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Attachment Parenting
pgros005
member
Question about "sleep training"
pgros005
member
I'm getting much more unsolicited advice about sleep training lately. My LO is 14 weeks (WAYYY too young to even consider it) and everyone is saying "You're not putting her down drowsy, but awake?---yada, yada, yada..." Anyway, I've come to the realization that I don't believe in sleep training, per se. I kind of look at my baby as a primitive creature who knows way more than I do and if she wakes at night and tries to wake me, there's a reason. I highly doubt she's going to need me to nurse her to sleep when she's 15.
Thankfully, she's relatively easy to put down to bed after a nice, long nursing session (which I absolutely look forward to each and every night) and wakes once maybe twice a night (right now). I definitely know her sleep cues and have found that little-to-no television after 6:30ish helps her go to sleep around 8:30. Would there be any benefit to introducing sleep training (gentle, no CIO) at 6 months if she's not falling asleep on her own? We do swaddle and use white noise, but will wean the swaddle when she begins rolling. She's also in a crib about 10 feet away from me. Any experience with sleep training easy sleepers (well, easy right now, we're just entering 4 months so who knows...)?
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Re: Question about "sleep training"
Breastfeeding Counselor with Breastfeeding USA
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You don't have to sleep train at all. Our daughter was also naturally a good sleeper, or at least her 1-2 time wakings were easy enough for us to manage that we didn't feel we had a problem. The only "training" we ever did was set her up for success: relaxed, well fed, fully diapered, and dressed for the weather.
When she went through the 4 month wakeful phase, we started doing nightly massages to get her extra relaxed and it seemed to help a lot. When she was 9-10 months, we noticed that she STTN when she had a big dinner, so we put more effort into tanking her up at night. When she's teething, we offer her advil. And so on . . . we just observe, try to figure out what's going on, and address the needs as they arise.
My sleep training philosophy is that kids don't need to be trained on how to sleep. It's something we naturally do/learn. I personally believe that all the "sleep training methods" are for the parents' benefit - not the child, because not all parents can/want to wait for the child to get there on their own. (It's different for each child - some will start sleeping on their own, through the night early, and others will take years) So it's really up to what you can deal with. My friend sleep trained because her son's night-wakes were affecting her performance at work.
We did absolutely no sleep training, and I did not have a naturally good sleeper. Or at least not one consistently! (He was fabulous up till 5 months and then it was all over the map) He could NOT be put down drowsy but awake until he was 4 months old - and it wasn't something I forced. All of a sudden, he just was able to. Same with everything else. He started putting himself to sleep on his own (10 months), he started sleeping through the night on his own (14 months). Of course it was later than those that "sleep trained," but I was okay with waiting for him to do it on his schedule.
i don't think this is always true. My kids were pretty poor sleepers and eventually learned to sleep on their own--for my son it was 18 months, for my dd it was two. However, they would only wake up once or twice a night past Age 1. I think some kids can be such poor sleepers that it can negatively impact development and/or cause the child to be downright miserable due to lack of sleep. If I had a kid who was over six months old, was up every 90 minutes during the night and it wasn't just a phase that passed in a month or so, I would have probably reconsidered the whole no sleep training thing. I can live on little sleep, but I wouldn't let my kids suffer so I could say I didn't sleep train.
Totally agree with this. I dont think all day tears from a cranky, miserable kid are more gentle than the sleep training tears.
At about 9mo (which is when my pedi recommends sleep training if you want to do it) I got really done with the whole not sleeping thing. I considered fully sleep training and slowed my reaction time when he woke up. It was about 30 seconds before he went from unhappy to hysterical. Even if I had chosen to do it, I dont think CIO would have worked for him.
I was patient and it was just a phase. He had just learned to crawl and he was in play mode at all times. He only wakes up 1x now and we can both live with that, but this year has been hell with sleep- no lie.
I think you're in a great place for 14 weeks. You seem really intuitive, so just keep your eyes open and keep assessing what she's up to. You'll know what to do when the time is right!
Both of my kids were easy to put down. At 6 months they weren't exactly silent after nursing but before falling asleep, but they weren't crying either. They definitely both made noise and vocalizations other than crying. I think people get into difficulty with sleep because they are uneasy about the baby making any noise at all. Both of my kids "talked" to themselves before falling asleep.
If your kid's sleeping habits are working for you, then no, I don't think there's any reason to change anything.
My son was a fairly good sleeper as a newborn, then slowly regressed. At 6 months I was in tears nightly - it was usually pretty easy to get his to sleep, but he was waking 3 - 10 times a night, and it wold take 10 - 60 minutes to get him back to sleep. Sometimes I would speng half an hour getting him back to sleep and he'd wake 10 minutes later. I tried to wait it out but it was consistently getting worse. He slept 12 hours in a 24 hour period as a newborn, and that dropped to a low of 9 - 10 hours in a 24 hour period at 7 months. At that point, both my super crunchy naturopathic dr and I were really concerned with his inability to sleep and I decided to sleep train.
I had always been against sleep training, esp any form of CIO. But we got to a point where I felt that his lack of overall sleep and total lack of unbroken sleep (he didn't sleep more than 3 hours at a time, and often less than that), was harming him, and we did a modified Ferber.
He's still a crappy sleeper but he does get a long stretch every night, and he naps longer than 30 - 45 min in the day.
Also, I would stop talking with people about sleep habits right now. Unless you are actively interested in hearing people's thoughts, maybe because you are thinking about making a change, that conversation is just never going anywhere and it will probably just frustrate you. If you have the same experience I did, everyone will ask how your baby is sleeping, because that's just a common question. I started giving a quick, 1-line answer that made it clear I had no interest in discussing it.
I don't think that's true. We used sleep training methods because at 6/7 months old, my son wasn't sleeping at.all. No amount of rocking, shushing, feeding, teething tablets, white noise, or anything else we tried helped. He was losing weight because he was so tired during the day that he wasn't eating. He was miserable. I was miserable. It wasn't healthy for anyone.
I decided to sleep train when he woke up from a nap crying and I couldn't get to him for some reason (I think I was helping my nephew in the bathroom or something). Lo and behold, he put himself back to sleep after a few minutes of crying. We gave it a shot a few nights later and it turned out that he just needed to work out things for himself. He still does that to this day, but rather fussing or whining, he sings and talks to his lovies.
OP, it's totally up to you and your comfort level. Certainly, if you want to read some books about sleep and encourage your child to have better sleep habits, it's your perogative. If you are happy with how things are going, though, why bother rocking the boat? Also, a lot can change in a couple months. I went from having a really wonderful sleeper to a kid who never slept, so it really all depends on where you are at 6 months.