Those who have done Controlled Crying...

[LydiaFTM]

...was it successful?

DS is 6 months old and nurses to sleep. We also cosleep and contact nap. He's starting nursery in March and I'd like him to be able to fall asleep better on his own or with less support. Previous, more gentle, sleep training attempts where we stay with him while he falls asleep haven't been successful.

I'm aware sleep training isn't for everyone and if we could avoid it I would but I'm not going to survive on current sleep levels on 8 hour work days. Plus he will be looked after by nursery and grandparents and I need reassurance he will be able to settle for naps without me there to nurse him. So please no judgment!

If it's worked, how long did your baby take to fall asleep on the first night? And how long did the whole process take?

Am I right in thinking on each check-in we spend a few minutes comforting DS without picking him up? I'm fairly sure it will reach a point where no amount of reassurance will comfort him in the slightest!

Did you use it for bedtime and naps all at once? Or start with bedtime?

Thank you!

We did it with DD1 at about 14 months. We went in after 2 min, then 3min etc, resettling each time. I think we got to 6 min max and within 5 days there was no crying. It was definitely not just leaving her to cry.

We didn't do it with DD2 and still have to sit with her until she is asleep. She's 7 now. That was a mistake.

@Pyri yes, I'm always baffled when people say that babies learn not to cry as no one will come if they go through controlled crying. Not my experience! We did CC at 6 months old, leaving it an extra minutes interval between going in to rub our sons stomach when he cried but never picking him up, talking to him or giving him eye contact. It took 4 nights and then he slept through the vast majority of the time. He would still wake up and cry if he was feeling unwell, or needed his nappy changing etc and we would respond because that's when he actually need led us. He's 7 yrs old now and will get into our bed if he wakes up from a nightmare or feels unwell during the night - he certainly knows that we are here when he needs us! Sometimes babies will be picked up and they will still cry and be distressed for a long long time and do this at night for months - is the cortisol level still raised then for them, causing them "damage"? Or is it better to have a few nights of crying with comfort from parents but not being picked up, and then sleeping through the night without constant crying and interrupted sleep?

@Snowdayoverdue

I'd recommend waiting if you can until your DC starts nursery. They are used to babies that don't settle and will want to get your DC into their routine. Which basically means they will do a lot of the hard work for you. If you start changing things now, you run the risk of them changing it all again in a few months anyway.

I have thought about this but I'm scared they will call me on the first day and say he's refusing to nap and disrupting the other babies! And then I'll pressured into doing something anyway. Plus he has to go to grandparents as well and I'm worried they will get stressed too trying to get him to sleep.

I tried CC with my now 10 year old son.. it was hell but I was willing to try anything after almost a year with very little sleep!
I think as a pp said you have a lot of things going on.. the feeding to sleep, co sleeping and starting nursery.. I think it would be a lot for your baby if you tried CC now but if you gradually stopped feeding to sleep and then get the baby used to sleeping in their cot and then if you need to try CC..
I started with naps for my son they worked really well but night-time was very hard..
He's a great sleeper now though! I have to drag him out of bed for school..he loves his bed

@Snowdayoverdue

I'd recommend waiting if you can until your DC starts nursery. They are used to babies that don't settle and will want to get your DC into their routine. Which basically means they will do a lot of the hard work for you. If you start changing things now, you run the risk of them changing it all again in a few months anyway.

Much harder on the baby to be sleep trained by strangers while they are settling in to a new place, than to do it at home where they already feel secure. Easier on the parent as they don't see the crying, but not for the baby.

Routine changes every few months anyway, it's the actual act of falling asleep that you are training.

Night one was awful tbh well over an hour of crying with me going in at increasing intervals - 2 minutes then 4 minutes -you don't go in for long at all just a quick reassurance that you're there and they're safe I think if you stayed any longer they'd get even more unsettled.
Second night was about half an hour
Third night about ten minutes
From then on my babies and kids always went down for naps and bedtime awake a d settled with no fuss at all and we were all sat happier for it
Sleep is really important for development and as long as your baby is a good weight and not poorly a couple of nights of crying is fine and so much benefit to good quality sleep for them

@crossstitchingnana

Please don't. It gives the message there is no point in asking for your needs to be met as no-one's coming.

Trotted out, again. Classic mumsnet

Numerous studies show that once ‘controlled crying’, which allowing a baby to scream and cry for an hour isn’t, works the cortisol levels of parents goes down to what it was before the stress but that it stays elevated in baby for a long time, they just don’t let you know as there is no point crying for someone who doesn’t come.

This is not true. One study reported this but it only looked at 3 nights and babies that did the sleep training in a hospital... And it doesn't report the cortisol levels before the study started.

Numerous studies have found no difference in behaviour or attachment between babies that were sleep trained and those that weren't.

Much harder on the baby to be sleep trained by strangers while they are settling in to a new place, than to do it at home where they already feel secure.
Easier on the parent as they don't see the crying, but not for the baby.

Routine changes every few months anyway, it's the actual act of falling asleep that you are training.

I agree with you

@Mmmmmmbop90

I think the thing that’s missing from all of these ‘success’ stories is how the baby felt!

Numerous studies show that once ‘controlled crying’, which allowing a baby to scream and cry for an hour isn’t, works the cortisol levels of parents goes down to what it was before the stress but that it stays elevated in baby for a long time, they just don’t let you know as there is no point crying for someone who doesn’t come.

My 3 year old slept through for the first time at 20 months and has slept through every night since (sparing illness) she’s in bed at 6.30om and sleeps until 7am. From 1year old she only woke up once per night for a feed. We never did any form of slee training and she got there herself in the end. She also stopped feeding to sleep herself, asked to move in her cot herself and then a bed etc - we just did it at her pace.

My 6 month old is currently feeding to sleep and in a next to me, I couldn’t imagine putting him through what you are thinking of. He will settle differently for grandparents and nursery because you aren’t there - you don’t need to do anything to prepare him .

Have you followed care it out on Instagram? She has great ideas that don’t involve leaving baby to cry and could help you get more sleep? Or could you get more support to allow you to rest when you get home from work or in the mornings so you can catch up? I know it’s so hard but it is a short phase,

What about all the studies that show the effects of poor sleep on physical, mental and intellectual development? The cortisol level type theories often are based on extreme neglect and trauma such as Romanian orphanages- not a couple of evenings of controlled crying .

We did it and it took 3 days with a max of half and hour of crying but going in every few minutes as I was at breaking point after every nap had to be on me and I'd spend hours rocking him to sleep at night.
He was happy going to sleep from awake for a few months but did slowly regress and we've had to sit with him in the room until he fell asleep since
Now he's 2.5 we're working on leaving him to fall asleep on his own now he understands we're still here if he needs us which seems to be working well 🤞🏻

I did it with my DD when she was 6 months and same with my DS. Both took about an hour the first night, then about 8 mins the second night, then slept straight through after that for 12 hours pretty much ever since, and their 30 min daytime naps became an hour long. I couldn’t believe it, it transformed my ability to be a happy parent and actually enjoy my child, because I was getting more than an hours sleep at a time, and I felt more confident the children were finally getting the sleep they obviously needed. I was never after a full nights sleep (although this was obviously welcome!) I just wanted a few hours at a time! And with my DD she had been waking every hour after 12am for THREE months and I was getting seriously concerned for her development. All this talk of babies not thinking you’ll come back is bullshit, that’s the whole point to the method, it’s not cry it out, you DO come back. Over and over. Good luck OP

I think the gentle methods can work but they take a long time (weeks at least) and it's really difficult to be totally consistent for long enough when you are exhausted. You could having to do something multiple times each night for weeks when you just want to get back to sleep asap. If you aren't consistent it's like starting all over again each time. Whereas cc is potentially easier as you get much quicker results. I think the ideal is to get everything right from birth and avoid having to do sleep training of any sort. But it's very difficult especially if you also have a toddler or if the baby has reflux or any other problems that mean they don't want to lie down to sleep at the correct times etc. My first child I didn't have to do anything in the way of training - she just slept through from 5 months by herself. My second had reflux and I had a toddler so the baby was getting overtired or woken up as well as being constantly ill from nursery bugs. Those things led to unhelpful sleep habits. By 6 months I was at the end of my tether and the baby wasn't happy at night either despite cosleeping. Cc has improved things hugely for both of us.

Have you tried habit stacking to move away from nursing to sleep? That worked for me to build in different associations (I started at about the same age) which got us to the point where he could be put to sleep with cuddles and bum pats. This took a few months so you’ll need to start now. We still co slept and he would nurse every wake up in the night, then at 9 months when his night sleep was getting worse and worse we sleep trained in the sense that my husband took over wake ups and comforted him with the same technique he was put to sleep at the start of the night. I still dream fed twice in the night at first. This worked and he was sleeping through within a few weeks, he also started napping in his cot. You can find Lynsey hookway on Instagram she has more info on habit stacking.
I considered controlled crying at 6 months, even spoke to a sleep consultant but it just didn’t feel right in my gut at the time. It felt cruel to just go straight from feeding to sleep and co sleeping to leaving him to cry himself to sleep. I feel really comfortable with how we did it looking back.

I think with CC it's either going to work quickly or it's not going to work. I tried it twice with my DS - at 7months and again at 11 months. It didn't work either time. We preserved longer at 11 months, but it just didn't work. He was like your baby, waking often through the night too. Then, all of a sudden at about 13 months, his sleep just turned a corner and with some gentle nudging he started settling quickly and sleeping long stretches. They are all different, but I think it CC doesn't have the immediate result some people on here are describing, it's probably not going to work for you.

Good luck whatever you choose to do, sleep deprivation is so hard for everyone

I’m currently trying it but struggling as baby will wake up after 30 mins from when fell asleep crying again and then I end up going in. 😦 he’s my 3rd and I did a little controlled crying with other two and it worked fine. Just feel like this ones sleepnis a mess so hard to have proper routine, etc with 5 and 2 year old needing attention to.... on my own a lot at bedtimes 😩

He is extremely young at six months to be left at a nursery.

DS3 feeds to sleep if I am around, he is almost 2, but if I am not here then he happily self settles. He has been like that since he was tiny. His ability to self settle doesn't appear to have made any difference to his night wakes.

CC didn't work with DS1. We tried at around 8 months and it was torture on us all. DS became an anxious mess during the day. Do we left it until he was almost 18 months. We thought we had cracked it a week in! But then I realised he was silently sobbing himself to sleep 💔

So we stopped CC Method and moved to "gentle" sleeping 🙄 all because we were worried about him not settling well ahead of DS2's arrival... nope, we battled and battled every night, determined not to be in his room when he drifted off so he would self settle.

When DS2 arrived, our view drastically shifted and we realised that if we spent time creating a calm and secure bedtime, including staying by DS1's side until he fell asleep then bed time could be done in under 20 minutes!

Anyway. Sleep deprivation is hard OP. It does get better.

Did it at 8 months. Took 20 mins to fall asleep first night, but didn't actually cry, just looked around for a bit. Woke once the first night, fed and put back down, whinged (not proper crying) for 2 mins and back to sleep. No more night waking after that(until 2 year regression), and went to sleep on his own every night without any crying. Was a terrible sleeper before, waking up to 10 times at night, and being rocked or fed to sleep every time. We were very lucky of course that it was that easy. Tried at 5 months and didn't work.

Yes took 3 nights for us.

My son takes ages to go to sleep but he is happy and laughing in the cot.

@blyn72

He is extremely young at six months to be left at a nursery.

Wtaf

@blyn72

I wouldn't say so. And totally beside the point

You will find lots of parents on here saying ‘they stopped crying because they knew no one would come’ but I know parents like this 5+ years on and they’re often the ones still having to try and get their children to sleep. My husband told me it is important that children learn to fall asleep themselves and I didn’t agree at the time but I do now.

From feeding to sleep, contact napping and coalescing, controlled crying seems quite extreme

@blyn72

He is extremely young at six months to be left at a nursery.

Well thanks for that. Obviously I wouldn't be sending him if I could afford not to work.