Ferber method

[E899]

No judgements please!

I have a 18 week old who has always been a bit of a rubbish sleeper. Will soothe himself for naps but they only last about 30 minutes and will cry inconsolably at bedtime every single night. He will get about 3 hours sleep a day as we tend to take him out in the pram once a day and he will sleep for a while in that.

Once asleep at night, he will wake after 40 minutes and can’t put himself back to sleep. After that it’s every 2 hours.

I’ve been looking into the Ferber method and just wanted peoples experiences.

Does it work?
He currently has a dummy but I’m guessing we will have to remove this as he won’t be able to connect the sleep cycles if it falls out?
He is EBF, do I give him a feed every two hours when he wakes up like I have been doing?
Or have people done the PUPD method and has that worked?

Thanks in advance!

I rocked & fed both babies to sleep until they were about 11 months old and also neither were keen on naps (they were either in the car, the pram or while being cuddled for almost a year).

At times it drove me bonkers but ultimately they got to a point where they didn’t need it anymore.

What helped me was an acceptance that this was what bedtime and nap time would be like for a long time. When I stopped worrying about it or trying to change it, I felt much better.

My 4 month old used to get really upset when we would put her down to sleep (we co-sleep) but I realised she was very overtired by the time we were putting her down so making sure she had a cat nap and not too much awake time before bed helped massively.

Ours have always been rocked or fed/cuddled to sleep. None have ever liked being put down to sleep.

I agree that It could also be over tiredness. If I don’t keep an eye on the clock and put mine down every 2 hours then he will scream blue murder.

The inconsolable evening crying could be colic. If so it will pass but is very exhausting when you're in that phase.

Re naps, they will improve but ours didnt really improve until 6 months and they're still hit and miss.

Re the night, you can def stop feeding him to sleep (if you're doing that) but he seems young to do Ferber with. We cut down night feeds from 4+ to 2 at about 20 weeks and tried to soothe her with dummy etc BUT she has always been quite an easy baby.

I think you have to work from the baseline that you start at and try not to compare yourself (which I do and it drives me crazy).

18 weeks is so, so young though and it does improve. You can build positive sleep associations without resorting to Ferber for now. That's just my opinion anyway.

Highly recommend Stephanie Modell's sleep book x

Have you tried a different approach? We used Lucy Wolfe’s book and it was great at preventing overtiredness - sounds like that’s why your LO is screaming at night of naps are short.