Sleep training a baby that... goes to sleep.

[Madbee]

Bear with me, I know it sounds ridiculous. DD is 6 months and a terrible sleeper. As in up every 1.5 hours at the moment and takes ages to go back to sleep. I have just gone back to work and am feeling pretty desperate about it. I know there are differing views on when sleep training is appropriate but she is in general a bright, happy and lovely little person and I don’t see why some gentle training wouldn’t work for her...except that I don’t know how to do it because she goes to sleep beautifully at the start of the night! We have a simple routine - bath every other night, into sleepsuit, feed (she is BF) and into crib with a dummy and Ewan while textbook drowsy but awake. I usually stay in the room until she is nearly asleep but don’t interfere and I can equally just leave her there and she’ll go to sleep (occasionally with one little squeak, which is solved by popping back and putting her dummy back in, or giving her a little stroke.). So I’m really not sure how to go about the sleep training as clearly she can self-soothe - she just doesn’t during the night. Do I try the standard methods at 2am (I prefer no cry but would do CC if desperate) or is there a better way to do this?

Does your little one have long naps?

Sounds like she's struggling going into her next sleep cycle. Figure out what she likes. My daughter likes a fan on, blacked out room and snuggling right up in the corner.

I also don't go in straight away. Sometimes she's having a bad dream.

My 6 month old DD did this. We ditched the dummy and it helped massively. She was relying on it to get back to sleep every 45 min to hr and couldn’t get it back in herself. Obviously it’s not popular thing on here at all, but we did some controlled crying and after the first night she settled within a couple of min and is down to 2 night feeds usually.

I know that the method she uses to fall asleep at bedtime hugely affects her night, as does the timing of her last nap, as last week we were away and she got overtired and wouldn’t settle at bedtime and I breastfed her to sleep. She was up every hour overnight wanting feeding back to sleep.

I was also advised to really separate the feeding from the sleeping in the bedtime routine. So feed first and then do pjs etc

I hate to be the harbinger of doom, but my dd was/is exactly like this.

She is the 3rd dc, I did exactly the same routine that I did with the first 2, who consistently slept through after 11pm feed until 6/7am from about 4 months (bath, boob, bed at 7, put down awake, self soothe, sleep). I thought I was a pro.

DD has only just started sleeping through at 3yo. And only then for no more than 2/3 nights in a row. She is a very confident little girl in the day but at night seems to become quite insecure. She says she "needs to see me" or "just checking you are still here" or she just wants a cuddle.

We tried everything. Eventually even the HV admitted defeat and said there was nothing else to try.

I think it is early days for you and there's definitely time for things to improve for you, but in the end (around 18 months) I just had to accept that she was how she was . And tbh as soon as I did and stopped stressing about it, coping with it got a lot easier.