TTMA ::whispers:: sleep training

[3dimesdown]

I don't ever open the sleep threads because the few times I did they were kind of a bummer, so I apologize if this has been discussed at length somewhere else. Please point me in the right direction if it has.

Inspired by the NYT article/Parenting thread, I'm getting sort of curious about sleep training. I've never done any real research into it, but now that I'm pretty sure LO is not waking up hungry at night, it'd be cool if we could cut the 2 wake ups out.

So, what do I do? Just put her in the crib and let her stand there and cry until she passes out from exhaustion?

[3dimesdown]

@scoop - Nobody wants to help us.



I guess I'll have to stop being lazy and google. Or keep being lazy and just keep waking up to rock her back to sleep.

[mrsmonogrammed]

3dimesdown I'd love to help but I have no answers:( I think that @hilarityensued has some feels on sleep training though so maybe she can?

[jessila]

Different things work for different babies. Different things work for the same baby at different times.

The first time we used the extinction method (Ferber?) where we'd put him down and let him fuss. We'd go in after 3 minutes, rub his back, say soothing things for 30 seconds to a minute then leave. Go in again after 5 minutes doing the same thing. Go in again after 8 minutes, do the same thing. The key to this is not to pick the baby up and to go in at increasingly longer intervals of time until the baby falls asleep. By the third night, he had put himself to sleep after 30 minutes of fussing. Another part of the method is to say the same thing each time. Mine is usually something like "I love you. I hope you sleep well and have great dreams. I'll see you in the morning." We did this around 6 months and he was almost sleeping through the night in his crib. When my dad died, I let LO sleep in the swing because it meant I could sleep and deal with my grief.

The second time was when LO was 9 months old. We tried extinction again but he would scream bloody murder if we went in and didn't pick him up or if we went in and picked him up he would scream when we put him down. He wouldn't go to sleep if we interfered at all and became increasingly upset. So we had to go cold turkey. I set a time limit (45 minutes or if it sounded like there was something wrong) before I would go in. If I did go in, I sat and rocked him to sleep. After a few nights, it just suddenly clicked. Now he might fuss to let me know that him going to sleep isn't his idea but it stops within a couple minutes. Usually he'll pass right out or play until he falls asleep.

We have a projector that we turn on if he isn't too tired and he'll stare at the ceiling until he sleeps. He STTN 5-6 nights per week. Usually he wakes if he has a nightmare because he's freaked out when I go in then.

Good luck! Find what works for you. As you can see from my response, it isn't always cut and dry. But sleep is worth it.

[3dimesdown]

May 25, 2016 12:37:46 GMT -5 @hilarityensued said:

Wait... okay so D15 babies are... 5ish months?

ETA: I'm dumb, I don't know where I am... babies are almost 1... I'm on board now.

Yeah, LO will 11 months tomorrow. Am I too late for training now? I know nothing.

She has never put herself to sleep. She has to be dead asleep in someone's arms to get put down and any time she even sort of wakes up, she stands up, clings to the crib bars for dear life, and screams like something is chewing her leg off.

[3dimesdown]

@hilarityensued She gets rocked to sleep about 8-8:30. Usually sleeps until at least midnight in her crib. Then if she wakes up, I put her in the bed with me and nurse to sleep. She usually wakes up one more time 3 or 4 hours later and I nurse to sleep again. I mostly just stick the boob in her mouth and she immediately falls asleep both times, so not hungry.

ETA: If H gets her, she goes to sleep fine with no boob, just not quite as instantaneous. 

[tjanca22]

We did sleep training with E. Ours probably fell closer to the graduated extinction method and it was successful for us. We'd do our normal bedtime routine then lay him down and walk out of the room. We'd watch the clock and go in at increasing intervals. I can't remember what minutes they say to go in there, but you can google it. When we would go in there, we'd only pick him up to give him a kiss, tell him it's bedtime, lay him on his back (we trained at 10 months so he'd stand in his crib while crying) and then walk out again.

Night 1: he cried for 40 mins and woke up twice that night and we repeated the process with the MOTN wake ups, he was back to sleep after about 15 mins each time
Night 2: he cried for 21 mins and STTN
Night 3: he cried for about 9 mins and STTN
By night 4, he'd cry for a few mins and then fall asleep. Some nights, he wouldn't fall asleep right away and we'd have to go into his room 1-2 times, but he'd eventually fall asleep. He never had any wake ups after this. UNTIL we spent the 1 night in the hospital about a month ago. For the past month he's been waking up 1x between 2-3am. We just give him a bottle and he goes right back to sleep. DH wants to retrain him, but with his birthday right around the corner I need to change his bedtime routine a little bit since I won't nurse him before laying him down. I'm holding off the retraining until then.

I'd say do what's best for you and MM. Going into the room for some babies will only make things worse. Some babies will take to a sleep training method and sleep perfectly after that. I personally put off sleep training until 10 months mainly because I was worried about the "what if he really is hungry during the night" and also for the fact that I knew I'd have to hear him cry for a long time before eventually falling asleep. What helped me to get past the crying at first was knowing that he had a fresh diaper and was just fed; there wasn't much more that I could do for him. I also would tell myself that him learning to put himself to sleep was a good thing. What helped the most was that I had DH do the training so I didn't have that urge to rush into the room and just comfort E; DH was a champ those first three nights.

Good luck! Remember that even if you go the sleep training route, it won't last forever; each night gets better.

[holliberry28]

We used the Ferber method (cry it out with checks) around 6-7 months. M still cries to sleep for 5-15 minutes most nights just because he does not want to go to sleep. However, it did help us get him to STTN, unless he isn't feeling well. We basically used the approach jessila described. I can upload the chart that specifies the timed intervals that you follow for your checks. We always went in for 15-20 seconds, any longer and he'd freak out even more.

If you going in makes her more upset though because she sees you, you might have to go the full extinction, weisbluth approach and then just let her cry it out cold turkey.

[beersandweirs]

We did the Sleep Lady Shuffle from the book Good Night, Sleep Tight. Essentially you stay in the room with LO while they cry and offer mostly verbal reassurance for 12 nights, moving father and farther from the crib each 3 nights. I can honestly tell you Ferber or full on extinction probably would have worked better for our LO because touching her or talking to her just seemed to make it worse, but it is what it is and this seemed like a more "gentle" approach at the time.

Granted, we did it at 4.5 months because I could not deal with sleep the way it was going, so we did it on the early side (with pediatrician's blessing), so there could be some aspects that are harder now that LO is older and has more awareness, but by no means do I think you are too far gone to do anything!

I agree with @hilarityensued and whatever method you decide to do, fully commit to it, it can be hard, but really it is key.

Good luck, sleep training I think is the best parenting choice I have made thus far!

[beersandweirs]

Another thing to consider, you can choose to do bedtime and naps at the same time, or stagger them a bit. We did bedtime first and started naps a week later. I have read that naps can be a bit harder since they have more energy to fight them during the day.

[3dimesdown]

May 25, 2016 13:00:42 GMT -5 @hilarityensued said:

May 25, 2016 12:54:26 GMT -5 3dimesdown said:

@hilarityensued She gets rocked to sleep about 8-8:30. Usually sleeps until at least midnight in her crib. Then if she wakes up, I put her in the bed with me and nurse to sleep. She usually wakes up one more time 3 or 4 hours later and I nurse to sleep again. I mostly just stick the boob in her mouth and she immediately falls asleep both times, so not hungry.

ETA: If H gets her, she goes to sleep fine with no boob, just not quite as instantaneous. 

is your goal to not have her sleep in your bed or do you want to continue the co-sleeping situation? 

Nooooooo to co-sleeping. She touches me and it's too hot. Our routine is fairly consistent at this point, but it's just pajamas, brush teeth, play/snuggle, nurse/rock to sleep. She's started self weening, so I'll be hopefully done with that completely in a couple months.

I guess I'll start with the checking at intervals method, but I feel like she's going to Hulk smash her way out when she sees me... 

[3dimesdown]

May 25, 2016 13:26:15 GMT -5 beersandweirs said:

Another thing to consider, you can choose to do bedtime and naps at the same time, or stagger them a bit. We did bedtime first and started naps a week later. I have read that naps can be a bit harder since they have more energy to fight them during the day.

I have no control over naps because my mom watches her while working FT from home. I don't expect her to deal with a child screaming at her while she works. I'll volunteer the info in a conversational way, but I have a feeling naps will just keep on the same way they are now.

[beersandweirs]

May 25, 2016 14:06:03 GMT -5 3dimesdown said:

May 25, 2016 13:26:15 GMT -5 beersandweirs said:

Another thing to consider, you can choose to do bedtime and naps at the same time, or stagger them a bit. We did bedtime first and started naps a week later. I have read that naps can be a bit harder since they have more energy to fight them during the day.

I have no control over naps because my mom watches her while working FT from home. I don't expect her to deal with a child screaming at her while she works. I'll volunteer the info in a conversational way, but I have a feeling naps will just keep on the same way they are now.

I understand. If you get night time in order, you may find that naps work themselves out as well.

[3dimesdown]

May 25, 2016 14:05:00 GMT -5 @hilarityensued said:

May 25, 2016 14:02:00 GMT -5 3dimesdown said:

Nooooooo to co-sleeping. She touches me and it's too hot. Our routine is fairly consistent at this point, but it's just pajamas, brush teeth, play/snuggle, nurse/rock to sleep. She's started self weening, so I'll be hopefully done with that completely in a couple months.

I guess I'll start with the checking at intervals method, but I feel like she's going to Hulk smash her way out when she sees me... 

Well you can skip the intervals.  I never did them because they made both of my kids way more insane when I went in there.  

Also, if you want to ditch the co-sleeping, then after you nurse MOTN, put her back in her crib.  Do not ever bring her into your bed.

My husband and I were very firm on the kids not sleeping in bed with us and it has been huge in helping their sleeping success.

Logically, I know this, but then I have to stay awake to feed her and that's a lot of work.

But seriously this sounds like something that is definitely going to have to wait until my H is off night shift. I am not a patient night time person and will just give in and put her in the bed when she won't stop crying... Which is probably why she's a suck sleeper in the first place...

[beersandweirs]

FFWC: I get kind of excited to talk sleep training because I know how much it helped us and I hope it can help other people just as much. Sleep is sooo important!

[3dimesdown]

May 25, 2016 14:09:11 GMT -5 beersandweirs said:

May 25, 2016 14:06:03 GMT -5 3dimesdown said:

I have no control over naps because my mom watches her while working FT from home. I don't expect her to deal with a child screaming at her while she works. I'll volunteer the info in a conversational way, but I have a feeling naps will just keep on the same way they are now.

I understand. If you get night time in order, you may find that naps work themselves out as well.

I'm sure my mom would love that instead of having to try to work while holding a sleeping baby. Have I mentioned my mother is the best?

[beersandweirs]

Once you have done nighttime, you could always try to put LO down for a nap in her crib on weekends, see if it is even an option for your mom to try.

[mrsmonogrammed]

May 25, 2016 14:15:17 GMT -5 beersandweirs said:

Once you have done nighttime, you could always try to put LO down for a nap in her crib on weekends, see if it is even an option for your mom to try.

Ugh, DD has always been a fantastic night time sleeper (after an initial 10ish min of crying to fall asleep) but naps are a freaking nightmare. My grandma is the one who watches her during the day and she won't let her CIO. Not to mention my grandma rests when DD is asleep so to interrupt that seems cruel:( I'll continue to suck it up since night sleep hasn't been effected, but I'm trying to come up with a better solution.

[beersandweirs]

Does your grandma have blackout curtains in the room where LO sleeps? Maybe that would help 'trick' her into thinking it was nighttime?

[billyhorrible]

I'm always hesitant to jump into these kinds of threads, because we didn't sleep train, but I do want to put this out there - make sure you're sleep training for you and not her.

I'm not anti-sleep training, but I do think a lot of advocates stress that if you don't do it, your kid won't learn to put themselves to sleep, or won't be good sleepers, and I think that's just fear mongering to an already anxious FTM. If you're sleep training because your sleep routine doesn't work for you, then go for it, but if it's working, then try not to stress about it.

Unless your kid is literally waking every 45 minutes (the length of a sleep cycle) then they are already putting themselves to sleep between cycles. And babies/kids/adults wake up for other reasons than just hunger. (That being said, if it's not hunger, that means your breasts aren't necessary and when DH is back on days he can also be the one going in)

LBB stopped waking MOTN at 14 months on his own. He could never do drowsy but awake. But that gets easier as they get older. At a certain age, we just needed to be in the room while he was in the crib, then we just needed to tuck him in. They all get there.

[purple]

Good luck, 3dimesdown! I hope you find something that works for you.

L still gets cuddled to sleep at bedtime, when she wakes in the night, and for at least one of her naps. It's completely normal for her to scream herself to sleep even whilst being cuddled. (Luckily for everyone she doesn't usually scream MOTN.) This hurts my ears, but it's also why I feel sleep training just won't work for us.

[turtle]

We started with Ferber at 6 months. I stopped nursing in the middle of the night at the same time as he wasn't seemingly needing the food, he just wanted comfort to go back to sleep. I also took away the pacifier because he was waking up every hour and I wasn't playing the "put eleventy million pacifiers in the crib so he can find one" game. So no boob and no pacifier and no mommy and daddy all at once led to a rough two weeks, after which we went to complete extinction as going in the room made it worse. (He was waking up fewer times each night but it still took three weeks total.)

After three weeks, we had the new problem of early wake up, with him sleeping from 7pm to about 3am. Then we worked on doing extinction with naps so that he wasn't over tired and could sleep through the night. At about 7.5 months, he was sleeping from 7pm to 6am with no wake up. I would say he ends up waking us up twice a month now, usually due to teething. At this point, if he's crying, I go in because it is so rare, but he hasn't eaten in the middle of the night since 6 months.

I got a lot of good information from babycenter's Teaching Your Baby to Sleep forum. There were charts and tips and I read them all while in the middle of training.

I agree with @hilarityensued, when she says that consistency is key. I didn't give in once, even though I wanted to many times. Sleep is important to me and even more important to him. I didn't want to start from scratch after giving in.

I also think it could gone even faster if I had started working on naps earlier. It took me awhile to realize that was the root of most of A's sleep problems. I found a wake time chart and that made all the difference in the world. Before the chart, I was letting A put himself to nap and his times between naps were not even close to what they should have been, hence overtired. The chart was awesome.

Good luck!

[3dimesdown]

That's a good point billyhorrible. The reason I haven't really bothered to look into it until now is because I wasn't worried about her never learning. She sleeps just enough that H and I aren't zombies every day, but she never sleeps longer than 4 hours at a time, which is draining in the long run. I figure I'll get some info, give it a try, and see what happens.

TBH, my gut reaction is that it's not going to work for us because I'm not going be able to let her cry that long and hard. But, maybe I'll surprise myself.

[beersandweirs]

May 25, 2016 15:22:24 GMT -5 3dimesdown said:

That's a good point billyhorrible . The reason I haven't really bothered to look into it until now is because I wasn't worried about her never learning. She sleeps just enough that H and I aren't zombies every day, but she never sleeps longer than 4 hours at a time, which is draining in the long run. I figure I'll get some info, give it a try, and see what happens.

TBH, my gut reaction is that it's not going to work for us because I'm not going be able to let her cry that long and hard. But, maybe I'll surprise myself.

I thought it wasn't going to work for us also, but I had resolve because our sleep was just that shitty that I knew it had to change. She was doing so much daytime crying because she was so tired that when you really look at it, she did less crying with sleep training because she wasn't crying during the day.

I was more than pleasantly surprised when it worked out well for us.

[Deleted]

May 25, 2016 13:24:20 GMT -5 beersandweirs said:

We did the Sleep Lady Shuffle from the book Good Night, Sleep Tight. Essentially you stay in the room with LO while they cry and offer mostly verbal reassurance for 12 nights, moving father and farther from the crib each 3 nights.



Stuck in a box *******^We did this method for DS when he was 18 months old (around the time I found out I was pregnant w DD) Before that I rocked him to sleep every night. I'm not sure if this is a version of sleep training but H still sits in a chair in his room while he falls asleep in bed. It takes about 20 min. If H is out of town I sit in the chair or I sit on his bed with my hand on his back while he falls asleep. I have no clue what method this is but it works for us and he rarely has MOTN wake ups.

For DD we will probably do the same thing. For now we are still co-sleeping.

[wegrowsheep]

Tried sleep training with DD. Didn't work. Dealt with wake ups and needing snuggles for a few years. She is now 6 and has been SSTN for a few years.

Round #2 with DS1 was like magic. We were consistent, and he rewarded us with blissful nights of sleep and our bed to ourselves. Then he out grew his crib a year later, stopped SSTN, and ended up in bed with us almost nightly until T was born. Now one of us goes to his room and puts him back in bed.

Tried sleep training from 7-9 months with T. Got tired of the hysterical hour + of screaming every.damn.night and second-guessing my mothering skills. He starts the night in our bed, gets moved to his, then ends up back in ours.

[megeliz1]

I did Ferber with both girls and we have amazing sleepers now.

I didn't do a ton of research before hand, just found this and it worked.

[hannahl201477]

I'm afraid we are to the point of needing to do CIO and get him out of the bed with us. Mal has also started making himself cry so hard he starts gagging.

My question is do you go in there at all MOTN?

[3dimesdown]

May 26, 2016 7:08:09 GMT -5 hannahl201477 said:

I'm afraid we are to the point of needing to do CIO and get him out of the bed with us. Mal has also started making himself cry so hard he starts gagging.

My question is do you go in there at all MOTN?

+1 was wondering this last night when she woke up eleventy times and was all

[carolyngrace]

May 26, 2016 7:08:09 GMT -5 hannahl201477 said:

I'm afraid we are to the point of needing to do CIO and get him out of the bed with us. Mal has also started making himself cry so hard he starts gagging.

My question is do you go in there at all MOTN?

We basically do a form of Ferber and yes, we go in MOTN. We pick him up and walk/sooth for a few minutes and put him back down. Usually then he'll cry a few minutes and fall asleep. At the beginning we'd do that 3-4 times before he'd fall asleep. For us leaving him in the crib seemed to make it worse. He was better able to calm down after being held for a minute. We went from 3 MOTN wake ups a couple months ago to one doing this.