I want to start sleep training my baby – we are very sleep deprived and I fear I have created bad habits. I am wondering when is a good time to start?
Thanks!
I want to start sleep training my baby – we are very sleep deprived and I fear I have created bad habits. I am wondering when is a good time to start?
Thanks!
Comments
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It depends what you mean by sleep training…if you’re talking about letting them cry themselves to sleep, I didn’t do that at any age with my kids. But working on getting routines established with sleep, it’s never too early to start working on good sleep habits.
Never. If she cried , that means she needed me so I went in and took care of her needs. Didn’t sleep through the night till literally right before age 3.
They go through so much. Sleep regression’s, growth spurts , leaps , teething. I was always there when she cried. Many many nights I didn’t get any sleep. It’s brutal but it doesn’t last forever.
At 10 weeks, we implemented eat, play, sleep and started trying to establish a nap routine. Once that was consistent, around 12 weeks, we used the extinction method to sleep train nights, which took about two days.
Seems like we had to revisit sleep after big holidays, traveling time zones, big life changes like dropping the pacifier and dropping naps, but mostly we had a really smooth transition from 5 wake ups per night, feeding to sleep, unsafe and uncomfortable bed sharing and all of the chaos of being constantly tired to an independent sleeper. Sleep training is hard, but I’d say it’s easier and faster than potty training and certainly easier than being sleep deprived for years on end.
Never did. Not once in nine kids. I learned their natural schedule and worked with it as much as possible, and that made for good sleep for us all. The only ones who were artificially scheduled were the twins, and that’s because they came home from the NICU that way, so what they needed was support in the way they’d come to expect. As a mom who nursed everyone else to sleep, rocking them to sleep instead was heartbreaking, so I handed that over to my husband.
Your child depending on their mother until they are naturally ready to detach is not a bad habit. I don’t know when American society got started on this idea that babies who need engagement from their caregivers are somehow misbehaving or have bad habits but it’s nonsense.
Go to r/sleeptrain. You will get information, not judgement there.
We started about 4.5ish months, but it was a transition that took us several weeks to fully make. Our daughter was literally only willing to sleep while in contact with someone, so we did it in stages, working on one skill at a time.
First it was about getting her to sleep in her bassinet next to the bed. That involved slowly moving her from on us, to the bed, eventually to the basinet over about 2 weeks.
Then we focused on getting her to fall asleep in the bassinet without being held.
Then we focused on her connecting sleep cycles.
Then we focused on her falling asleep on her own for naps
Then we focused on her connecting sleep cycles for naps
At each stage, we’d let her try for a bit until she either got it, cried for more than 5-10 minutes or so, or was obviously spiraling. If that happened, we’d go in and comfort her until she settled and we’d either give up for the night and do what we knew worked or if we had the energy we’d try again.
Official answer is 4 months but I personally wouldn’t do it before 6 months.
Never.