Babies: 0 - 3 Months
lexgall
member
Options
Crib training
lexgall
member
when is the best time to start putting my LO in her crib? She is almost three months. Is she to young to let her cry herself to sleep?
Re: Crib training
Yes. You shouldn't try CIO until at LEAST 4 months, and even then (a) most people prefer to wait until 5-6 months, when LO won't need to eat during the night anymore, and (b) at no point is it ok to just leave your kid in the crib to cry themselves to exhaustion. The Ferber method, which is commonly referred to as "cry it out," is a progressive-waiting method where you go in and check on the child at increasing intervals, so that they don't feel like you have abandoned them.
I transfered to the crib around 3 months, when LO was getting too big for her bassinet. Some suggestions are:
- If your LO isn't dependent on swaddling (mine never was - her arms were always out), you may want to transition to PJs first. We got LO into footed PJs for two weeks in the bassinet, and then moved her to the crib.
- Assuming the crib is in another room, try to put LO in there for a few minutes at a time a few times a day so that she becomes familiar with it. We have a mobile on our crib that LO really loves, so we would stick her in there 2-3 times a day for 5-10 minutes at a time and turn the mobile on. She would stare at it and laugh, and she started to associate the crib with a comfortable, familiar place. If we had just transferred her in there asleep one night without doing that, she would have woken up screaming, not knowing where she was.
- if you use a bassinet now that is not a flat mattress, you might want to consider rolling up blankets and putting them under the crib sheet to mimic the shape of the bassinet to get LO used to it (DO NOT do this once she can roll to her belly on her own, it's a SIDS risk). We had blankets to make the shape of her bassinet and then slowly moved them to the perimeter of the crib, and then started removing them one by one until she was completely flat.
LO has always been a good night sleeper, so we really didn't suffer from any crib transition issues...she pretty much slept exactly the same in the crib as she had been sleeping in her bassinet, right away.
People are so misinformed about CIO and what the options are when it comes to sleep training. You should never just leave a child, of any age, to cry themselves to sleep. That's awful.
PP above has good advice. It's also not a bad idea to pick up a sleep training book and start reading now. There are lots of options out there.