Sleep training for a 19 week old

[ArlyBaby]

Evening all.
My dd is 19 weeks and isn't a great sleeper. (Possible 4 month sleep regression, start of teething, occasional colic all thrown in). She used to sleep about 10pm til 5am. Then we started the bath/boob/bed routine at about 6pm each day to try and get her to sleep earlier and get our evenings back. At the moment and probably for about the last few weeks she's been waking very often in the night, every 1 to 3 hours. She's got a very strong boob-sleep association and is very hard to move into her own cot (next to our bed) once asleep on the boob as she wakes up and it's almost impossible to settle her without boob! Other half is getting annoyed with having her in the bed with us every night, it's a bit of a squash!
So....HOW do I get a decent routine going, how can I get her to self settle or is she too young still?! Will bottle feeding help so I know she's full? And does day time routine and naps make a big impact on night routine?
Thanks!

She is a little young for sleep training, because she still needs night feeds until at least 26 weeks. You can try and alter her sleep association, which might help with the nightwaking. Basically, she needs to fall asleep without any breast /bottle/ cuddle. To do this you would need to feed, then bath, then story/ song/ then down in cot awake. If she can't fall asleep like this, you could try shush-pat while she lies in her cot, and gradually withdraw this over several days. I think the problem arose from trying to dramatically move her bed time forward by 4 hours. If you want to move bedtime, it needs to shift by no more than half an hour at a time. You could also try and teach her to self settle in the cot for one of her day time naps.

She is way too small to sleep train. Although it's hard her behaviour is totally normal , you're just going to have to ride it out and do the best in the circumstances. Sleep training is for much older babies if at all. She still needs feeding regularly through the night.

Your baby is tiny and needs you. Sleep training is just a polite phase for teaching your baby that it is futile to cry because no one will come. If your dh is annoyed then tell him to go and sleep in the spare room or buy a bigger bed.

OP, nothing to add because I have massive sleep problems with my DS but I have a thread about sleep training going and got some great ideas for starting a routine (which I now believe we should’ve done from day 1).

eightmagpies I’m not sure I completely agree with that. I think there are different strategies that may or may not work depending on the baby’s personality. My DS will scream for upwards of half an hour being held and rocked to sleep which can’t be good for him either.

@newcupcake and @brokenlink can I just ask you to elaborate on what you said about babies needing to be fed throughout the night?? My 11 week old boy slept from 7:10pm to 6:50am last night and usually only has one wake up in the night at worst (around the 3 or 4am mark)... I was delighted but is this bad?? He's packing on weight fine and he's already 15 pounds (following the 91st percentile line) so I wasn't worried at all and even the breastfeeding cafe people said just let him sleep if he wants... but should i be waking him to feed??

No you don't need to wake them if they are taking enough feeds through the day to grow well. But it is thought that for most babies, that is unlikely to happen before 6 months of age.

No I didn't mean wake them if they sleep thats great ! What I meant was that it shouldn't be considered abnormal or something to be fixed if they do wake