11 month labour still wakes in the night. Help!

[NewMeNewUs]

Need some advice cos she’s killing me!
our girl wakes up multiple times in the night barking- last night I lost count but it was about 6 or 7 times.
She has her bedroom in our utility room, door kept open with a baby gate on it. She loves her little room and often takes herself off in there when we are home, so I don’t think the space is an issue.

when we go up to bed we encourage her outside to wee but she is very stubborn and often will not go out. For this reason, the first time she barks in the night I do go down and let her outside. Sometimes she goes to the toilet sometimes she doesn’t. From then on, when she wakes and barks I ignore her.
sometimes it’s only for a minute or 2 then she stops and goes back to sleep. But it’s waking me up and on occasion waking my young kids up too.

any ideas/suggestions/tips?

thank you.

I would bet good money on her being unhappy sleeping alone.

What training did you do to get her to sleep happily by herself?

Ahh really, this thought makes me sad.
she was crate trained initially but she didn’t like it so we stopped it. I slept with her on the living room floor for weeks, if not months. Then I slowly reduced the amount of time I was sleeping with her. That’s all I did really so I suppose you could argue I didn’t do much in the way of training her to sleep by herself.

When you slept with her, did she bark at all?

Does she have a slow sniffy walk late in the day? This stopped my dog waking at night as it relaxed him.

You go to her when she barks. She's getting exactly what she wants and, unfortunately, I don't think it will improve unless you are prepared to let her bark it out and never go down to check on her until it gets to morning.

This is why many people won't co-sleep with their puppies - it's a very slippy slope. And it's really hard to correct the behaviour when they were used to sleeping with you.

You have two choices: don't go down to her at all at night and let her bark it out. Give in and let her sleep with you. It won't improve if you carry on checking on her sometimes and ignoring her other times.

Thank you

I would suggest when you want her to go for a last pee then take her out on her lead and keep prompting her. Maybe go back to crate training again, my 6mth pup has separation anxiety but copes well at night in the crate with blanket over the top although it took a short while to fully settle. I know it's really hard not going when they bark but at least wait for a gap in the barking and walk into the area but don't go straight to the baby gate in the utility ignore them then go over and make the dog sit. Don't know if it'll help but I sympathise