Repost - thought you guys might have advice as well!

foxlm22

Hello all, My LO is a little over 6 months.  We started sleep training about 15 days ago.  The first couple of days were great.  He, at most, cried 20 minutes and a lot of his crying was more fussing and such.  That was 15 days ago.  He still cries at every nap and at every bedtime and in the last week the crying is often much longer and much harder.  In the past week or so I have been going in there if he is really upset and trying to soothe him in the crib, etc.  Even getting him out completely and trying in another 20 minutes or half hour.  I don't know what to do.  This isn't normal and I'm SO stressed.  I have a two year old too and I started sleep training because it was taking me 20+ minutes to get him down for every nap, etc.  Sometimes more and it would involve bouncing and walking.  He also only cat naps all day.  30 minutes or so.  I'm just so stressed.  I don't know what to do but this amount of crying can't be normal. Any advice would be appreciated. 

katiefyd84

I don't have any expert advice for you, but I just wanted to let you know we were in the same exact situation a month and a half ago. I also have a two year old who I sleep trained using the Ferber method and it worked wonderfully. Not so much with DS2. He would get so upset with the check ins that we used the "exctinction" method which is basically no check ins at all. If you haven't already, I would recommend reading Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. That book gave me the mental ammunition to sleep train DS2. Now he goes down great for naps and bedtime. He still doesn't STTN, but that's because I don't let him CIO in the middle of the night.

I know what you're going through, and it's the toughest thing ever. You're doing a great job, hang in there!!

Snapdragon750

It's hard to give specific advice without knowing more about your situation, so take everything that I and anyone else says with a grain of salt.  I believe that sleep training is harder when you start it with an older baby, and I started at 3 months and had issues like this, so you should probably expect some bumps in the road.  For us, bedtime was easy, but naptime was difficult.  My best guess at this is that I am more wishy-washy with naps; bedtime was bedtime and I wouldn't go back in there if she cried, but if she took a short nap I would go and get her.  I'm sure she picked up on that, and that might be the case with your baby too.

Two things helped me: First, blackout shades.  Easy as pie and I felt like an idiot for not doing it in the first place.  Second, not going in there until it had been an hour or at least close to an hour since I put her down.  That meant that if she woke up after 20 minutes crying, I would let her cry another 40 minutes if that's what it took.  I could do this because I knew, for my baby, that if I got her early from her nap she would cry harder when I picked her up because she was still tired.  If she was going to cry anyway, I figured I might as well give her a chance to go back to sleep.

It took a few weeks before she stopped crying every single time I put her down for a nap, but now she naps a solid hour to hour and a half at every nap and goes down smiling and babbling and being adorable.  Occasionally she will still make sounds or cry half an hour or so into the nap, but she almost always goes back to sleep.