Sleep training - how long per evening to spend?

[maloney123]

Help please! I am trying to sleep train my 7 month old. To date she has only ever slept if she’s fed and/or rocked to sleep, which can take a long time and she’ll often wake as soon as you put her down. I’m now sleep training using the shush / Pat method, but it is taking a good two hours per night to settle her and she just seems to get more and more worked up to the point that she’s crying in her cot while I sit next to her trying to calm her. Should I persevere beyond two hours or five up at that point and pick her up? Or would that confuse her? I don’t want to push her too hard

Hello!

We have just completed night 3 of this and I absolutely can’t believe it but our 7 month old went from 8-10 wakes per night to 0 the very first night, 0 second night and did wake briefly once last night and put himself back to sleep again!

So what we did was put down awake, after 2 mins shh, after another 2 mins shh and pat, then shh after 2, then shh and pat after 2, etc etc. After 14 mins we picked up until calm and then put back down once calm and did shh, then shh and pat again and after 25 mins he slept through. Next night only 10 mins so never actually got to the picking up stage and then last night 2 mins moaning slightly then asleep!

I genuinely can’t believe it and feel like a new woman!!

Good luck xx

We did control crying with ferber method. Worked amazingly. She still wakes and crys when she needs us for any reason. But that's it. Best thing for us. Think most I have got to was 7 mins. My other half got a lot longer but mummy trumps all generally.

The way you are doing will take longer but is seen as more kinder and will work at some point.

@Val2021 thanks - that sounds similar to us, albeit it is taking far longer to get my little one down to sleep! But she has touch wood slept right through once she’s gone down. I’ll persevere and hopefully she’ll start settling quicker

Takes as long as it takes I'm afraid. She is safe, you are there with her offering reassurance & security, when she learns to sleep you will all benefit. It is so worth it for the whole family.

If you give up at any point all she learns is that if she cries hard enough you will pick her up. Hold your boundary with love 💚

Look up 'Pick up, Put Down' and use in conjunction with Shush Pat. It works, stick with it!!!

www.wonderbaby.org/articles/pick-up-put-down-method

Is this different to ‘cry it out’ as you sit with them the whole time? If so, this sounds interesting. I’d love my DS to sleep longer but wouldn’t leave him to cry.

My understanding is that you can pick them up if you need to but they must go to sleep without your intervention. If the baby is getting extremely distressed or hysterical and it's going on longer than 15 to 20 mins (that is constant screaming with no gaps) I would calm them down a bit. It's a balance because too much intervention might wind them up more. And probably makes the whole thing take longer.
Also you can just work on the start of the night to begin with, so do the sleep training once per night and.if they wake during the night just use whatever method you normally did to get them back to sleep. You might need to work on the rest of the night a week or two later, if they don't work it out by themselves. But it makes it easier on both if you to do.it in stages, if you have a very persistent baby.

On our 3rd full night of sleep training we'd gone from wake ups every 1-2 hours to just 1 wakeup at 5am.

Shush pat does nothing for us, we sort of did a combo of ferber and pick up/put down. So cry for a set number of minutes but then go in, pick up and cuddle/gentle rocking until calmer, then put down again awake. Repeat with a longer crying interval if she cries again.

Also I think what has really helped is to break the feed to sleep association. We used to do bath then a final feed in which she would feed to sleep. So we now do a final feed before bath, then after bath I sit in a dark room with her, have a cuddle and play white noise/same lullaby music each night, wait until she'd drowsy then put her in cot. She may cry/whinge for a minute or two but then finds her thumb and self soothes to sleep!