parenting: sleep training
I agree that sleep training is as much for the parents as it is for the child. When our pediatrician told us it was time to sleep train our son, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of sadness. I distinctly remember her saying with a cheerful, encouraging smile - “He is ready.” Up until that point he was sleeping in our room in his own bassinet, and basically every night he would wake up, I would nurse him, and then I’d just let him stay in bed with me. I had gotten use to (and loved) the nighttime baby snuggles, cradling this tiny human in my arms.
I still remember pediatrician saying, “You’re going to give him the gift of sleep.” She mentioned that more studies were coming out about how sleep is linked to improving a person’s overall health, mentally and physically (obesity, depression, dementia). Our takeaway was that really we would be doing our son a favor, giving him the ability to learn how to fall asleep.
Please talk to your medical provider to see if your child is ready, but this is what our pediatrician told us to do. Note there are many methods of sleep training, but this one seemed pretty straightforward and seemed more gentle (yet efficient) method of sleep training.
Where we started: Our son was 4.5 months, 16 lb 14 oz (71st percentile). Up to this point, he was always waking up every 3-4 hour at night, and he was sleeping in a “Love to Dream” swaddle. At the time he was in the “Swaddle Up Transition Bag”, but he had maybe one or two nights with one arm out of the swaddle. For the past two months, we were doing our bedtime routine (bath, diaper, lotions, feeding, book, song, bed). In the daytime he was napping anywhere between 30 min to 2 hours during the day, and I was rocking him to sleep every time (would take about 25 min of rocking).
Sleep training method: Our pediatrician told us to do our normal bedtime routine, put him in the crib awake (on his back), and then set the timer for 1 hour and let him learn to soothe himself to sleep. She said most kids will figure out how to fall asleep within an hour, but if not, go in, tell them that you’re there (pat pat their tummy) - do not pick the kid up, and then leave and give them another hour to figure it out. If they do not fall asleep after that second hour, abort the sleep training (do what you normally do to put them to bed), and try again the following week.
Developmentally the kid needs to be ready to learn how to self soothe, and thus giving them another week to develop would likely get them there.
What happened: My husband was still at work, so I decided to start the sleep training while he was out. For the first time I put our son in his OWN bed in his own room, and both of his arms out of the swaddle (also the first time). Set the timer, put some noise cancelling earphones in and blasted some tunes, and did chores for a 30 minutes straight. No need to check the baby monitor - he was definitely still up wailing. Then, I video chatted my mom for sympathy and then after 52 minutes our son had fallen asleep.
Something to note is that “sleep training” is a bit of a misnomer. You’re reaching the your child the skill of learning how to fall asleep, not that they will stay asleep through the night.
Sure enough our son woke up after a few hours (like normal) and I didn’t know what to do. While nursing him (like I had normally done), I was on my phone looking what I was supposed to do if your kid woke up in the middle of the night while you’re sleep training.
Summary:
Focus on letting them fall asleep themselves the “first time”, and then it’s fine to help them fall back asleep if they wake up in the middle of the night.
Try not to feed them at night to go back to sleep, or slowly wean (if you haven’t already).
Focus on nighttime, and then day time naps will naturally sort themselves out.
There will be more sleep regressions with with large developmental milestones. I only seemed to hear about the 3-4 month sleep regression, but there are more.
Just because you “slept trained” your child doesn’t mean you’re done. After you travel, or a change of environment, maybe they recovered from a cold, teething, you might have to sleep train them again.
The second night it took him 17 minutes to fall asleep, and then very quickly it consistently got down to 10 minutes for him to fall asleep. I would go in and do a dream feed, and then maybe one other time at night to put him back to sleep. About a month later I dropped the dream feed, and then he very quickly started sleeping in his crib from 7pm to 6-7 am. And sure enough, his naps became easier, and I could put him to sleep in the crib for his daytime nap, and he would fall asleep on his own.
I felt like we had hit a new chapter of parenting when I realized that I didn’t have to use my camera flashlight to put on my pajamas. We had reclaimed our room, and it was really nice.
Good luck! YOU can do it!
