Why has my 6 month old stopped soothing himself to sleep?

[Sprimarolo]

Hey, my 6 month old ha become a nightmare in the past few weeks for sleep. He used to self soothe and go off on his own for every nap and most nights without my help unless he was over tired.

In the past few weeks he will not go off to sleep without me and it’s getting worse. Whereas I could rock him or back pat him to sleep or last resort boob him (he’s breastfed) now absolutely NOTHING is working. I’ve tried changing nap times and everything. When I finally do manage to get him to sleep he wakes within like 3 minutes 😩

He’s also gotten terrible overnight and waking constantly at any sound. He can’t move to his own room until we move house (41 days aaaah).

I’m desperate for any tips! I have a 3 year old with very complex needs and disabilities and unfortunately I’m completely time limited so can’t spend everyday fighting him! Overnight I’m naughty and boob him and pull him into my bed because I just don’t have the energy to tackle this yet with all the care my eldest needs because I’ll just be more sleep deprived! (OH tells me off and says I’m making him too reliant on me).

Any ideas welcome!!

This sounds like the symptoms of being overtired. What's baby's daytime sleep/feed routine?

Do you feed to sleep for naps?

Well it’s been a bit allover the place and I’ve been trying different things. He normally goes off on his own for his naps and nuzzles his comforter but we’ve been naughty past couple of weeks with feeding and rocking to sleep 😬

Loosely:
Wakes 6.30/7am
Nap 8.30/9am
Nap 1pm
Nap 4.30pm

He’s only been sleeping 30-40mins for his naps and then last nap of the day he would go for over an hour I reckon but I wake him as it’s so late.

It’s just hard as he has to fit around his sister a lot of the time as she can’t sit/walk/talk and has lots of medical needs as well as dropping and picking her up at nursery. He would definitely have his second nap earlier if he could be were leaving the house at 12 everyday.

They are very long awake windows throughout the day, with the late morning wake window being very, very long.

As an approximation, wake window wants to be around

• double previous nap length
• plus or minus 15 mins
• never more than 2h unless naps are consistently over 90 minutes.

So your 30-40 minute naps want Wake Windows or around 1h10mins (in the range of 45min - 1h35min).

If you would like convenient naps that work alongside your daughter with complex needs, how about doing naps in something that moves and with a dummy? While at home, I'd suggest putting baby into a bouncy chair at the start of the range for when nap time will be. You can then sit on the sofa and bounce baby to sleep with your foot, or sit in the floor and play with toddler while also bouncing baby to sleep.

Then if going out, try to tine your Wake Windows such that baby is ready for starting a nap as you need and have the nap in the pram or carseat, with movement again.

This is really helpful thank you. I didn’t really know about wake windows! My first was so easy with naps and obviously had the freedom of not having to work around anyone else so I used to just follow her lead.

I think I need to try and get him napping much earlier in the morning so that by the time we head out he’s had 2 naps or at least 1 long nap (he used to go 1-2 hours!). Think we have our day back to front 🤣 so would you say put him down after an hour of being up in the morning is enough time for him to be ready to nap?

He outgrew his bouncer a month ago as he’s nearly 10kg! And recently become so interested in the world he just won’t nap anywhere but his cot, he will in his pram/car seat after a good 30 mins+ so I’m going to try and be clever with timings so he can nap at home

Do you think this would work:

Wake 7am
Nap 8am
Nap 10.30am
Nap 2pm
(Give or take dependant on nap length and wake time in the morning)

Today we have had progress and he’s gone off on his own for both naps!! I put him down much earlier this morning at 8.30am but I think it was still too late, he only managed 30 mins 😫