I don’t mind him in bed with me and I don’t mind the wakeups , but is it bad for him and is it going to improve naturally? I won’t mind if someone said by 18 months he should naturally sleep through I can cope with that
It all depends on how realistic your expectations are.
You are not going to go from where you are now to independant sleep in 9 months (so by the time he is 18 months) without some intervention from you. And probably some crying.
Is it bad? No. Not at all. It's not independant sleep though. You can't have hopes that you'll have an independant sleeper sleeping all night in the cot while parenting in a way that favours dependance not independence.
There is nothing bad about a parenting ethos based around dependence - parental soothing, parental comforting. Wanting, needing the parent for comfort whenever comfort is needed. This forms the backbone of the Attachment Parenting and Gentle Parenting movements. But you cannot expect to parent this way them then suddenly change your mind and want the outcomes of the Independant Sleep parenting ethos - baby sleeping on own, settling on own though the night and at bedtime and naptime.
Realistically speaking, your child is likely to need comforting to get to sleep for a few years. It might be until 3 years old. It might be until 6 years old. It's a sliding scale, they are all different. But "school age" would be a reasonable approximation.
If baby doesn't have the methods of independant sleep, then the options are completely denying all comfort (which is the stuff Sarah OS assumed all who don't gentle parent do) or being your childs source of comfort. That means embracing co sleeping in the longer term (not forever, but for several years).
we wanted to alternate the night wakings
I'm your situation, i would suggest either:
- fully embracing cosleeping. With baby going to sleep in the parental bed consistantly every night and staying there. This will help stop night wakes because of the consistency of place to go to sleep and staying asleep. It should help with sleeping through. Know it's likely to be for a fair long while though. Set your expectations as 5 or 6 years old, then you can be pleased with yourself if you get her in her own bed by aged 3.
Or
- if you want independant sleep, you're not helping by being half-hearted about it. It possibly needs you to reach the "something must be done" stage and various aspects need to be done differently. In particular, if you want baby staying asleep in the cot then he needs to go to sleep in the cot. Consistantly every time. And with a consistant method.
There are gentler methods to get to independant sleep and harsher methods. But from the start point you are now at, it is unavoidable that all would be called sleep training and will involve crying (even the gentler methods), probably a lot from your start point. And may well be distressing and stressful.
The uber gentle methods of Attachment Parenting advocates, like Pantly PullOff towards cuddling to sleep/cosleeping rather than feeding to sleep, these are more for preparing your child to comfort independantly when the child is ready (rather than when the parent wants it). So it's not for getting baby independant sleep before they are ready. Just on the earlier side of when they are ready. So maybe, for example, 3 years old rather than 6 years old. This isn't a method for getting baby sleeping independantly early (ie ready for when you go back to work). Although it certainly helps long term.
If you think you might want to slerp train to get independant sleep, I would very strongly recommend you do it before the child is standing. Getting baby to sleep in the cot who refuses to is intimately more difficult with a pulling to standing baby. It's most easily done before thr rocking on all-fours crawling precursor phase and becomes massively more fifficult once pulling to standing.
In fact if this was my child, if I had not established in-cot settling before child was pulling to standing then I would completely abandon the idea and embrace long term cosleeping instead. The level of distress created once leaving sleep training that late would be too much for me, personally, to cope putting my child through.