I’m exhausted and it’s my 6 month olds fault

[trevayne]

@chesed28 You can’t sleep train a bad schedule. If you are not consistently following the same schedule everyday, you won’t be able to sleep train productively. It’s like if you want to go to bed at 10pm everyday and somebody keeps trying to make you go to bed at 7pm or 1am everyday.

I’d recommend starting with a schedule following age appropriate wake windows and waking at roughly the same time every day.

 

[mcmurdo]

@chesed28 “ I don’t let him hysterically cry, I intervene if that happens, is that why” - maybe. My son would cry pretty hysterically for about 1-2 mins max and then settle.

Also, could be schedule related or teething. It’s very hard at this age.

 

[chesed28]

@mcmurdo He hysterically cries for longer and then will get to the point where he coughs and chokes on spit cause he was crying so hard

 

[jennysunner]

@chesed28 We used The Sleep Easy Solution, which has a method for weaning night feedings in which you feed them a bit before they would otherwise wake up and try to have them not really fully wake up all night, and then slowly wean down the amount at each feeding. Not sure how that compares with the method you’re using or if they could work well together, but this worked ok for us.

We did let our baby hysterically cry when we were sleep training, though, which was super super hard but also I think probably did make the training work better.

We didn’t let him cry much at all after he was fully trained though, and at 2, it doesn’t seem to have messed his training up - usually he sleeps 10-11 hours straight unless he has bad teething pain or we are traveling.

It does seem to me like planning to not feed him but then changing the plan if he cries more and feeding him anyway does incentivize him to cry until you feed him. Maybe there is a way to make a plan to slowly wean him off of night feedings that you can stick to?

 

[dogwood74]

@chesed28 You can try the 5/3/3 approach as far as feeding goes and then slowly drop it. Maybe your baby would respond better to total extinction - mine is 6mo and can definitely see me in the dark if I go check on him and he starts raising his hands towards me so I think it’s much less confusing for him if I don’t go in (now I just sneak in to see if he is on his tummy and can’t turn around or something similar but make sure he doesn’t see me) than going in and not picking him up I think this just frustrates him even more. Is he sleeping in his own room?

 

[chesed28]

@dogwood74 He sleeps in our room, we have thought about switching him to his own room but would really like to wait until he’s 1.