4 month old won't sleep independently - help!

[AbsolutePlonker]

I am in a right mess with my daughter, who is 4 months old next week. She just hates sleeping!

She began sleeping terribly at 4 weeks and I began to cosleep (following lullaby trust guidance) as I was exhausted, and this was really successful for a time. Her sleep has gotten steadily worse though, to the point where she is now waking every hour or two to feed and she gets very agitated if she doesn't get a boob right away. Her bedtime is 7pm ish (after bath and book), we feed to sleep, with a bit of white noise to help her off.
However if I dare get up, even to go to the loo, she wakes up and cries, and we have to spend another 30 mins feeding to sleep.
During the day she'll only nap on me, in her pram, the car or sling, and she needs constant motion to stay asleep. If I put her down she wakes immediately, and is normally upset. I'm aiming for 3 naps a day but the constant movement is exhausting.

She is a very fidgety baby and she flings her arms all over the place, waking herself up.
I am very tired and I miss spending time with my husband. Unfortunately she cries if he tries to settle her and doesn't really take the bottle.

I think I want to sleep Train her but the idea really upsets me. Would be very happy to hear advice and approaches.

You can't sleep train a baby that age. They don't have enough comprehension to be trained. I'm sorry though, it does sound exhausting.

At 4 months we kept DD with us until we went to bed. She slept on one or other of us and I fed her whenever she wanted. That carried on till she found her own sort of bedtime and I’d feed her to sleep upstairs and she’d sleep for a bit in her cot. We always coslept from her first wake up once we were in bed.

You don’t need a routine at this age, she’ll find one by herself in time. You definitely don’t need to sleep train.

It’s hard but she’s just doing what babies do and the path of least resistance will help your sanity and your marriage.

We never got 3 daytime naps, not all babies do, and no babies have read the books.

Is she tired enough for 3 naps? If she nods off in the car and you park up does she wake up?

For now I’d ditch a nighttime routine and just have her on you. It’s what she needs to feel comfy and relaxed. You can eat a meal together, watch tv, chat.

If she goes down to nap in the sling, can you go to the loo with her in it?

If she naps in a pram happily, take her out for a walk for her morning nap.
You can also buy a pram rocker (Rockit portable baby rocker) which you may find useful.
We kept our DS downstairs with us at that age until we wanted to go to bed.

She's not ready for sleep training.

Sorry OP, it is hard

I did sleep training when my DD was 7.5 months old and it worked a treat. Most of the things I read said you can do it from 6 months (plenty on Mumsnet will tell you not until 12 months but I've never read that anywhere other than Mumsnet). And there are supposed no cry methods you can try from four months, like habit stacking - did not work for me but does for others so maybe worth looking at. Basically all this to say, there is very likely a potential end in sight - in a couple of months you will be able to do something like Ferber or gradual retreat (what I did) if you choose to, and it will very likely make her sleep much better. And there is a chance it will have improved by then anyway, as four months is prime sleep regression territory. I know that sounds like a long time when you're totally exhausted but I found having a rough date on the horizon really helpful when I was deep in the crap sleep phase.

Oh, and in terms of advice/ it upsetting you - obviously only you can know what you're comfortable with but I definitely felt like it was nowhere near as traumatic for her as Mumsnet/gentle parenting sites will have you believe. With gradual retreat you're in there with them through most of it and it definitely felt like most of the crying was annoyance rather than major upset. But then I had already got the feeling that she was frustrated with having to feed to sleep by then so it felt like she was ready - at four months she probably wouldn't have been. If you're not comfortable with leaving her to cry I would definitely check out gradual retreat.

At that age you can’t sleep train, she is too little.

When they are so little my dc never had a bedtime, they stayed downstairs with us until we went to bed, low lighting, tv on quietly so we got some time together and baby was content with us. It really is a very short time although I know it doesn’t always feel that way when you are living it.

I would work on daytimes, if she naps in the pram then go for a daily walk, an hour outside in the morning and if you are lucky she might stay asleep when you get home so you can leave her in the pram. In the afternoon make that a cuddly nap where you can cuddle up on the sofa or safely in bed(if you want to nap too).

It does get better, then it might get worse and then better again.

Sleep training is cruel enough as it is, let alone on a 4 months old baby. Please don't do this to her.
She is still very small and there is also a sleep regression at that age. Just do whatever works best for you and your family, even though this means cosleeping, using the sling, bfeeding to sleep etc.
The arms situation will change in a few weeks and will no longer wake herself up because of that. I think it's more of a matter of waiting until she gets a bit older before you change her sleep habits and routines and see how it goes.
My DD is 13 months old and we are still in a similar situation. Things have gone much better since she was 7-8 months old, then worse again when she was 11 months and started nursery. Every baby is different, this too shall pass.

I disagree with all the others. 4 months is a good time to try to get into some good sleep habits. Babies can learn to go to sleep independently from this age.
I would definitely not advocate leaving the baby alone or crying but at this age you don't need to as it's much easier to nudge them in the right direction. If you wait until they are older it's much more traumatic as sleep associations are stronger.
Sleeping for 35 minutes at a time won't result in a happy well rested baby and is detrimental to parents too - it's not the same as waking 2 or 3 times a night, which might be normal for the age. Telling mothers that they have to put up with that level of sleep deprivation for months is not helpful.
OP - Read up on self settling for 4 month olds - bit different to actual sleep training.

I think it sounds like you need to work on not feeding to sleep as it’s so draining for you. This isn’t sleep training which isn’t appropriate for a four month old, it’s just getting them used to sleeping while not with a boob in their mouth for half an hour. A dummy is the obvious solution - it took us four different dummies before we found one our baby liked but it was a godsend. I still have to put it back in 5-10 times a night when he wakes but it’s a lot quicker than feeding to sleep - he’s three months old and now I only feed him 2-3 times between 7pm-7am. I also found that introducing a gentle bedtime routine helped. We started doing a baby massage and lullaby and putting him in his swaddle when he woke up from a nap between 6-8pm and after a couple of weeks he started going down quite happily at 7pm and sleeping for hours. We also found at that time of day when he was crying he actually wanted to be put down with his dummy and white noise and go to sleep, rather than being held or rocked etc. Like most things with babies though it takes a couple of weeks at least for habits to form, so you might decide it’s easier to just stick with the feeding to sleep for now.

@AbsolutePlonker appreciate this was a long time ago but I could've written this post now. Any words of wisdom? How did you get through it? Xx