11 month old won’t sleep in his cot anymore

[peacockj]

My son is almost 11 months old and up until a few months ago he slept through the night every night. He then went through a period of waking up every couple of hours but the past few weeks have been an absolute nightmare.

I do bath time, then feed him which he usually falls asleep during, keep hold of him for around half an hour (as he is quite refluxy so if I tried to put him down straight away he’d just throw up) and then try to put him down in his cot. Try being the optimal word. Some nights he will let us put him down but most of the time he’ll just start screaming straight away. This then goes on for sometimes a couple of hours until we finally manage to successfully put him down. He will then only stay asleep for an hour or so and the whole process has to be repeated again.

It started because he had a cold so he was very snotty and sad all the time, that was fine but the cold has gone and his sleep habits have remained the same.

He has ended up in our bed every night the past few weeks which is fine as at least we all get sleep but I don’t want it to become a habit.

I put a post on a few weeks ago asking for advice on the Ferber Method after being recommended by the health visitor but I tried it for 10 minutes and it traumatised us both so I don’t think it’s for me. Does anyone have any advice on how I can get him to sleep in his cot without just letting him cry? I’ve tried sitting next to him, stroking his head, holding his hand, giving him his favourite teddy (the list goes on) but he just wants to be picked up. Please help

Hi @peacockj, it sounds like you're going through a tough time.

We're just giving this thread a bump in case anyone's around to give you some advice and support.

The issue stems from the fact that he's fed to sleep, then cuddled to sleep, then put down awake.

If you want independent sleep (ie not sleeping in your bed) then your aim should be independent settling. To get independant sleep baby wants to be going from fully awake to fully asleep all in the cot.

Clearly to get from where you are now to that is going to involve a lot of crying if you want this to happen anytime soon. If you dont want the crying, then you have two options

(1) Accept cosleeping and stop battling against it. Make cosleeping work for you all and embrace feeding to sleep lying down.

(2) Accept that it will be a long, long road to independent sleep and you will be dealing with wake ups and long settling times for a long time to come. Make that work for you by embracing things like sleeping during the day yourself.

If you want to work towards independent sleep without any crying, start with lowering your expectations. Your first aim might be 'longer cuddling to sleep and less time feeding to sleep'. For example, feed baby before getting ready for bed in nightware. Then feed again after having had a bath and got ready for bed, but know that baby will be feeding less. Change to rocking/cuddling to sleep rather than feeding to sleep.

Next aim might be not feeding near sleep time at all, do all of your settling by rocking/cuddling to sleep.

Next aim (and this might be many, many months away) might be to slow down any rocking so you cuddle to sleep. Throughout all of this, keep on the cuddle until baby is fully asleep, don't have the battle of putting baby down awake because it won't work in this method and will just prolong everything.

Next aim might be to slightly shorten the cuddle. Say, cuddle until baby has been asleep for 30 mins then put down. After a few weeks work towards cuddling for only 20 mins after baby is asleep. Then 15 mins, then 10 mins, then 5 mins and so on. Each with a good few weeks before the next progress step.