Is sleep training necessary for good sleep?

[Fireplacestockings]

Good evening 😊
My lovely LO is coming up to 4 months and has been waking hourly to 2 hourly every night for about 4 weeks. He's also waking up from naps after about 45 mins - 1 hour and needs settling back to sleep again. I think it's been the 4 month regression hitting early. As you can imagine we. Are. Tired.
From what I understand, this means their sleep cycles are maturing, which is great. But because my LO isn't able to soothe back to sleep, we have to comfort him until he's asleep again. We aren't able to put him down drowsy. He instantly wakes up and gets very upset. So we're putting him down asleep at the moment. (Not always easy!)
What I'm worried about is him not being able to learn how to sleep longer stretches on his own. So is sleep training necessary? Or will this be something he learns in time?

@Pinty thank you, yes it does seem like forever 😫 co sleeping doesn't really make much of a difference overall for us. We used to until we realised it was pretty similar either way.

@Liketheclappers we also have a routine for bedtime. We've stuck to it for weeks and aren't noticing any difference. I know he's still so young, so it hopefully will change. But it's hard going at the moment.

I really do feel for you, unfortunately I think some babies just seem to need more sleep than others. I did try and keep his naps in the day earlier if possible so morning he would go down around 9am to say half 10 and afternoon around half 1 until hf 3. He used to have bad colic around tea time which was brutal and nothing I ever did would help so we would have a really unsettled hour around 5. Once he established his 10pm bedtime and was doing well I brought it back by in 15 minute intervals.

You don’t have to sleep train but if you want guaranteed good sleep in the next couple of months then yes you probably will need to. Doesn’t mean cry it out - look up Ferber or the chair method. Ignore the martyrs saying bad sleep is part of being a parent, it really doesn’t have to be.

My whole friendship group sleep trained their kids and they’ve all slept amazingly from 6 months. All the kids are happy, thriving, well adjusted (age 1-8 now). No attachment issues at all. All the nonsense about “training them not to cry for help” is a load of crap - our kids still cry when something is actually wrong eg ill or wet the bed, they just don’t cry at the end of a sleep cycle as they know how to put themselves back to sleep!

@Fireplacestockings how is it going for you? I hope you’re getting more sleep. I think we’ve finally got somewhere by having him on two naps per day. He’s young to drop down to it, and his wake window before bed is way longer than most would suggest but at the moment it’s working for him (and me!). I think that feeding to sleep and him not falling asleep wasn’t the issue, I think the problem was he was getting too much sleep and too late in the day and he just didn’t have the sleep pressure to get him through the night. A 5-6 hour wake window before bed wouldn’t be for every baby but mine copes fine with it, and he’s generally happy until he clearly gets tired and harder to entertain half an hour or so before we start bedtime routine. Depends on if you see playing around with naps as sleep training, but we didn’t do any CIO. Ferber or anything like that with him, and the last few nights have been one or two wake ups, with a 5+ hour block and a 3+ hour block.

At 7 months we used the Ferber method, worked within a couple days and DS was absolutely fine in his own room. Doesn't work for every child though. We were lucky he was a very relaxed sleeper anyway but if he wasn't ready after maybe 3 days or so, we would have left it alone and tried again at a later date.

Hello! So glad things have improved for you 😊 they have for us too! We just make sure he has 3 naps that total about 3h 45m every day and he only wakes up once a night to feed now. It literally changed overnight, we didn't really do or change anything. So thankfully no sleep training was necessary for us either. 😊 He just figured it out on his own. 💕

I don’t think so but sleep train of you want, I know people who’ve done it and it worked. I didn’t do it and my baby sleeps great now at 8 months, at 4 months it was horrendous, I cut naps to 30 mins total and she slept better at night. Follow the sound asleep guru on Instagram, she debunks parenting myths.

So glad to hear things have improved for you OP as I was just coming on to create a post about this. My nearly 5mo is waking hourly and needing held or fed to sleep. I'm done.

I’m always amazed that so many mums think they need to rush to sleep training for such a little baby. Yeah sleep deprivation sucks and isn’t easy but all this regimentation isn’t good at that age.

This thread is refreshing! I feel like all I’m hearing is that my 3 month old should be sleeping 12 hours at night and put down for naps alone.