Question re: Taking Cara Babies- S.I.T. B.A.C.K. Method

[auraya]

I have a 6.5 week old baby. I’ve been taking the TCB newborn sleep course. She mentions that the sit back method can help with extending the time that baby sleeps at night. But I can’t help but think that she is recommending stretching the time by trying the techniques, which inevitably will stretch the time between feedings. Usually our baby only wakes in the MOTN to feed and then goes back to sleep. What am I missing about this technique, and how have you implemented it?

 

[katrina2017]

@auraya The sit back method didn’t work for me either and I honestly would rather feed my baby and put him back to sleep than trying to go through the sit back steps and ultimately take away my sleep. My son has naturally been extending his sleep with time. He’s 2 months now and sometimes reaches a 5-6 hour stretch on his own. I use the Huckleberry app to track when he’s been feeding at night to see his patterns. Right now he has a dream feed at 11pm and he naturally wakes up again around 4:30am for another feeding. He did randomly wake up at 2:45am one night and I knew he could make it to 4:30am, so in that instance, I did not feed him and just offered him a pacifier until it was 4:30am as to not reverse his sleep stretch habits. I know per Cara, my son should be able to go 8 hrs without feeding since he is 8 weeks old, but I don’t wanna pressure him. I feel like it’ll just work itself out or we’ll work through it when we officially sleep train him in a couple months.

 

[alohaisu]

@auraya I don’t think you’re missing much; the idea is to get the baby used to going longer between night time feeds either by soothing them back to sleep with methods other than feeding or just taking a while to get to the feeding step. FWIW I had friends who swore by TCB and gifted us this class but it never worked for us. We definitely did the pausing to make sure she was really awake/wasn’t going to settle herself back down, and baby’s longest average stretch of sleep gradually extended on its own until she was sleeping through the night most nights at two months old. But when we tried the rest of the SITBACK steps she’d never soothe back down, just escalate to screaming fast and be harder to calm down to eat/get back to sleep. I really think it’s just down to the baby’s personality whether certain techniques work, so try not to stress about doing it “right”.