but I take him in bed with me and feed him since, what with the others, I don't get to cuddle him so much in the day anyway. Different approaches to different life moments.

Try what suits you. If you're exhausted then you have to do something. It doesn't cause any damage to the baby to cry for a while sometimes. After all, what do you do if you have 4 kids and you're busy with 2 of them and baby starts yelling? Sometimes they just have to deal with it imo.

He may be physically capable of sleeping through, but hell, he's tiny still. Give him a cuddle and some milk if he wants it - he's not crying to piss you off. Understand Spagbol's point if you got others and have to see to them or are desperate for sleep, but otherwise accept it's not forever and let him have his way for a bit longer.

Not a great fan of controlled crying but would think that five months on is not too young if you want to go down that route. Its doing it with 2 week old babies that send shivers down my spine.

Thank for your replies.

DS goes to bed at 6.30pm / 7pm ish and usually then sleeps til 1am. He then wakes every couple of hours for dummy replacement only and falls back to sleep again til around 7am. He has a good chunk of undisturbed sleep in the evening but then at night (typically!) he seems less settled.

Would you call this sleep pattern "sleeping through" or not and does it seem ok?

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I don't have any experience of a dummy but dd3 (about the same age, maybe a week older IIRC) goes down at 7-ish and wakes once or twice in the night for a feed, sometimes she goes through. I did CC with dd2 at this age as she woke four or five times a night and I was knackered. This time dd3 sleeps in with me and feeding ehr is easy so it isn't really bothering me.

I presuem if you do CC you will have to take the dummy away too?

Out of desperation I did the pick up every 5 minutes thing when dd was 5 months. First few nights was hell, but am very glad I did it as she now usually goes down perfectly. It takes a lot of determination though.