sleep clinics/consultants

[babyOcho]

The night time screaming and wakeful baby (8.5 months) is getting me down and DP and are are falling out over it.

Has anyone used a sleep clinic or consultant. Is it worth it? Do they really help?

DD naps wells during the day, goes to bed early, is generally happy and smiley and not ill. She just goes mad with the whole sleep thing, and although I can handle to lack of sleep myself I cannot cope with the battle with her every night.

I used Andrea Grace and she was brilliant. She specialises in 'gentle' methods (i.e. not controlled crying). dd was 8 months, and with Andrea's help we got her sleeping through in four days. She cost about a hundred quid, but this was a couple of years ago.

She has a website, or phone number is 020 8348 6959.

Thanks hester.

What method did she get you to use? What was her diagnosis of your DD??

Our problem was that dd got hooked on being bf to sleep. At the begininng this worked fine, but as she got older she woke up every hour crying to be bf. By 8 months I was going out of my mind with sleep deprivation. Andrea was recommended to me by a friend; if you want to check out her approach you could look at back copies of Mother & Baby magazine (she's their sleep expert). Anyway, she came round and talked to us for a couple of hours, then emailed us a sleep plan that was basically:

• get in a proper bedtime routine
• start removing dd from the breast just before falling asleep
• putting her down awake, but sitting with her, touching her and soothing her. I had been very reluctant to do controlled crying, and Andrea warned me that dd would cry out of frustration and tiredness, but that she wouldn't get too upset because I'd be with her throughout (as she said, "How traumatised can a baby get when their mum is patting their back?").

(This is a real precis: the actual plan was two pages long!)

dd did cry, for about 40 minutes the first night, less the next night, and was sleeping through by night 4. I couldn't believe how quickly it worked. Of course, it wasn't rocket science, but when you're that sleep-deprived you can barely work out how to get yourself dressed.

What really worked was that you get phone access to Andrea every day for up to a month. So I rang every morning for the first week or so, to tell her what had happened the night before and be told EXACTLY what to do that night. This was critical: I really needed the hand-holding and the precise instructions.

I heard from a friend that Andrea has become very popular, so her service might not be as I desccribe any longer. But check it out: I thought it was money really well spent. I never liked the idea of those sleep consultants who just come in and do your controlled crying for you, and I was really reassured by
Andrea's experience (mother of four and health visitor) but most of all by her calm, supportive manner. She's very sane, practical and sympathetic.

God, I sound like her agent, don't I?! Anyway, I seem to remember that her website has lots of case studies so it's worth checking if any of those sound similar to your situation, and if you like the feel of her approach.

Good luck - let us know how you get on.

hey- don't want to be contrarian (sorry Hester), but we also used Andrea Grace and it really did nothing for us. tbh her method is essentially the no cry sleep solution, so you could do it by yourself really. i think her expectations were totally unrealistic- dd1 was a really really bad sleeper, so while her methods would have worked on a normal child (say dd2) i found she was jsut working off a script and didnt recognise just how bad dd1 was. things have improved for us, but it's taken several months not days as she says...

Oh, how interesting! I wouldn't disagree with what you say about being able to do it by yourself, with the help of a good book - except that I was so crazed by lack of sleep that I really needed the hand-holding. Perhaps the message is that (a) different strokes for different folks, and (b) you're more likely to be successful if your child's sleep problems are not too complex or unusual.