What happens to poor sleepers who aren’t sleep trained?

[fidole]

@liannakeller If your baby is putting themselves to sleep at 6 months without sleep training, your child is definitely not a poor sleeper (as OP is asking about). When you only have one child and they sleep well like that it is easy to assume that all babies are capable of sleeping like that, but you have just gotten very lucky! My first baby was like that; my second two were terrible sleepers after they hit the 4 month sleep regression and were waking multiple times a night until I sleep trained them at 8 and 9 months.

 

[momof3teens]

@fidole Certainly not a poor sleeper!! My 7 month old wakes up every hour of the night!

 

[col1]

@ebveloz I’ll let you know when I know. Our oldest is 5, never sleep trained and mostly coslept. Always been very poor sleeper unless cosleeping then like a log. She still cannot go to sleep without us there for about 30 minutes and gets anxiety about being left. She will wake up and come into our room after 1-2 hours and meltdown if we try to put her back.

I think this is probably unrelated to sleep training or not, she’s probably just a poor sleeper with anxiety.

Younger siblings have similar issues though.

 

[hoohkostwon]

@col1 Last time I've looked into this for my sister I've read that cosleeping with school age children (6+) can actually worsen anxiety.

It's certainly going to be hard to break that habit but short term pain of those meltdowns will eventually net you less and less meltdowns and more sleep. (Assuming she's neurotypical)

 

[hosslyn13]

@ebveloz Anecdotal (d'oh!): Sleep got much better once we stopped breastfeeding at 2.1. I was very skeptical but it did help a lot.
She's 2.6 now and she still wakes up sometimes to come snuggle/use the toilet, but she sleeps again immediately. It doesn't impact my life quality. I leave the room once she sleeps, or stay if I want to. She also accepts dad as comfort, whereas when BFing it was all about me.

So I have no regrets not sleep training so far.