6 month old only fights sleep at night

[TresBon88]

I have been doing some gentle sleep training with my little boy for about a month now. I’m not a huge fan of the cry it out method so have been leaving him to self soothe and going in occasionally if needed, but avoiding picking up/feeding to settle. For the most part he has done amazing and for pretty much all his day time naps, I can put him in his cot awake and he will put himself to sleep. At night time though it’s a whole other story. He will give me all the sleepy cues (rubbing eyes, yawning, whinging etc) and will carry on with these cues when I’m feeding him, but as soon as we’re coming to the end of his last boob, he’ll start kicking out and arching his back and when I put him down in his cot he starts babbling, blowing raspberries etc. I try leave him to it like what I do during the day but he will just progressively become more and more upset, before I have to go in and try calm him down. I try to avoid picking him up or feeding but sometimes I just don’t know what else to do to get him to sleep. I don’t understand why he’s so different at night vs the day? Any ideas are so welcome!

Is he too tired?

I wondered this but I don’t think so. His last nap is about 3:30pm until 5 and we try bedtime between 7 and half past 🤷🏻‍♀️

In which case he might not be tired enough. My baby is the same age, we do bedtime at 7 but last nap finishes by 3.30 latest.

I see! Thank you. I will try adjust the nap times. We just found that he gets really whingy if he doesn’t nap at that time. Does your little one nap at pretty much the same times every day?

Not really, it can be pretty hit and miss depending on when she wakes up and what we're doing, but that 3.30 cut off is the hill I die on - no matter what happens, she sleeps at least 3-3.30. sometimes that's the 2nd nap of the day and it's an hour and a half, sometimes it's the 3rd nap and it's a short one. I don't really sweat the timings of naps for the rest of the day but she always sleeps up til 3.30.

Unless of course I have a dire nap failure, and she goes down at 2 but sleeps for less than an hour, in which case I let her have a TINY nap at around 5pm. But literally 10min max.