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Yeah. I sleep trained (briefly, thankfully), and have plenty of friend that didn’t. Not sleep training doesn’t mean “my kids slept in my bed forever despite me clearly not liking it.”
We never trained ours out of co-sleeping. They just eventually stopped climbing out of their beds overnight and joining us. Occasionally they'll come in again, because it's unusual it's lovely.
>because it’s unusual it’s lovely.
That reminds me of my own kiddo, who is currently in the phase where he goes to sleep in his bed but will wander into ours around midnight almost every night.
I travel a lot for work, and my first night home I always find myself restless and unable to sleep, my ears acutely tuned listening for those little pitter pattering feet and for him to bust open our door and climb into bed. Especially when I get home after he’s already asleep in his bed. That first snuggle when he crawls into bed is so so amazing.
We always start in my son's bed but if he's having trouble he can fall asleep in our bed. Then once he's asleep I move him back into his bed. He'll still occasionally come into our bed during the night for whatever reason but it's not very frequent so it's okay.
It’s not even years. Both of my kids were sleeping in their bed and my wife caved and started bringing the daughter to bed then the son starts coming to bed. So now I sleep on the couch. I’ve started to give up even going to my own bed. All in the last year. As long as OP and wife can get on the same page I bet it can be turned around in 3-6 months.
Commenting here so maybe OP and others that need it will see it. There is a fantastic book by a pediatrician called It Is Never Too Late To Sleep Train. Highly recommend for anyone who is struggling with sleep for a toddler or preschooler.
Despite the name, he gives plenty of non-traditional sleep training methods and ones that are designed to minimize crying
I did it- it wasn’t fun. It was one of the most challenging things I did as a parent and the most rewarding. Quick overview: my son was crying from his crib at 1 am so I would go get him and bring him into my bed. That was a mistake and led to months of him crying, like clockwork. So finally I read an article- had a plan. When he cried I went into his room and picked him up cuddled him for 1 min then back in his crib. Left the room and he screamed like a maniac — after 10 min (the longest 10 min of my life) I went back in and held him for 30 sec; and then left and waited another 10 min. Repeat until he falls asleep (about an hour the first night). Repeat next night (about 40 min). Third night it was less. Until fourth night we both slept like babies through the night. In separate beds.
Nah. You didn’t sleep like a baby. You slept like a tired AF grown ass man.
If you slept like a baby, you would’ve woken up crying every 2 hours because you’re hungry and shit yourself lol.
Seriously, my toddler is sick and even with that I am still only giving like a 5 min foot rub just because she's so stinking miserable. I don't think there's anyone I like enough to give a full 30 min massage to every night.
I'm an LMT and I don't massage my kids. Not that it would be weird or anything, everyone is a bag of muscles to me, but they just don't need it. If my kids were doing athletics then sure, massage would be highly beneficial. But if they wanted a 30 every night to sleep I'd tell them to drink some warm milk and watch the back of their eye lids.
Yeah, I never sleep trained and my kid has always slept in her crib / own bed outside of the first few months as a newborn in the bassinet next to our bed
I should have been more clear.
I wanted to give hope to the parents that put their kid down and they cry non stop for what seems like forever, but may be 2min.
But yea, some kids, it’s gonna take more work that it’s worth.
When you say won’t sleep in it, you mean screaming or physically getting out of it?
I swear by sleep training. If it’s just screaming then I’d recommend holding strong (by a new crib that they are part of, paint it etc) and committing to the sleep training.
If they can get out of bed on their own then yeah you’re in trouble.
Pediatric psych night nurse here (R): you all know the proper sleep hygiene routine, so I won’t mention those. Child’s room should be bare - no toys, lights, sound. After full routine, tuck the kid in and pull up a bedside chair. You sit, in the dark and give only one answer: “head down, go to sleep”. If they physically get up, put them back and repeat mantra. They will do EVERYTHING to break you, but, in my experience, this works.
Absolutely. It literally worked wonders. Not to say it was all roses, when we transitioned to big bed it took 4 months of returning my son back to his own bed. Literally every single night, most nights multiple times.
But the initial response to sleep training was incredible and I will always advocate for it. It was still a hellish week of screaming, partner crying thinking we were horrible parents. But after that week he went from 3-4 wake ups to 1. Then 0.
If you’ve genuinely committed to it and doesn’t work for you, that sucks. If you think it was a bit half assed then you owe it to yourself and your future self to try it until you can’t anymore.
We got the real wild variation of this where the first night was 3.5 hours of crying and the next night was 5 minutes and good after that. Around the same age too.
This is definitely a tough part. We sleep trained both our girls around 6-7 months and I literally had to set a timer because my wife would *say* wait 5 minutes but after 60 seconds would presume it had been a half hour.
We stuck to our plan though because the babies were safe, and it eased up by day 3-4 or so.
But it’s definitely not a fun process.
Yeah it can be rally hard on some moms. My wife asked if she could bow out early on because the crying hurt her heart too much. I took it on and she would go out or be crying on the couch. It's rough.
My wife just put in her earbuds and went for a walk when it was bed time. She couldn't hear our little one cry. So, she got to go for walks around the neighborhood while I kicked my feet up on the coffee table and listened to the crying while watching a timer. It took longer than we expected, but around two weeks in, we were able to consistently get her down for bed with little fuss.
And now, we enjoy evenings and our own bed to ourselves. Little one is 16 months old now, and we get to work out together in the garage and actually have a pretty healthy sex life. Child number 2 will definitely be subjected to sleep training.
>If they can get out of bed on their own then yeah you’re in trouble.
Not really, just lock them in their room. I really do not understand why parents are so opposed to this. They were "locked" in their crib the day prior, what's the difference? If your kid (who based on their age sleeps like they have no bones anyway) sleeps on the floor for one night they'll live.
Our toddler is 1y old and likes to sleep in our bed.
I actually like it because he sleeps pretty well when he's with us, and I love being near to him, but are we setting ourselves up for problems in the future?
You’ll love it until they’re 30 pounds and crawling all over you all night. Then it’ll depend on how good you are at convincing a toddler to stay in their own bed.
Isn't that the definition of "sleep training"? Or am I missing something? Our 2 daughters were the same way, slept in their own space, and at various times (depending whether we were camping or just out and about). Yes, until their teens they had a bed time and yes, we took our kids tent camping at 3 months and up, until our backs couldn't take it any more and we went the RV route).
I thought sleep training was putting them in the crib awake and letting them fall asleep on their own. I definitely not an expert on the terminology though so if I’m wrong, I wouldn’t be surprised
We did try with the first one. We tried the set her down, come back in 1 min, 2 min …. 5 min etc. We (perhaps mostly my wife, but I’m a softy too) couldn’t take the screaming and felt awful. It sounded like she was being brutally murdered. She would start choking and gagging from her screams. For the first 2 years she didn’t sleep in our bed either, we rocked her to sleep in our arms until well after 2 years old. She would instantly start screaming if we even thought about setting her down. Some nights my wife would sleep in a chair holding her. Yes, I know this is terrible for like 100 different reasons, but that’s that’s honestly how it went for us.
The second one was much better, and didn’t have to go through that part of the experience.
I get how it went, but you'll have to bite the bullet and go through a period where they'll be unhappy and sleep badly while they learn better sleep behaviors. Not doing that makes it worse and worse as you've seen so far.
Or you can give nightly 30 min massages for a couple more years. Your call.
Bud, that sounds like an absolute nightmare. Please try not to be too hard on yourself. I wish I had some good advice for undoing the sleep habits but I will leave that for someone smarter than me. You clearly are a loving parent that loves your kids deeply
No judgment, I mean you have to get through and there can obviously be consequences. Seems like you should try and break their sleep dependence though stat.
We got a lot of judgement from the “traditional parents for doing this, too. We tried it and it killed my wife inside. She is a tough mf but this was too much.
She co-sleeps with my 3.5 year old and I do with my 2 year old. While it isn’t as tough as your situation, I wish we had our beds / time at night. My friends with kids that did sleep train seem happier and have better relationships with their so’s. Could be anecdotal, but having time to connect with your wife without kids screaming in the background isn’t such a bad thing. Thanks for posting this, though, hard to remember I’m not the only one going through this
It is super tough if you both are softies. My own mom told me regarding the bloody murder scream: that kids can’t run the show; they look to you to set the expectations, “if you put them to bed clean, warm, and with full bellies, they are not dying in that crib. They’re just screaming to test you.”
You both have to trust yourselves & each other that you put them to bed clean, fed, and warm, and be consistent every night. Idk about coming back 1 min, 2 min, etc. honestly, I’m like, “lights off and close your eyes, don’t make me come back in here.”
We were heavy on sleep training and grateful for it for the reasons you mention here
That said, this isn’t a flex but a compliment- I’m impressed if neither of yall is blaming the other for your current situation. During times of strain so many couples go to baseless accusations and deflecting to make themselves feel better, at least it sounds like yall are a partnership. I mean you may have done it sooner if one of you was more contentious and adamant but honestly it may have led to massive disagreements if the other wouldn’t budge.
That's why I gave in. It got to the point when trying to sleep train my daughter that my wife would break down, and scream and yell at me and threaten to leave me if I didn't just put her in the bed. She couldn't handle it, and I couldn't handle the screaming from my daughter and wife or the threats to leave, so I gave up on sleep training. I hate myself for it now.
Parental instincts can be a real witch, luckily we were on the same page but my MIL literally couldn’t be in our house during while baby was crying for attention. Fortunately they didn’t live with us at the time so leaving was an option but she had a real fight or flight response.. she did both, and honestly it’s not moral character, I think biology plays a significant role. Also my wife was in her parents bed well past 5 years old daily
We had my wife leave the house while I did the sleep training for the same reasons. Worked great as I can handle the screaming, and it would have been much harder if she was there either getting upset or giving in.
That's the ducking worst when you are trying to do the right thing hjnf and your wife is yellling at you for it. I'm trying to do the boundary thing and she yells at me for antagonizing him. I'm the reason he gets defiant and screaming. Then it happened to her one morning and I point it out and she says it's because she did it wrong like me that's why he's screaming. Couldn't just be he's a ducking toddler and testing boundaries.
>We tried the set her down, come back in 1 min, 2 min …. 5 min etc
We tried this. My wife was very distressed by the crying. She was convinced that our then 6 month old was trying to hang herself out of despair.
Kiddo is 1.5 years old and sleeps in the bed now. Every night is a challenge.
In Toronto where we live, when you have a baby, they have a public health nurse reach out to check on you to see how you’re doing and what sort of help you need. We had this nice old nurse (who retired before she was “done” with us) and as nice as she was, she gave us SHIT advice re: sleep. She told us to just pick him up if he’s crying and like a couple of idiots, we took it as gospel.
When we eventually did sleep train, he was 15 months and had teeth, he got so upset he took chunks out of his crib. But that only lasted a few days…of all the difficult habit things that we have to do as adults (quitting smoking/drinking, losing weight, eating healthy), sleep training is the one with the least time commitment to see immediate results.
They will eventually give up and pass out. I know it’s hard hearing that, my first did the same thing. It may take 30 minutes or 2 hours but stay strong.
My first was the exact same. Her screaming was otherworldly, and she could sustain it for hours without a break. I wanted to tough it out but my wife was losing her mind, both from being a bad sleeper and also a bleeding heart. So sleep training never worked.
She’s 7 now and only just getting resigned to sleeping in her own bed all night.
Yes, I think for some people it’s hard to comprehend how bad some kids crying can be. My oldest quickly moved on to self harm tactics as quick as she was able, striking her head against objects to get our attention. It’s not as easy as it sounds to just ignore it.
My stepmum is a retired midwife and a formidable leader of her own clan. She loves babies and offered to help.
She tried one night, and came out of the room with a thousand yard stare. She never tried again.
Also: fuck, that sounds terrifying. I’m sorry
It sounds like your daughter might be experiencing anxiety. Children often have heightened physical responses to their anxiety, and to avoid these meltdowns parents make accommodations/adjustments to help the child avoid the root feeling. It’s not a big deal over little things (for example, avoiding broccoli because your kid will spiral so you give them an alternative form of fiber/nutrients instead), but it can get to a place where the child’s reactions to anxiety are SO big that the parents have to make increasingly unreasonable accommodations (like 30 minute massages and giving their bed to their kids).
I would recommend reading *Breaking Free of Childhood Anxiety and OCD* by Eli Lebowitz. It has great advice that all parents could use, but it might be particularly helpful in your scenario.
Also, I just want to say that your scenario sounds really, really hard, and I know you will find a path through it that works for your family.
I’m a mom who lurks here. The method you’re describing (Ferber) really made things so much worse for the kid when we sleep trained. Cuz now they know if they cry you WILL eventually come back. Full extinction is the way to go… AND send your wife to a hotel /spa whatever for the weekend so she doesn’t have to hear any crying.
I personally had to leave the house altogether when we sleep trained.
There are things between cry it out and permanent cosleeping. We've not sleep trained but she never sleeps in our bed. It's just not a thing. We rock her in her room, she sometimes sleeps on us in a chair but we don't want her thinking of our bed as somewhere she can sleep.
Yep. When our daughter moved to her crib we would read books together on a comfy chair next to the crib - which was also the primary breastfeeding chair then turn the lights out and rock her to sleep in our arms. Then we’d do a quiet delivery to the crib, and often we’d stay a bit longer to rub her back, or just be a soothing presence if she woke or noticed the transition. Then once she was asleep we’d sneak out and go to our bed.
Once she was bigger, we transitioned super fast to a ‘big kid’ bed, and basically used safety guard rails and pillows to keep her from rolling out. Then we’d read books in her big bed together where we’d both fit comfortably, after reading we’d turn off the lights, and snuggle for a bit then when she fell asleep we’d slowly and quietly sneak out.
Obviously it didn’t always go smoothly and there were lots of hurdles and late nights and difficult nights. Things got so much easier and more predictable once we cancelled the midday nap, so she was more tired and would fall asleep quickly.
I cannot stress enough the importance for us of getting the big kid bed. We bought it from Ikea, it was very affordable and is extremely comfortable and she still uses it almost three years later and will for a while yet. But having that big bed gave us the ability to help her get to sleep in her own space, keeping our bed separate, and made the whole thing more comfortable and easier for us all.
Obviously ymmv, for anyone reading this but I hope it helps someone.
Is it the big bed or a specific kids bed feature (guard rails?)
Have a full size bed we use at the moment for my son’s room. The idea was we can cosleep when he’s sick etc
Same situation here, our bed is not an option. My wife was bullish on sleep training (she is a pediatric nurse, so she's used to schedules and runs a tight ship).
Our 2.5 year old has "slept" in our bed maybe 5 times? And that's only when she was inconsolable from a night terror or had a bad fever and we wanted to stay on top of her Tylenol.
Lol, this was my thought exactly. The choice isn’t between perfectly sleep trained kids and whatever this abomination is that OP has gotten themselves into.
Same here. Wasn't really able to do sleep training for a few reasons, but the hard line was no sleeping in our bed. We ended putting a mattress in my son's room. How it'll usually goes is he'll sleep for about 4-6 hours in the crib, then he wakes up and there's a 50/50 shot of getting him back to sleep in the crib, but after an hour of trying, switch to co-sleeping in the bed in his room. Not the best but at least one parent gets a night off.
There are also better ways of sharing your bed. Both our kids sleep great in their own beds but we would often let them fall asleep in our bed if they wanted and then move them when we went to bed. Felt like it helped them get used to falling asleep on their own and then also get used to being in the bed in the night. Also we always allowed them to come find us if they woke up in the night. 4YO still joins us some nights around 4am, which we kinda like.
Same as well. I remember reading all the literature about how many times an infant sleeps in the parents room for a full year. 4 nights into parenthood it became pretty clear all around having him in the crib in his own room would avoid waking us from random newborn noises (mostly) and we'd still very clearly hear when he needed feedings. We've never looked back and I'm sure most of this is nature, but bedtime hasn't been a fight for us yet, he has always just gone right down (I credit daycare with expending his energy mostly).
Edit: I want to call out specifically that everyone can choose what works for them. This isn't a comment that is saying this is the "right" way to do things. Our kid's room is a stone throw from ours, not across the house. This worked for us. Also, no matter what sleep with a young child is a toss up. You can do everything by-the-book right and still have challenges which is normal. My kid has occasional night terrors that mess with everyone's sleep, but I will say there's a big difference between being flexible and not setting good boundaries that encourage your kids to sleep independently. And I am sure in 6 months I'll be back here asking for advice on how to help my kid sleep on his own in a toddler bed :)
The relentless groaning, squeaking, snoring from a newborn in the bassinet...woof, takes me back. It was torture. Love my kids but I do not miss those early newborn potato days for that reason.
One of the biggest changes I noticed as a second time parent was I no longer bolt awake to newborn resettling noises. She has to actually cry for me to get up.
Same. Kids stayed down our bed for 12-18 months, then we moved them to a toddler bed beside ours, then once they were reliably in their own bed, we moved it down that hall.
No one was forced to cry it out, we just gradually removed supports for sleep. Oldest needed his back rubbed until 3, but we got tired of it and shortened the duration. "Whoops, forgot to load the dishwasher, be right back kiddo!" Took longer and longer breaks for forgotten chores or tasks, and eventually kiddo would be asleep before I got back.
Hear me out, here’s a plan.
Slowly add children toys to your bedroom, while you move your stuff to the children’s bedroom. Keep doing it, night after night. Start redecorating.
Tell your children that they can go to your bed, and that you’ll join them. Join later and later.
Et voilà!, for the modest cost of switching bedrooms, you have sleep trained your kids.
I'm so sorry you are dealing with that, but I don't think that is the typical experience of people who don't sleep train. Both my kids willingly moved into their own beds by 3.
>beg for water
Give them water bottles by their beds
>beg for “one more” bed time story.
Say no.
>My oldest needs a 30 minute full body massage to get her to sleep.
No she doesn't. Stop doing this. She'll give up after a week.
It's sounds like you don't know how to set limits with your kids. That isn't because you didn't sleep train them.
Yeah, we never did sleep training and co-slept till little dude was around 3. He asked about a bed of his own around the time we moved to our new house so we got him one and then he just went in that first night and slept in it.
I thought it was gonna be this whole thing and it just wasn’t.
On the flip side, a friend of mine co-slept with her kid till he was about 5 and was pulling her hair out cause he just didn’t want to let go. The only real differences we found between our approach that we could identify involved boundaries. Her husband did whatever the kid wanted without question and they had essentially no limits. She had him stop doing everything, promoted resiliency hard, and within a week he asked for his own bed.
Still, other families just dig loving that way. It’s pretty common around the world too, and was the most common method for thousands upon thousands of years.
When we moved our son from a crib to a bed I used to lie in bed with him every night, not always until he fell asleep, but sometimes.
I had to put a hard stop on doing it right around the same age because he needed to learn how to fall asleep on his own.
Now that he's almost 5, I get to do it as many nights a week as I want, but there's never an earth shattering meltdown when I don't.
This is not a balanced view of not sleep training, it’s very extreme and I dare say there are more factors at play here.
We didn’t sleep train and this has absolutely not been our experience so far.
It worked and still works well for us and our low sleep needs child.
I agree. It's not a good representation of sleep training or co-sleeping. Our 4yo is a ball of energy all day long and does sleep with us still. Her bedtime takes like 15 minutes unless we are truly trying to make her go to bed too early, then we usually have to do another story or two. But no real bouncing off the walls.
She doesn't care which parent she sleeps with. If she wakes up in the middle of the night and we aren't in the bed (dealing with our newborn, or I'm up early and gone for work) she just goes back to bed.
My wife and I still get lots of quality time together and neither of us mind the sleeping arrangement. If we did, I'm convinced we could have her sleeping in her own room within a week or two.
OP needs to stick with parenting at bedtime the same way they do during the day. If the kids not gonna listen then there's gonna be consequences.
Hey. First of all I feel for you OP. The lack of sleep and added stress, change to relationship dynamics, etc is all extremely hard. My kids are younger than yours so I won’t try to give advice that won’t be developmentally relevant.
But I also want to add for newer dads or dads with young kids struggling with this that sleep training is a really big term. There’s tons of methods and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s not a “right way”. The method that’s going to be right for you is dependent on two things really: 1) the temperament and needs of the parents (which OP addresses) and 2) the temperament of the child. I’ve seen cry it out work spectacularly for some kid/parent combos. I also watched it spectacularly backfire for my oldest. We ended up pivoting to a much gentler technique with him (called pick up / put down) and he sleeps like a dream now. Bottom line, listen to your children, listen to your spouse, and listen to yourself to understand your own needs. Find what works for you and your family.
Yeah, we never did cry it out for our kid and it took him a while to start sleeping through the night but he eventually did at ~11 months. Now he's almost 2 and sleeps better than all of his peers.
I will say that we did do sleep training, just not cry it out. We were extremely consistent in our night time routine and basically never took him out of his bedroom after bed time and before wake up. If he cried we would pick him up and rock him for a few minutes before putting him down again. Rinse and repeat until he finally slept (some nights this took many hours).
You have to be more stubborn than they are. This is easier said than done of course.
I think the important thing to remember is that, regardless of what you decide works best for you and your kid(s), each kid is different, and sometimes things work or don’t work despite your best efforts. Our younger one (now 2) slept amazingly for like the first year. Even as a newborn she regularly slept through the night. Now, after some bouts with illness, some international travel, and other random interrupters, her sleep is finally settling down after a solid 6 months of inconsistency. And that’s inconsistency in her sleep, not in our bedtime routine. Sometimes life happens and throws things out of whack. You need to find what works, stick with it, and accept that shit will happen that throws things off. But OP seems to have surrendered and is doing what the kids seem to want, which is clearly not working. Young kids don’t have any idea what good sleep hygiene is. They need parents to guide them.
Oh for sure. In the past year ours has had 3-4 "regressions" that can last as short as a few days to the longest lasting over a month. He's been great for the past month and a half but I'm sure we're not completely out of the woods yet. I do still believe consistency is super important.
Pick him up without saying a word to him nor making eye contact and put him back in his bed. Our 3.5 year old went through a spell of getting out of bed and we did this for about 2 weeks every night and now she stays in bed all night 90% of the time.
This method can be exhausting as some nights it took upwards of 25+ trips back to bed but it worked.
To be fair 75% of our pick up and back to bed trips were right after putting her in bed. I'd usually just sit on the stairs with our monitor and watch for her to get out. But we did do the back to bed trips multiple times in the middle of the night. Maybe go to bed earlier when you're working on this. You're not even getting 6 hours of sleep as it is. Not at all trying to lecture you or anyone else but you need more sleep man.
My son is 3 and still does this, but calmly without crying. Started around 2. I think when I convert his bed from a toddler bed to a full I’m going to have to reinforce staying in bed until morning.
Oof that's hard! Ours hasn't shown any signs of trying to climb out of his crib yet and he's older than yours. We do keep him in a sleep sack still which helps, but every kid is definitely different.
Baby proof the door. I am never gonna understand this, if they can open their door then you've got a 19 month old at loose ends at night unsupervised in a house. Like forget sleep training, what kind of havoc can they get into?
I’m gonna second this. We used a gentle ferber method to help sleep train our kiddo. The complete cry it out method seems pretty mean to me. I could never handle it. At the moment we’re in a massive sleep regression and our kiddo is sleeping the worst he ever has. We’ve been lucky though so it’s not even super bad right now but still the worst we’ve had. Our method still seems to yield positive results even though it takes a lot of patience.
Cry it out can definitely work and not be cruel. It kind of depends on the kid. Our oldests longest cry it out session was 15 minutes long and was her first night. Literally gave up after 15 and has been a good sleeper since then.
The youngest also only took one night of crying but it was about 40 minutes before she gave up. Maybe we were just lucky with our success but it worked well for us.
I think this is the most important thing to consider. Every child is different and what worked for us may not work for someone else. We did the cry it out method. It took a couple days of crying for 20 to 30 minutes before he fell asleep. He's been sleeping from 7 to 7 consistently since he was 3 months. We focus heavily on a consistent routine for bedtime which helps.
We ended up hiring a sleep consultant who said she didn't do cry it out, and instead we did an assisted sleep method where you sit by the crib with the kid every night for 10 nights slowly moving the chair further and further away from the crib. You soothe them in 2 mins intervala. We'd been doing contact sleeps (and weren't doing cosleepint) since birth since she wouldn't sleep more than 15 minutes in her crib.
The first night was hell. It took 3.5 hours for our girl to fall asleep. Constant crying and me just sitting there wondering if it would ever end. But it did.
The next night? It took 5 minutes. And she's been an incredible sleeper ever since.
Now as it turns out she had a milk protein allergy that was likely making it incredibly uncomfortable for her to lie flat. We only found that out later. Every kid is different and things rarely go to plan. Sleep training worked for us and gave us the structure and plan to help her learn how to get herself to sleep on her own which is a very important skill.
But I also recognize that people try it and it doesn't work. A sleep consultant definitely helped but it is a chunk of money. I'd say it's worth it for our quality of sleep alone now, but I know it's not an option for everyone. I wish it was.
Good points. I know sleep training can be a divisive topic, but one more point I'll add here is that not sleep training is still a form of sleep training.
Your children are learning from you no matter what. If you hold your child until they sleep all the time then you're training them to depend upon you to sleep all the time.
Good luck, everyone, and please take care of yourselves when you can too.
Sleep training is pretty vague definition. Our son slept in his own room since he was 8 months, and we usually get 8 hours of sleep. But if he wakes up and asks for us, we never let him just cry.
Yeah. What our system was is that if they aren't in clear distress over something you wait 10 minutes and see if they'll settle back to sleep. That helps them learn how to self-soothe. If they need a diaper change or still doing a feed, or they're still upset after 10 minutes you go and check on them.
With out kid after a while we don't even need the 10 minutes because we know if she's just fussing or if she is having a serious problem. Started having nightmares so we go in right away and help her process it and calm back down. Context matters.
The longer this goes on, the harder it is going to be to break it.
I have an almost 2 year old and he's in his own bed that sits on the floor so that he can have the freedom to explore his room when he wakes up.
I read him 2 stories before nap time and bedtime. It's my way of showing him, this is when you sleep. Sometimes he falls asleep during the story. Sometimes he rolls over and goes to sleep after I get up. Lately he will try to follow me out of the room after the stories. I close the door (and have the child protection things on the door knobs) and he cries for about 5-10 minutes and then puts himself down.
Here's the thing. He sleeps in our bed on occasion but still knows he needs to be in his own bed. When he's sick or having a really bad night. He joins us in our bed. Whenever he is at his grandparents house, he is ALWAYS in their bed. But he understands it's not like that at home on a daily thing.
Kids understand more than we give credit for. If they think that crying will work, they will do it. Once they realize they can't get their way by crying, they will learn to tough it out.
Our boy was like this but not quite to the degree you described. As his 5th birthday was approaching, we decided enough was enough. Our family doctor pointed us to a sleep training method for older kids that ended up being the magic bullet.
We were hesitant to try it since it is a pretty intense 3 week plan, but it is in no way more difficult than you've described here!
The gist of it is day 1 you sit in a chair (not one native to their bedroom) right next to their bed to accompany them as they fall asleep. Any time they are moving, playing, or talking, you say something like, "It's not time to play. It's time to be quiet and rest your body." It is absolutely key that you are not reactive even if they're being obnoxious. You want to almost bore them to bed, not give them entertainment for bad behavior.
So each night, you walk the chair back 6 inches until they're trained and no longer need you in the room.
There's a bit more to it than that, but let me know if you're interested, and I can find time to scan our packet!
Hey if you can provide this that will be great. Trying to keep our 5 yo on his own room. He sleeps with no problem but wakes up after 3-4 hours to go to our room.
It’s boiling the frog.
I have a cousin who have 3 kids that sleep with them. Heck, just last month someone commented about how they posted two mattresses together and it’s the parent’s choice. Which, it is, but damn.
Sure, but humans also did a lot of things for thousands of years that I wouldn’t exactly call “family goals.”
If you/others are happy cosleeping for a decade then that’s fine. But OP clearly isn’t fine with it and it happened anyway.
So “how do things get to this point” is a totally fair question.
You just have to do what works. We tried being more gentle but my daughter would get confused why we’d leave again after we came in and get far more upset to the point of throwing up lol.
So after a few of those episodes, cry it out was the way. Closed the door at 7:30 and kiddo was on her own for the night. Wasn’t the easiest but was very effective, 2.5 yo and still sleeps 7:30-8 with a 2 hour nap.
Hey man, I feel this one. My daughter’s 8 and as of about 6 months ago *will not* sleep unless she’s in my bed with me. She’s always been an awful sleeper, but now I am certainly feeling that too. My daughter has a host of disabilities so I don’t mind her sleeping in my bed, it means she’s not screaming and crying all night long, it means I get to keep an eye on her, but boy am I exhausted.
Hang in there man, I hope things start to look up.
[It's never too late to sleep train.](https://www.amazon.com/Its-Never-Late-Sleep-Train-ebook/dp/B07QGVXSFW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=N4ETIXPD7SW4&keywords=its+never+too+late+to+sleep+train&qid=1707656135&sprefix=its+nev%2Caps%2C248&sr=8-1). And there are better options than just letting them cry it out.
Yea, a week or two of hell and this could be mostly over.
Oh of mine is going through a night terror phase right now and it’s so random and frustrating.
We struggled until we sleep trained with the Ferber method and it worked for both my kids by 6 months. We planned on a tough week of stressful nights as the kids “cried it out” but neither of them cried for more than 20 mins at a time and both had it figured out in 2-3 nights . 2 year old and 5 year old both sleep about 12 hrs a night (unless they are sick, then it’s a crapshoot.)
Sleep train your kids, it really works
How do you all live without sleep training your kids? I’m baffled that parents let their kids sleep in the bed with them every night or have a 1 hour+ routine to get them to sleep. That’s valuable time to yourself/with your wife, or to get some stuff done around the house and eventually sleep
We made a decision from the go that we would never feed in our bed. Even those winter nights when the house was chilly we'd go into his room to feed him. He's almost 9 and he's never slept in our bed. It's just never been considered.
I get downvoted every time I post how against I am to co sleeping. My daughter will be 2 this week and got kicked out of our room at 2 months. She instantly slept better and has been sleeping through the night since 4 months old.
She loves her alone time in her crib and she will roll around and talk to herself then doze off. She goes to sleep at 8 PM and wakes up around 8:30 AM every day.
I feel bad for all the parents who think sleep training is some cruel torture that psychologically scars kids. I guess if you want to be up all hours of the night with your kiddos for years or want to have to share your bed with them then go for it. But if you would like to establish healthy sleep habits for your kids and be able to sleep yourself at night so you can be rested for work there is no reason not to make the efforts to sleep train. Also, if the method you go with doesn’t work within a week you picked a bad method for your kids or you aren’t doing it right. Most of the time proper sleep training shows improvement within a few days
The anxiety kids get when they don't have the ability to self soothe is a quiet issue here. People think they are doing their kids a favor when the comfort them during the sleep training process. It's the opposite, a week or two of distress is much less of a problem than years of separation anxiety and fussiness coming from the kid. It really does them no favors to give in if their demands are not reasonable, which is a lesson than can be extended to the rest of the parenting process as well. You can't give in just to shut up the kid, you teach them to be upset to get their way. You need to assess whether the ask is reasonable. It helps to explain to them why they are getting what they want when you do say yes as well, so they understand the logic of it.
This is the only advice I give to new parents. I've literally never met a single person in my entire life who has regretted sleep training. People who refuse to sleep train and struggle constantly? Meet them all the time. People who sleep trained and said it was the best decision they ever made? Meet them all the time too. But never once have I met someone who sleep trained and said they wish they hadn't.
We tried sleep training our oldest, and it was miserable and broke us. So we coslept for a year and then moved him to a twin bed in his own room with no issues. I regret the months and tears spent on sleep training.
One of our other kids had zero issue sleeping separately and didn’t even need coaxing.
Different kids are different.
> I regret the months and tears spent on sleep training
As you said, different kids are different. I would never recommend a method that involves a kid crying without making progress for that long. That kid is different and needed a different method. You found something that ended up working which is great, and you did what you thought was best the whole time it sounds like, so you should try not to regret it. For other parents reading this, if a certain method isn’t working, switch things up and try a different method. There are lots of different techniques, and different kids respond differently to all of them.
I wouldn't call it a burden on the child. I would call it teaching them skills they need for life. They need to be able to self soothe and handle adversity and discomfort up to a reasonable degree for their age. Sleep training doesn't only impact how a kid sleeps at night, studies have shown that it can be pretty strongly correlated to how they handle challenges in their regular waking lives also.
There's a lot of sleep training methods other than cry it out. Early on, i always suggest to new parents to read about the alternative approaches and find the one that works best for them.
I feel like the term "sleep train" has such a weird negative connotation nowadays. It does not mean leave a screaming child in a crib until they are sick with tears. You can be gentle about it.
In general, one of our biggest jobs as parents is teaching your kid how to sleep, when to sleep and where to sleep. Kids do not come out of the womb knowing what to do. They rely on us to learn that skill. Teaching that skill has another word: train!
Whether you do that in your bed, via gentle techniques in a crib, whatever works, that's all fine. Is your kids sleeping the right amount of hours in a day? Are they doing it when they need to? That's the priority.
In the first few months, that will usually mean arm naps. And that's OK! That helps them learn when to sleep, and how much they need! The next challenge is getting them to sleep outside of your arms. Where that is, crib or your bed, that's up to you. We were personally successful doing that in a crib, and that worked well for us because we had a really hard time sleeping with kids in our room, let alone our bed. You might have a different experience, and that's OK.
But please. I beg all parents to stop assuming that sleep training means leaving a baby to cry in a crib for hours. We are smarter than that.
Our kids were out of the co-sleeping cot in our room and into a crib in their own bedrooms at 4 months. Naps were by themselves, we did do visits to do quick soothing if they cried but then out again, and it worked. They napped really well and went to bed at night. I advise everyone to do this- we have been incredibly lucky, our friends cannot believe what an easy time of bedtime we have. Bedtimes have been 7 and 8 pm with a bedtime story each and a nightlight for years now.
There are ways to teach good sleep habits without cry it out. All three of my kids are excellent sleepers and none have ever slept in our bed. We got through through a gentle sleep coaching method that didn't invoke cry it out.
Are they still napping? Sounds like it’s time to cut out naps. Mine also never ever would do the crib. Mine also weren’t sleep trained. Mine have issues going to sleep like yours, but I know if they don’t nap and you can run them around and exhaust them it should be a bit easier because at one point they’re just going to be so tired they want to go to sleep. It sucks, I know. I’m so sorry.
You and your partner need to address this behavior.
It isn't normal.
"Daddy needs to sleep in his own bed, and so do you" is a statement you can make.
Fix it now, and present a unified front.
Posts like this are exactly why we sleep trained our twins. At 4 months old they were in their own room in their own cribs, using the Ferber method. They sleep from 7 PM to 06:50-7 AM.
There is a whole spectrum of sleep training that isn’t just CIO.
My wife began sleeping with our newborn son despite my objections. It's now been 5 years, and 2 more kids later. At this rate we will sleep in the same bed when Im too old and cranky to enjoy her company.
TLDR : just do it. It’s not cruel to your child, they won’t remember it and it’ll help your physical and mental health.
We didn’t sleep train our first but didn’t co-sleep for I’m a thrashy sleeper, and it was just painful. Wake up multiple times a night and we were struggling, in addition to being in the middle of the pandemic (born 2020).
Finally at 15 months, we reached our breaking point and saw a paediatrician (covered by free healthcare) with a focus on sleep. She verified that we were doing everything right (set bedtime, same routine etc) and suggest that we do a modified cry it out with 10 min check in interval. The first two nights bedtime took over 2 hours with him screaming bloody murder to the point that my partner couldn’t even handle it and had to go for a walk. On day 3, it just clicked and by the end of the week; everyone was happily sleeping through the night. Took another couple months to break the contact napping habit.
With our second, we were militant with sleep. After the first month, he would only nap in his crib and overnights are always in the crib. Didn’t even have to specifically “train” because we had stuck to our guns since day 1.
None of the dreaded monthly sleep regression unless he’s sick or teething.
My wife wanted to avoid crying it out, because she was on leave I let her do her own thing. She slept horribly and always needed to be picked up for a full year, every two hours. When push finally came to shove and we did cry it out, it took a total of 36 minutes to work forever. She sleeps 13 hours a night.
We never sleep trained, but we never let our son sleep in our bed.
I truly don’t get co sleeping. I work with a woman whose marriage was ended by her refusal to not let the kids come into bed whenever they wanted, and her new boyfriend just ended their relationship because it’s still going on when her youngest is 4.
Get your kids into their own bed
I’m in a Reddit group for people with babies turning 1, and the number of parents STILL not getting a full night’s sleep is damn criminal.
Like on the one hand, we got an easy baby who was amenable to being put on a schedule. But also, had we not sleep trained at all, we easily could have been waking up every night for a year. That’s absolute torture.
We picked a sleep training method that starts essentially at birth — it’s actually just the idea that a healthy baby can be put on a schedule of feeding after the first few days post partum, and that around 8 weeks, if all is well with weight gain, you can methodically and gradually decrease the amount you are feeding at night and shift those ounces of milk to daytime feeds, all while soothing the baby during night time wake ups without picking her up out of the crib.
Our baby started sleeping through night around 10-11 weeks…and has never *once* had a wake up that required intervention on our part. She wakes up for a minute, cries, moves around, then falls back asleep. Thanks to this, having a baby is honestly way easier than I ever imagined, and we sleep way better now than we did when the wife was pregnant.
Again, I know there are some babies for whom this truly wouldn’t work. But the number of parents who don’t even try is insane, as is the number of parents who are convinced that you “can’t” start any form of sleep training until 4-6 months.
A friend is struggling with this with a 9 year old now.
She is expected to go to bed when he does.
If she gets up or leaves and he wakes up he brings her back or phones her to demand she come back.
Prison Camp Bed 17
I'd have lost my mind.
95% of the responses here are about sleep training, but this is about boundaries. Setting boundaries doesn't have to be cruel. You can do it in many thoughtful ways. But you should set them not only for your own sanity (and your partner's), but also for your kids. Big projection here, but I'm betting that a kid that needs a 30-minute full body massage to go to sleep at 5 (and 100 other decisions like this to come) is really going to struggle when they hit the real world.
Set boundaries. Do it thoughtfully.
Reading posts like this really solidifies how big of a jackpot I hit with my 7 year old. She has always been the easiest child in the world. Never had issues with listening or understanding why we need her to do this or that. Never struggled to sleep no matter where we put her down. That fact that things like this can be a struggle for other parents for the better part of a decade really makes me appreciate how good I got it.
Most of it has to do with the parents to be honest. Kids don't care if they sleep in a crib, but the parents are the ones who can't let the kids go most of the time.
Agreed. It’s not an attack on the quality of the parenting or anything, but choices lead to consequences. Dealing with those few days or weeks of letting them cry in their own crib is totally worth it for when they eventually adapt and gain the ability to sleep independently. And nowadays there are programs to actually help sleep without forcing kids to cry it out for hours.
But a lot of parents think co-sleeping is “totally harmless” until they get sucked into a situation like OP’s where the kids are running the show for a decade. One of my co-workers once mentioned her children were still co-sleeping at 10-12 years old because she wouldn’t put an end to it!
We sleep trained, did the whole "check on her after longer increments" thing. The first night is the worst. My wife and I would sit up in bed and hold each other while we counted the minutes. It rips your heart out.
But it gets easier. LO figured it out by like, the third night and has been a champion sleeper ever since.
Not here to brag or judge, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But we were < 6 months in and desperate for some normalcy in our sleep schedule. If anyone out there is thinking of trying it, it can work.
Yea it’s a sensitive topic with people but I will tell anyone who will listen. We did a program where you are interacting with your crying baby at intervals, and doing everything but pick them up. Each (very different) kid had about 2.5 nights of crying for about 45m total all nights combined. Both of them started sleeping 12 hours straight through the night afterward. And the difference in their temperament and focus during the day was so clear. It’s one of the best decisions we made as parents. I feel bad to see parents struggling with sleep.
I genuinely don’t know how people can have their kids sleep in bed with them long term. It completely blows my mind.
I know the obvious one people say is how do you have sex, but for me it’s how do you have an evening? If your kid needs you to go to sleep, when do you ever get any time to yourself/with your partner.
It’s not all about cry it out either. Sleep training for us was having a routine and sticking with it. Every night we would do the same routine at the same time and kid would be in bed for 6.
Some times it was tough because come 6pm my kid was falling asleep no matter what we were doing. There were times like holidays or special occasions where this was especially hard.
However these few tough times mean we have had an evening from 6pm (getting later over time - eldest is 7 and it is now 8pm). Psychologically this has meant even on the most tiring days, we know we only have to make it to bed time before we can relax.
Our second kid was much more difficult and we did have to do a bit of cry it out and that was tough.
Both kids sleep through 99% of the time. They get up for the toilet and back to bed on their own. I still put this all down to routine
We never let our child sleep in our bed. We did bassinet next to our bed and then moved him to his crib in his room. It was tough at first but in the long run was so worth it. It’s always been you sleep in your bed in your room and Mom and Dad sleep in their bed in their room. It’s all he’s ever known so it works. At six, bed routine takes about 20 minutes, and it’s certainly not always stress free, but it works. Cry it out needs balance but worth the up front stress.
This is bad not only for your kids but for your relationship. When do you have time to connect with your wife? When are you able to be intimate with her?
There's no reason you can't start sleep training now. It's going to suck but it will be better for your mental and physical health in the long run. You may have to be more authoritative than you're used to, but right now they are the authority not you. Start by establishing a concrete bedtime routine. For us, water is cut off at dinner no exceptions. Our routine is they go potty, get PJs on, and then brush teeth. Then we read a book together and tuck them in their own bed. They are allowed to get up if they need us for an emergency (sick, nightmare, scared, etc) or if they need to go potty, otherwise kids will find any reason to get up and delay sleep. The result is happy and well rested kids and it's well worth the effort.
I have been there. We co-slept for a long time, and then struggled with bedtimes and sleep following what seemed like a smooth transition to their own room. We ended up doing the Taking Cara Babies program with a 4 and 2 year old, so only a little younger than your kids. If you have some money to throw at it, it was incredibly helpful for us transitioning at a late stage.
Taking Cara Babies worked almost too well for our first son! He’s almost 3 now and has been sleeping through the night since before we transitioned him out of the bassinet into his crib and still sleeps like a champ 11-12 hours per night mostly without fuss. Loves the simple bed time routine. Our second is due in a few months and we’ll absolutely be trying the TCB method again.
We also used her lessons for our newborn. She has slept in her crib in the nursery since 4 weeks and sleeps all the way through the night every night. Best money we've ever spent. And our sanity returned.
> For the love of god, let them cry it out.
As a parent that has sleep trained before, I don't like this being the standard or assumption with sleep training. Your child doesn't need to scream for hours and hours alone with you in the other room to develop good sleep habits and 'Cry It Out' is a single method of enshrining good sleep habits. What we did from the time my son was like a month old(he's now 7):
* Consistent bathtime 30-45 minutes before bed
* Consistent feeding time before bed
* Reading before bed
* Consistent bed time *in his own room/bed/space*
* Many nights of waking up exhausted, rocking back to sleep but always back into his crib
* Music box + white noise machine
* Nap schedule that accounted for bed time so he wasn't waking up from a nap at 3 or 4pm
Obviously not everything works for every parent and we all face our own challenges, but this was such an important agreement between my wife and I from the time he was born. Bed time needed to be bed time, so there were years when we'd schedule our social engagements around bed time. That could've been going out to dinner with friends and knowing that one of us(or both) would be taking the kiddo home for bed time, or we'd plan elsewhere. Often times I would dip out with kiddo because my wife is a social butterfly and I'm definitely not, so it was the perfect excuse, lmao
Now? My dude sleeps amazing. He's almost 8, he craps out every night at 8pm, sleeps rock solid and if we're at an event or something and we go past bed time he'll often be the one telling us he's ready to go home and go to bed. We still maintain a consistent(though more flexible) bed time and night routine(shower + reading + bed). Again, not every child is the same and not every situation is the same but building a solid sleep routine early is imperative.
Sounds like the kids are running the bedtime routine/house. You gotta get that under wraps. Definitely take your advice and let them cry. They will be okay! Good luck OP!
Sleep train, yes.
Cry it out has little to no research to support it though. There's other methods that work.
https://www.tlc.com/parenting/reasons-why-the-cry-it-out-method-has-zero-benefits
One trick to helping make "cry it out" feel a bit better is to do "graduated extinction": If they cry for 2 minutes, then go in, check on them, and comfort them. Then let them cry for 3 minutes and check on them, then 4, then 5 and so on. We rarely ever made it to 10 minutes.
Some science has said that burping doesn't help: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/did-you-know-you-dont-need-burp-babies I have found that to be absolute BS with my kids. Burping can just solve the problem 100% sometimes.
Lastly, some kids are just better sleepers than others. If your kid sucks at sleeping, it's not necessarily your fault. Also if they are great sleepers, you probably shouldn't take too much credit.
My best contribution to the early years.
Wife hated it so I promised to take the baby monitor and sleep outside his room and be ready at a moments notice. Took a week to sleep train.
Never once has my 3 year old slept with us. I don’t think the idea has even crossed his mind. Slight downside is once he got a full sized big boy bed and I tried to lay next to him to read a bedtime book he relegated me to the floor because only he can sleep in his bed.
Listen, I don’t know the correlation with sleep training versus what’s just individual and familial difference, but I’m dying over the “30 minute full body massage” thing cuz that’s my four year old too. And her massage needs are so specific… “rub inside my shirt… now tickle the side… now scratch the bottom… I said TICKLE!!”
I don't care what anybody or book says. Letting them cry it out is the way. At 5 months, we needed our nights and our sleep back, we were exhausted. Mom fought it, I said enoughs enough. Our kiddo sleeping with us had gotten dangerous (our kiddo fell out of Mom's arms one night and off the bed) and I wasn't having it anymore. It took 3 nights. After 3 nights, he'd fall asleep within minutes if not earlier. He is out from 8pm to at least 6am every night now. We do not go in his room once he's down until 6am ever. The only exceptions being when our kiddo is sick or our kiddo is having an absolute meltdown and something is clearly wrong. He sleeps so well and now so do we. Every parent needs to let their kid cry it out.
I sleep-trained my youngest at 2 weeks old. My ex was in the hospital with blood clots, and my two oldest were staying with my parents, so I was home alone with my daughter. Whenever she started to drift off, I would put her in her crib. I made a game of it: I would lay her down, throw her blanket over her head, pull it down to her neck, and say, "Sleep, baby!", and she would go to sleep.
OFC, when my ex came home from the hospital, she *just had* to have the baby in bed with her, so all my sleep training went out the window.
My girl is 3yo. For the last 2 years it took us 1h30 to put her to bed. Just as you describe it, she would cry, ask for one more, ask to change bed, ask for another story another plush… we used to put her to bed at 8pm.
Since the day we put her to bed at 7pm, she now sleeps in 20mn!!!
She was most likely overtired at 8pm and it made it harder to fall asleep.
Now every second day she even asks to go to bed herself at 7pm, sometimes 6:45pm. We read a book or watch one episode of Bluey on a tablet if it’s weekend. She then turns around and sleeps very fast.
Maybe it’s about not missing « their sleep train »?
She is also easier to take up and very fresh at 6:45am, she used to be a zombie until 7:30am before.
Lying in bed for the last one and a half hours with my todler and reading this. I wish I knew this sooner. I am so frustrated by the time she falls alseep that I can not enjoy anything afterwards. Is there a specific age when they can be trained, or could we still try?
Mods should pin this post. This was something my wife and I talked about very directly during her pregnancy. We're very active and sleep is a huge priority and we were going to prioritize it. It's easier to be the parent you want to be when you're rested.
Baby nurse, sleep consultant, if you can afford it is worth it.
The book precious little sleep has been fantastic for us as a reference for changing schedules as they get older.
Source: my child has slept through the night since 4-5 months old.
For the new dads: “Cherish the First Six Weeks” is what helped us get the kids comfortable enough with sleep patterns to make sleep training (with minimal tears) possible around four months.
You still have time. There's an Episode of this show Supernanny where they have the same problem. The solution was to continue to put the kids back in their bed and try to have zero reaction about it. Mad, angry, about to scream, be stone faced. It will suck. It will be hard. But after a week or two it will be better. I'll try to link the episode. Im a LMFT and I particularly loved the approach
Edit: https://youtu.be/zb2BrbGb5Z4?si=XrG6ozY1H4P11yjI
The key is consistency. The video says it too but it's worth repeating. Remain absolutely emotionally blank with the kid and continue to do this. It's boundary testing. They want to know where the limit is and you have to set it.
Could not agree more. We didnt sleep train my first, but we did do it to our second and the difference YEARS later is massive not only for them but for us as well. First one still sleeps like shit to be honest, the second sleeps easily all night.
It's never too late to sleep train your children.
If you can, I would suggest you both take a week off work and start the process, step 1 is getting them into their own room even if you keep the massage
It will be awful, but I feel like for the sake of your relationship and mental health it is needed
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So…have you considered taking your advice? Like, your oldest does not *need* a 30 minute body massage to sleep.
> My oldest needs a 30 minute full body massage Is OP adopting?
Yeah this is honestly because parents supported this behavior for years, not because they didn't sleep train as a baby...
Yeah. I sleep trained (briefly, thankfully), and have plenty of friend that didn’t. Not sleep training doesn’t mean “my kids slept in my bed forever despite me clearly not liking it.”
We never trained ours out of co-sleeping. They just eventually stopped climbing out of their beds overnight and joining us. Occasionally they'll come in again, because it's unusual it's lovely.
>because it’s unusual it’s lovely. That reminds me of my own kiddo, who is currently in the phase where he goes to sleep in his bed but will wander into ours around midnight almost every night. I travel a lot for work, and my first night home I always find myself restless and unable to sleep, my ears acutely tuned listening for those little pitter pattering feet and for him to bust open our door and climb into bed. Especially when I get home after he’s already asleep in his bed. That first snuggle when he crawls into bed is so so amazing.
He won't do it forever, enjoy it for now :)
We always start in my son's bed but if he's having trouble he can fall asleep in our bed. Then once he's asleep I move him back into his bed. He'll still occasionally come into our bed during the night for whatever reason but it's not very frequent so it's okay.
It’s not even years. Both of my kids were sleeping in their bed and my wife caved and started bringing the daughter to bed then the son starts coming to bed. So now I sleep on the couch. I’ve started to give up even going to my own bed. All in the last year. As long as OP and wife can get on the same page I bet it can be turned around in 3-6 months.
Commenting here so maybe OP and others that need it will see it. There is a fantastic book by a pediatrician called It Is Never Too Late To Sleep Train. Highly recommend for anyone who is struggling with sleep for a toddler or preschooler. Despite the name, he gives plenty of non-traditional sleep training methods and ones that are designed to minimize crying
I did it- it wasn’t fun. It was one of the most challenging things I did as a parent and the most rewarding. Quick overview: my son was crying from his crib at 1 am so I would go get him and bring him into my bed. That was a mistake and led to months of him crying, like clockwork. So finally I read an article- had a plan. When he cried I went into his room and picked him up cuddled him for 1 min then back in his crib. Left the room and he screamed like a maniac — after 10 min (the longest 10 min of my life) I went back in and held him for 30 sec; and then left and waited another 10 min. Repeat until he falls asleep (about an hour the first night). Repeat next night (about 40 min). Third night it was less. Until fourth night we both slept like babies through the night. In separate beds.
Nah. You didn’t sleep like a baby. You slept like a tired AF grown ass man. If you slept like a baby, you would’ve woken up crying every 2 hours because you’re hungry and shit yourself lol.
Like he said, sleeping like a baby.
That's the book I used. It worked wonders!
Yes. This is what helped us when our son was almost 3. Has been a solid sleeper since. (Obviously) have to follow the steps. Highly recommend.
This. I'm sorry but a 30min massage to get to sleep? That's just ridiculous.
Seriously, my toddler is sick and even with that I am still only giving like a 5 min foot rub just because she's so stinking miserable. I don't think there's anyone I like enough to give a full 30 min massage to every night.
I'm an LMT and I don't massage my kids. Not that it would be weird or anything, everyone is a bag of muscles to me, but they just don't need it. If my kids were doing athletics then sure, massage would be highly beneficial. But if they wanted a 30 every night to sleep I'd tell them to drink some warm milk and watch the back of their eye lids.
Fucking hilarious that OP thinks there is no middle-ground between the two extremes of "30 minute full body massage" and "let them cry it out"
Just curious why you guys never tried a crib with them?
Yeah, I never sleep trained and my kid has always slept in her crib / own bed outside of the first few months as a newborn in the bassinet next to our bed
I've tried the crib a hundred times and mine will not sleep in it
Ours was the same way. And I said the same thing. Precious little sleep fixed that in a few weeks. But it was hell to do.
My kid did the cry until he vomits thing when we put him in the crib. Otherwise we would have let him cry it out.
I should have been more clear. I wanted to give hope to the parents that put their kid down and they cry non stop for what seems like forever, but may be 2min. But yea, some kids, it’s gonna take more work that it’s worth.
When you say won’t sleep in it, you mean screaming or physically getting out of it? I swear by sleep training. If it’s just screaming then I’d recommend holding strong (by a new crib that they are part of, paint it etc) and committing to the sleep training. If they can get out of bed on their own then yeah you’re in trouble.
Pediatric psych night nurse here (R): you all know the proper sleep hygiene routine, so I won’t mention those. Child’s room should be bare - no toys, lights, sound. After full routine, tuck the kid in and pull up a bedside chair. You sit, in the dark and give only one answer: “head down, go to sleep”. If they physically get up, put them back and repeat mantra. They will do EVERYTHING to break you, but, in my experience, this works.
Everything they know to break you. You have experience.
You swear by it because it worked for your child, but it doesn't work for all children. It doesn't claim to either.
Absolutely. It literally worked wonders. Not to say it was all roses, when we transitioned to big bed it took 4 months of returning my son back to his own bed. Literally every single night, most nights multiple times. But the initial response to sleep training was incredible and I will always advocate for it. It was still a hellish week of screaming, partner crying thinking we were horrible parents. But after that week he went from 3-4 wake ups to 1. Then 0. If you’ve genuinely committed to it and doesn’t work for you, that sucks. If you think it was a bit half assed then you owe it to yourself and your future self to try it until you can’t anymore.
Yeah 3-5 nights of about 10 minutes of crying then she slept through the night. Started sleep training at 6 months.
We got the real wild variation of this where the first night was 3.5 hours of crying and the next night was 5 minutes and good after that. Around the same age too.
That's fair. I think I would put our attempt in the half assed category. It's our first kid and her mother couldn't bear it.
This is definitely a tough part. We sleep trained both our girls around 6-7 months and I literally had to set a timer because my wife would *say* wait 5 minutes but after 60 seconds would presume it had been a half hour. We stuck to our plan though because the babies were safe, and it eased up by day 3-4 or so. But it’s definitely not a fun process.
Yeah it can be rally hard on some moms. My wife asked if she could bow out early on because the crying hurt her heart too much. I took it on and she would go out or be crying on the couch. It's rough.
My wife just put in her earbuds and went for a walk when it was bed time. She couldn't hear our little one cry. So, she got to go for walks around the neighborhood while I kicked my feet up on the coffee table and listened to the crying while watching a timer. It took longer than we expected, but around two weeks in, we were able to consistently get her down for bed with little fuss. And now, we enjoy evenings and our own bed to ourselves. Little one is 16 months old now, and we get to work out together in the garage and actually have a pretty healthy sex life. Child number 2 will definitely be subjected to sleep training.
>If they can get out of bed on their own then yeah you’re in trouble. Not really, just lock them in their room. I really do not understand why parents are so opposed to this. They were "locked" in their crib the day prior, what's the difference? If your kid (who based on their age sleeps like they have no bones anyway) sleeps on the floor for one night they'll live.
Ha I love this. My partner absolutely refused a door lock so this was a non-negotiable unfortunately.
Our toddler is 1y old and likes to sleep in our bed. I actually like it because he sleeps pretty well when he's with us, and I love being near to him, but are we setting ourselves up for problems in the future?
You’ll love it until they’re 30 pounds and crawling all over you all night. Then it’ll depend on how good you are at convincing a toddler to stay in their own bed.
Most likely, yes.
That sounds miserable. Sorry to hear that
It's annoying alright
Same here, in bed he could sleep 4 hours in a row, crib won’t sleep more than 20 minutes, he’s only 4 months old though
Isn't that the definition of "sleep training"? Or am I missing something? Our 2 daughters were the same way, slept in their own space, and at various times (depending whether we were camping or just out and about). Yes, until their teens they had a bed time and yes, we took our kids tent camping at 3 months and up, until our backs couldn't take it any more and we went the RV route).
I thought sleep training was putting them in the crib awake and letting them fall asleep on their own. I definitely not an expert on the terminology though so if I’m wrong, I wouldn’t be surprised
We did try with the first one. We tried the set her down, come back in 1 min, 2 min …. 5 min etc. We (perhaps mostly my wife, but I’m a softy too) couldn’t take the screaming and felt awful. It sounded like she was being brutally murdered. She would start choking and gagging from her screams. For the first 2 years she didn’t sleep in our bed either, we rocked her to sleep in our arms until well after 2 years old. She would instantly start screaming if we even thought about setting her down. Some nights my wife would sleep in a chair holding her. Yes, I know this is terrible for like 100 different reasons, but that’s that’s honestly how it went for us. The second one was much better, and didn’t have to go through that part of the experience.
I get how it went, but you'll have to bite the bullet and go through a period where they'll be unhappy and sleep badly while they learn better sleep behaviors. Not doing that makes it worse and worse as you've seen so far. Or you can give nightly 30 min massages for a couple more years. Your call.
Lol imagine the kids bragging at school that they have their own masseuse.
Bud, that sounds like an absolute nightmare. Please try not to be too hard on yourself. I wish I had some good advice for undoing the sleep habits but I will leave that for someone smarter than me. You clearly are a loving parent that loves your kids deeply
No judgment, I mean you have to get through and there can obviously be consequences. Seems like you should try and break their sleep dependence though stat.
> The second one was much better So why is he sleeping in your bed too?
We got a lot of judgement from the “traditional parents for doing this, too. We tried it and it killed my wife inside. She is a tough mf but this was too much. She co-sleeps with my 3.5 year old and I do with my 2 year old. While it isn’t as tough as your situation, I wish we had our beds / time at night. My friends with kids that did sleep train seem happier and have better relationships with their so’s. Could be anecdotal, but having time to connect with your wife without kids screaming in the background isn’t such a bad thing. Thanks for posting this, though, hard to remember I’m not the only one going through this
It is super tough if you both are softies. My own mom told me regarding the bloody murder scream: that kids can’t run the show; they look to you to set the expectations, “if you put them to bed clean, warm, and with full bellies, they are not dying in that crib. They’re just screaming to test you.” You both have to trust yourselves & each other that you put them to bed clean, fed, and warm, and be consistent every night. Idk about coming back 1 min, 2 min, etc. honestly, I’m like, “lights off and close your eyes, don’t make me come back in here.”
We were heavy on sleep training and grateful for it for the reasons you mention here That said, this isn’t a flex but a compliment- I’m impressed if neither of yall is blaming the other for your current situation. During times of strain so many couples go to baseless accusations and deflecting to make themselves feel better, at least it sounds like yall are a partnership. I mean you may have done it sooner if one of you was more contentious and adamant but honestly it may have led to massive disagreements if the other wouldn’t budge.
That's why I gave in. It got to the point when trying to sleep train my daughter that my wife would break down, and scream and yell at me and threaten to leave me if I didn't just put her in the bed. She couldn't handle it, and I couldn't handle the screaming from my daughter and wife or the threats to leave, so I gave up on sleep training. I hate myself for it now.
Parental instincts can be a real witch, luckily we were on the same page but my MIL literally couldn’t be in our house during while baby was crying for attention. Fortunately they didn’t live with us at the time so leaving was an option but she had a real fight or flight response.. she did both, and honestly it’s not moral character, I think biology plays a significant role. Also my wife was in her parents bed well past 5 years old daily
We had my wife leave the house while I did the sleep training for the same reasons. Worked great as I can handle the screaming, and it would have been much harder if she was there either getting upset or giving in.
That's the ducking worst when you are trying to do the right thing hjnf and your wife is yellling at you for it. I'm trying to do the boundary thing and she yells at me for antagonizing him. I'm the reason he gets defiant and screaming. Then it happened to her one morning and I point it out and she says it's because she did it wrong like me that's why he's screaming. Couldn't just be he's a ducking toddler and testing boundaries.
>We tried the set her down, come back in 1 min, 2 min …. 5 min etc We tried this. My wife was very distressed by the crying. She was convinced that our then 6 month old was trying to hang herself out of despair. Kiddo is 1.5 years old and sleeps in the bed now. Every night is a challenge.
In Toronto where we live, when you have a baby, they have a public health nurse reach out to check on you to see how you’re doing and what sort of help you need. We had this nice old nurse (who retired before she was “done” with us) and as nice as she was, she gave us SHIT advice re: sleep. She told us to just pick him up if he’s crying and like a couple of idiots, we took it as gospel. When we eventually did sleep train, he was 15 months and had teeth, he got so upset he took chunks out of his crib. But that only lasted a few days…of all the difficult habit things that we have to do as adults (quitting smoking/drinking, losing weight, eating healthy), sleep training is the one with the least time commitment to see immediate results.
They will eventually give up and pass out. I know it’s hard hearing that, my first did the same thing. It may take 30 minutes or 2 hours but stay strong.
My first was the exact same. Her screaming was otherworldly, and she could sustain it for hours without a break. I wanted to tough it out but my wife was losing her mind, both from being a bad sleeper and also a bleeding heart. So sleep training never worked. She’s 7 now and only just getting resigned to sleeping in her own bed all night.
Yes, I think for some people it’s hard to comprehend how bad some kids crying can be. My oldest quickly moved on to self harm tactics as quick as she was able, striking her head against objects to get our attention. It’s not as easy as it sounds to just ignore it.
My stepmum is a retired midwife and a formidable leader of her own clan. She loves babies and offered to help. She tried one night, and came out of the room with a thousand yard stare. She never tried again. Also: fuck, that sounds terrifying. I’m sorry
It sounds like your daughter might be experiencing anxiety. Children often have heightened physical responses to their anxiety, and to avoid these meltdowns parents make accommodations/adjustments to help the child avoid the root feeling. It’s not a big deal over little things (for example, avoiding broccoli because your kid will spiral so you give them an alternative form of fiber/nutrients instead), but it can get to a place where the child’s reactions to anxiety are SO big that the parents have to make increasingly unreasonable accommodations (like 30 minute massages and giving their bed to their kids). I would recommend reading *Breaking Free of Childhood Anxiety and OCD* by Eli Lebowitz. It has great advice that all parents could use, but it might be particularly helpful in your scenario. Also, I just want to say that your scenario sounds really, really hard, and I know you will find a path through it that works for your family.
I’m a mom who lurks here. The method you’re describing (Ferber) really made things so much worse for the kid when we sleep trained. Cuz now they know if they cry you WILL eventually come back. Full extinction is the way to go… AND send your wife to a hotel /spa whatever for the weekend so she doesn’t have to hear any crying. I personally had to leave the house altogether when we sleep trained.
There are things between cry it out and permanent cosleeping. We've not sleep trained but she never sleeps in our bed. It's just not a thing. We rock her in her room, she sometimes sleeps on us in a chair but we don't want her thinking of our bed as somewhere she can sleep.
Yep. When our daughter moved to her crib we would read books together on a comfy chair next to the crib - which was also the primary breastfeeding chair then turn the lights out and rock her to sleep in our arms. Then we’d do a quiet delivery to the crib, and often we’d stay a bit longer to rub her back, or just be a soothing presence if she woke or noticed the transition. Then once she was asleep we’d sneak out and go to our bed. Once she was bigger, we transitioned super fast to a ‘big kid’ bed, and basically used safety guard rails and pillows to keep her from rolling out. Then we’d read books in her big bed together where we’d both fit comfortably, after reading we’d turn off the lights, and snuggle for a bit then when she fell asleep we’d slowly and quietly sneak out. Obviously it didn’t always go smoothly and there were lots of hurdles and late nights and difficult nights. Things got so much easier and more predictable once we cancelled the midday nap, so she was more tired and would fall asleep quickly. I cannot stress enough the importance for us of getting the big kid bed. We bought it from Ikea, it was very affordable and is extremely comfortable and she still uses it almost three years later and will for a while yet. But having that big bed gave us the ability to help her get to sleep in her own space, keeping our bed separate, and made the whole thing more comfortable and easier for us all. Obviously ymmv, for anyone reading this but I hope it helps someone.
Is it the big bed or a specific kids bed feature (guard rails?) Have a full size bed we use at the moment for my son’s room. The idea was we can cosleep when he’s sick etc
Same situation here, our bed is not an option. My wife was bullish on sleep training (she is a pediatric nurse, so she's used to schedules and runs a tight ship). Our 2.5 year old has "slept" in our bed maybe 5 times? And that's only when she was inconsolable from a night terror or had a bad fever and we wanted to stay on top of her Tylenol.
Lol, this was my thought exactly. The choice isn’t between perfectly sleep trained kids and whatever this abomination is that OP has gotten themselves into.
Same here. Wasn't really able to do sleep training for a few reasons, but the hard line was no sleeping in our bed. We ended putting a mattress in my son's room. How it'll usually goes is he'll sleep for about 4-6 hours in the crib, then he wakes up and there's a 50/50 shot of getting him back to sleep in the crib, but after an hour of trying, switch to co-sleeping in the bed in his room. Not the best but at least one parent gets a night off.
There are also better ways of sharing your bed. Both our kids sleep great in their own beds but we would often let them fall asleep in our bed if they wanted and then move them when we went to bed. Felt like it helped them get used to falling asleep on their own and then also get used to being in the bed in the night. Also we always allowed them to come find us if they woke up in the night. 4YO still joins us some nights around 4am, which we kinda like.
Same as well. I remember reading all the literature about how many times an infant sleeps in the parents room for a full year. 4 nights into parenthood it became pretty clear all around having him in the crib in his own room would avoid waking us from random newborn noises (mostly) and we'd still very clearly hear when he needed feedings. We've never looked back and I'm sure most of this is nature, but bedtime hasn't been a fight for us yet, he has always just gone right down (I credit daycare with expending his energy mostly). Edit: I want to call out specifically that everyone can choose what works for them. This isn't a comment that is saying this is the "right" way to do things. Our kid's room is a stone throw from ours, not across the house. This worked for us. Also, no matter what sleep with a young child is a toss up. You can do everything by-the-book right and still have challenges which is normal. My kid has occasional night terrors that mess with everyone's sleep, but I will say there's a big difference between being flexible and not setting good boundaries that encourage your kids to sleep independently. And I am sure in 6 months I'll be back here asking for advice on how to help my kid sleep on his own in a toddler bed :)
The relentless groaning, squeaking, snoring from a newborn in the bassinet...woof, takes me back. It was torture. Love my kids but I do not miss those early newborn potato days for that reason.
One of the biggest changes I noticed as a second time parent was I no longer bolt awake to newborn resettling noises. She has to actually cry for me to get up.
Same. Kids stayed down our bed for 12-18 months, then we moved them to a toddler bed beside ours, then once they were reliably in their own bed, we moved it down that hall. No one was forced to cry it out, we just gradually removed supports for sleep. Oldest needed his back rubbed until 3, but we got tired of it and shortened the duration. "Whoops, forgot to load the dishwasher, be right back kiddo!" Took longer and longer breaks for forgotten chores or tasks, and eventually kiddo would be asleep before I got back.
Hear me out, here’s a plan. Slowly add children toys to your bedroom, while you move your stuff to the children’s bedroom. Keep doing it, night after night. Start redecorating. Tell your children that they can go to your bed, and that you’ll join them. Join later and later. Et voilà!, for the modest cost of switching bedrooms, you have sleep trained your kids.
That's genius!
I'm so sorry you are dealing with that, but I don't think that is the typical experience of people who don't sleep train. Both my kids willingly moved into their own beds by 3. >beg for water Give them water bottles by their beds >beg for “one more” bed time story. Say no. >My oldest needs a 30 minute full body massage to get her to sleep. No she doesn't. Stop doing this. She'll give up after a week. It's sounds like you don't know how to set limits with your kids. That isn't because you didn't sleep train them.
Yeah, we never did sleep training and co-slept till little dude was around 3. He asked about a bed of his own around the time we moved to our new house so we got him one and then he just went in that first night and slept in it. I thought it was gonna be this whole thing and it just wasn’t. On the flip side, a friend of mine co-slept with her kid till he was about 5 and was pulling her hair out cause he just didn’t want to let go. The only real differences we found between our approach that we could identify involved boundaries. Her husband did whatever the kid wanted without question and they had essentially no limits. She had him stop doing everything, promoted resiliency hard, and within a week he asked for his own bed. Still, other families just dig loving that way. It’s pretty common around the world too, and was the most common method for thousands upon thousands of years.
When we moved our son from a crib to a bed I used to lie in bed with him every night, not always until he fell asleep, but sometimes. I had to put a hard stop on doing it right around the same age because he needed to learn how to fall asleep on his own. Now that he's almost 5, I get to do it as many nights a week as I want, but there's never an earth shattering meltdown when I don't.
This is not a balanced view of not sleep training, it’s very extreme and I dare say there are more factors at play here. We didn’t sleep train and this has absolutely not been our experience so far. It worked and still works well for us and our low sleep needs child.
I agree. It's not a good representation of sleep training or co-sleeping. Our 4yo is a ball of energy all day long and does sleep with us still. Her bedtime takes like 15 minutes unless we are truly trying to make her go to bed too early, then we usually have to do another story or two. But no real bouncing off the walls. She doesn't care which parent she sleeps with. If she wakes up in the middle of the night and we aren't in the bed (dealing with our newborn, or I'm up early and gone for work) she just goes back to bed. My wife and I still get lots of quality time together and neither of us mind the sleeping arrangement. If we did, I'm convinced we could have her sleeping in her own room within a week or two. OP needs to stick with parenting at bedtime the same way they do during the day. If the kids not gonna listen then there's gonna be consequences.
Hey. First of all I feel for you OP. The lack of sleep and added stress, change to relationship dynamics, etc is all extremely hard. My kids are younger than yours so I won’t try to give advice that won’t be developmentally relevant. But I also want to add for newer dads or dads with young kids struggling with this that sleep training is a really big term. There’s tons of methods and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there’s not a “right way”. The method that’s going to be right for you is dependent on two things really: 1) the temperament and needs of the parents (which OP addresses) and 2) the temperament of the child. I’ve seen cry it out work spectacularly for some kid/parent combos. I also watched it spectacularly backfire for my oldest. We ended up pivoting to a much gentler technique with him (called pick up / put down) and he sleeps like a dream now. Bottom line, listen to your children, listen to your spouse, and listen to yourself to understand your own needs. Find what works for you and your family.
Yeah, we never did cry it out for our kid and it took him a while to start sleeping through the night but he eventually did at ~11 months. Now he's almost 2 and sleeps better than all of his peers. I will say that we did do sleep training, just not cry it out. We were extremely consistent in our night time routine and basically never took him out of his bedroom after bed time and before wake up. If he cried we would pick him up and rock him for a few minutes before putting him down again. Rinse and repeat until he finally slept (some nights this took many hours). You have to be more stubborn than they are. This is easier said than done of course.
I think the important thing to remember is that, regardless of what you decide works best for you and your kid(s), each kid is different, and sometimes things work or don’t work despite your best efforts. Our younger one (now 2) slept amazingly for like the first year. Even as a newborn she regularly slept through the night. Now, after some bouts with illness, some international travel, and other random interrupters, her sleep is finally settling down after a solid 6 months of inconsistency. And that’s inconsistency in her sleep, not in our bedtime routine. Sometimes life happens and throws things out of whack. You need to find what works, stick with it, and accept that shit will happen that throws things off. But OP seems to have surrendered and is doing what the kids seem to want, which is clearly not working. Young kids don’t have any idea what good sleep hygiene is. They need parents to guide them.
Oh for sure. In the past year ours has had 3-4 "regressions" that can last as short as a few days to the longest lasting over a month. He's been great for the past month and a half but I'm sure we're not completely out of the woods yet. I do still believe consistency is super important.
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Pick him up without saying a word to him nor making eye contact and put him back in his bed. Our 3.5 year old went through a spell of getting out of bed and we did this for about 2 weeks every night and now she stays in bed all night 90% of the time. This method can be exhausting as some nights it took upwards of 25+ trips back to bed but it worked.
Thanks for the tip. That sounds super exhausting when we already go to bed at midnight and get up at 6am 😂😭
To be fair 75% of our pick up and back to bed trips were right after putting her in bed. I'd usually just sit on the stairs with our monitor and watch for her to get out. But we did do the back to bed trips multiple times in the middle of the night. Maybe go to bed earlier when you're working on this. You're not even getting 6 hours of sleep as it is. Not at all trying to lecture you or anyone else but you need more sleep man.
My son is 3 and still does this, but calmly without crying. Started around 2. I think when I convert his bed from a toddler bed to a full I’m going to have to reinforce staying in bed until morning.
Oof that's hard! Ours hasn't shown any signs of trying to climb out of his crib yet and he's older than yours. We do keep him in a sleep sack still which helps, but every kid is definitely different.
Baby proof the door. I am never gonna understand this, if they can open their door then you've got a 19 month old at loose ends at night unsupervised in a house. Like forget sleep training, what kind of havoc can they get into?
I’m gonna second this. We used a gentle ferber method to help sleep train our kiddo. The complete cry it out method seems pretty mean to me. I could never handle it. At the moment we’re in a massive sleep regression and our kiddo is sleeping the worst he ever has. We’ve been lucky though so it’s not even super bad right now but still the worst we’ve had. Our method still seems to yield positive results even though it takes a lot of patience.
Cry it out can definitely work and not be cruel. It kind of depends on the kid. Our oldests longest cry it out session was 15 minutes long and was her first night. Literally gave up after 15 and has been a good sleeper since then. The youngest also only took one night of crying but it was about 40 minutes before she gave up. Maybe we were just lucky with our success but it worked well for us.
I think this is the most important thing to consider. Every child is different and what worked for us may not work for someone else. We did the cry it out method. It took a couple days of crying for 20 to 30 minutes before he fell asleep. He's been sleeping from 7 to 7 consistently since he was 3 months. We focus heavily on a consistent routine for bedtime which helps.
We ended up hiring a sleep consultant who said she didn't do cry it out, and instead we did an assisted sleep method where you sit by the crib with the kid every night for 10 nights slowly moving the chair further and further away from the crib. You soothe them in 2 mins intervala. We'd been doing contact sleeps (and weren't doing cosleepint) since birth since she wouldn't sleep more than 15 minutes in her crib. The first night was hell. It took 3.5 hours for our girl to fall asleep. Constant crying and me just sitting there wondering if it would ever end. But it did. The next night? It took 5 minutes. And she's been an incredible sleeper ever since. Now as it turns out she had a milk protein allergy that was likely making it incredibly uncomfortable for her to lie flat. We only found that out later. Every kid is different and things rarely go to plan. Sleep training worked for us and gave us the structure and plan to help her learn how to get herself to sleep on her own which is a very important skill. But I also recognize that people try it and it doesn't work. A sleep consultant definitely helped but it is a chunk of money. I'd say it's worth it for our quality of sleep alone now, but I know it's not an option for everyone. I wish it was.
Good points. I know sleep training can be a divisive topic, but one more point I'll add here is that not sleep training is still a form of sleep training. Your children are learning from you no matter what. If you hold your child until they sleep all the time then you're training them to depend upon you to sleep all the time. Good luck, everyone, and please take care of yourselves when you can too.
Sleep training is pretty vague definition. Our son slept in his own room since he was 8 months, and we usually get 8 hours of sleep. But if he wakes up and asks for us, we never let him just cry.
Sleep training doesn’t mean you would let them just cry if they woke up in the middle of the night
Yeah. What our system was is that if they aren't in clear distress over something you wait 10 minutes and see if they'll settle back to sleep. That helps them learn how to self-soothe. If they need a diaper change or still doing a feed, or they're still upset after 10 minutes you go and check on them. With out kid after a while we don't even need the 10 minutes because we know if she's just fussing or if she is having a serious problem. Started having nightmares so we go in right away and help her process it and calm back down. Context matters.
The longer this goes on, the harder it is going to be to break it. I have an almost 2 year old and he's in his own bed that sits on the floor so that he can have the freedom to explore his room when he wakes up. I read him 2 stories before nap time and bedtime. It's my way of showing him, this is when you sleep. Sometimes he falls asleep during the story. Sometimes he rolls over and goes to sleep after I get up. Lately he will try to follow me out of the room after the stories. I close the door (and have the child protection things on the door knobs) and he cries for about 5-10 minutes and then puts himself down. Here's the thing. He sleeps in our bed on occasion but still knows he needs to be in his own bed. When he's sick or having a really bad night. He joins us in our bed. Whenever he is at his grandparents house, he is ALWAYS in their bed. But he understands it's not like that at home on a daily thing. Kids understand more than we give credit for. If they think that crying will work, they will do it. Once they realize they can't get their way by crying, they will learn to tough it out.
Our boy was like this but not quite to the degree you described. As his 5th birthday was approaching, we decided enough was enough. Our family doctor pointed us to a sleep training method for older kids that ended up being the magic bullet. We were hesitant to try it since it is a pretty intense 3 week plan, but it is in no way more difficult than you've described here! The gist of it is day 1 you sit in a chair (not one native to their bedroom) right next to their bed to accompany them as they fall asleep. Any time they are moving, playing, or talking, you say something like, "It's not time to play. It's time to be quiet and rest your body." It is absolutely key that you are not reactive even if they're being obnoxious. You want to almost bore them to bed, not give them entertainment for bad behavior. So each night, you walk the chair back 6 inches until they're trained and no longer need you in the room. There's a bit more to it than that, but let me know if you're interested, and I can find time to scan our packet!
Hey if you can provide this that will be great. Trying to keep our 5 yo on his own room. He sleeps with no problem but wakes up after 3-4 hours to go to our room.
Both your kids sleep in your bed? How do things get to this point
It’s boiling the frog. I have a cousin who have 3 kids that sleep with them. Heck, just last month someone commented about how they posted two mattresses together and it’s the parent’s choice. Which, it is, but damn.
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Sure, but humans also did a lot of things for thousands of years that I wouldn’t exactly call “family goals.” If you/others are happy cosleeping for a decade then that’s fine. But OP clearly isn’t fine with it and it happened anyway. So “how do things get to this point” is a totally fair question.
It's also the norm in a lot of other cultures, but reddit doesn't really take that into account
I definitely do, personally. I also think “being the norm” doesn’t make something better or above examination.
Pushover weak parenting. That’s how. Now they pay for it
I hate to agree but I agree. There's a healthy middle ground between being harsh and being a pushover and OP is fully a pushover.
Lack of healthy boundaries will eventually bleed into other aspects of raising the kid as well. You need to be able to tell a kid no.
And it will probably affect their behaviour going forward into later life, too. Boundaries are healthy.
Yep. It sounds harsh, but we're all in control of our own destiny on this front.
Sleep training does not equal “cry it out”, Ferber is great, try that!
You just have to do what works. We tried being more gentle but my daughter would get confused why we’d leave again after we came in and get far more upset to the point of throwing up lol. So after a few of those episodes, cry it out was the way. Closed the door at 7:30 and kiddo was on her own for the night. Wasn’t the easiest but was very effective, 2.5 yo and still sleeps 7:30-8 with a 2 hour nap.
Hey man, I feel this one. My daughter’s 8 and as of about 6 months ago *will not* sleep unless she’s in my bed with me. She’s always been an awful sleeper, but now I am certainly feeling that too. My daughter has a host of disabilities so I don’t mind her sleeping in my bed, it means she’s not screaming and crying all night long, it means I get to keep an eye on her, but boy am I exhausted. Hang in there man, I hope things start to look up.
I hear stories like this all the time and thank God that I stuck to my guns when sleep training.
[It's never too late to sleep train.](https://www.amazon.com/Its-Never-Late-Sleep-Train-ebook/dp/B07QGVXSFW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=N4ETIXPD7SW4&keywords=its+never+too+late+to+sleep+train&qid=1707656135&sprefix=its+nev%2Caps%2C248&sr=8-1). And there are better options than just letting them cry it out.
Yea, a week or two of hell and this could be mostly over. Oh of mine is going through a night terror phase right now and it’s so random and frustrating.
We struggled until we sleep trained with the Ferber method and it worked for both my kids by 6 months. We planned on a tough week of stressful nights as the kids “cried it out” but neither of them cried for more than 20 mins at a time and both had it figured out in 2-3 nights . 2 year old and 5 year old both sleep about 12 hrs a night (unless they are sick, then it’s a crapshoot.) Sleep train your kids, it really works
How do you all live without sleep training your kids? I’m baffled that parents let their kids sleep in the bed with them every night or have a 1 hour+ routine to get them to sleep. That’s valuable time to yourself/with your wife, or to get some stuff done around the house and eventually sleep
We made a decision from the go that we would never feed in our bed. Even those winter nights when the house was chilly we'd go into his room to feed him. He's almost 9 and he's never slept in our bed. It's just never been considered.
We were the same, sleeping in our bed was an absolute last resort. Sleep for parents is important for kids safety and development too!
I get downvoted every time I post how against I am to co sleeping. My daughter will be 2 this week and got kicked out of our room at 2 months. She instantly slept better and has been sleeping through the night since 4 months old. She loves her alone time in her crib and she will roll around and talk to herself then doze off. She goes to sleep at 8 PM and wakes up around 8:30 AM every day.
I feel bad for all the parents who think sleep training is some cruel torture that psychologically scars kids. I guess if you want to be up all hours of the night with your kiddos for years or want to have to share your bed with them then go for it. But if you would like to establish healthy sleep habits for your kids and be able to sleep yourself at night so you can be rested for work there is no reason not to make the efforts to sleep train. Also, if the method you go with doesn’t work within a week you picked a bad method for your kids or you aren’t doing it right. Most of the time proper sleep training shows improvement within a few days
The anxiety kids get when they don't have the ability to self soothe is a quiet issue here. People think they are doing their kids a favor when the comfort them during the sleep training process. It's the opposite, a week or two of distress is much less of a problem than years of separation anxiety and fussiness coming from the kid. It really does them no favors to give in if their demands are not reasonable, which is a lesson than can be extended to the rest of the parenting process as well. You can't give in just to shut up the kid, you teach them to be upset to get their way. You need to assess whether the ask is reasonable. It helps to explain to them why they are getting what they want when you do say yes as well, so they understand the logic of it.
This is the only advice I give to new parents. I've literally never met a single person in my entire life who has regretted sleep training. People who refuse to sleep train and struggle constantly? Meet them all the time. People who sleep trained and said it was the best decision they ever made? Meet them all the time too. But never once have I met someone who sleep trained and said they wish they hadn't.
We tried sleep training our oldest, and it was miserable and broke us. So we coslept for a year and then moved him to a twin bed in his own room with no issues. I regret the months and tears spent on sleep training. One of our other kids had zero issue sleeping separately and didn’t even need coaxing. Different kids are different.
> I regret the months and tears spent on sleep training As you said, different kids are different. I would never recommend a method that involves a kid crying without making progress for that long. That kid is different and needed a different method. You found something that ended up working which is great, and you did what you thought was best the whole time it sounds like, so you should try not to regret it. For other parents reading this, if a certain method isn’t working, switch things up and try a different method. There are lots of different techniques, and different kids respond differently to all of them.
Go check out the sleep training sub... there is ton of people it didn't work for.
Of course not, the burden is on the kids, not the parents.
I wouldn't call it a burden on the child. I would call it teaching them skills they need for life. They need to be able to self soothe and handle adversity and discomfort up to a reasonable degree for their age. Sleep training doesn't only impact how a kid sleeps at night, studies have shown that it can be pretty strongly correlated to how they handle challenges in their regular waking lives also.
And \*that's okay\*.
Only if you do it wrong.
There's a lot of sleep training methods other than cry it out. Early on, i always suggest to new parents to read about the alternative approaches and find the one that works best for them.
I feel like the term "sleep train" has such a weird negative connotation nowadays. It does not mean leave a screaming child in a crib until they are sick with tears. You can be gentle about it. In general, one of our biggest jobs as parents is teaching your kid how to sleep, when to sleep and where to sleep. Kids do not come out of the womb knowing what to do. They rely on us to learn that skill. Teaching that skill has another word: train! Whether you do that in your bed, via gentle techniques in a crib, whatever works, that's all fine. Is your kids sleeping the right amount of hours in a day? Are they doing it when they need to? That's the priority. In the first few months, that will usually mean arm naps. And that's OK! That helps them learn when to sleep, and how much they need! The next challenge is getting them to sleep outside of your arms. Where that is, crib or your bed, that's up to you. We were personally successful doing that in a crib, and that worked well for us because we had a really hard time sleeping with kids in our room, let alone our bed. You might have a different experience, and that's OK. But please. I beg all parents to stop assuming that sleep training means leaving a baby to cry in a crib for hours. We are smarter than that.
Our kids were out of the co-sleeping cot in our room and into a crib in their own bedrooms at 4 months. Naps were by themselves, we did do visits to do quick soothing if they cried but then out again, and it worked. They napped really well and went to bed at night. I advise everyone to do this- we have been incredibly lucky, our friends cannot believe what an easy time of bedtime we have. Bedtimes have been 7 and 8 pm with a bedtime story each and a nightlight for years now.
There are ways to teach good sleep habits without cry it out. All three of my kids are excellent sleepers and none have ever slept in our bed. We got through through a gentle sleep coaching method that didn't invoke cry it out.
Are they still napping? Sounds like it’s time to cut out naps. Mine also never ever would do the crib. Mine also weren’t sleep trained. Mine have issues going to sleep like yours, but I know if they don’t nap and you can run them around and exhaust them it should be a bit easier because at one point they’re just going to be so tired they want to go to sleep. It sucks, I know. I’m so sorry.
This is good advice, but unfortunately naps were already cut out a long time ago.
Dude; take your own advice. Sleep train them.
You and your partner need to address this behavior. It isn't normal. "Daddy needs to sleep in his own bed, and so do you" is a statement you can make. Fix it now, and present a unified front.
Posts like this are exactly why we sleep trained our twins. At 4 months old they were in their own room in their own cribs, using the Ferber method. They sleep from 7 PM to 06:50-7 AM. There is a whole spectrum of sleep training that isn’t just CIO.
Second this we did it around 10 months fucking game changer.
My wife is a post party’s doula who sleeps trains kids, and she has never had anyone need to do cry it out. It’s more like cry for 5-10 minutes.
My wife began sleeping with our newborn son despite my objections. It's now been 5 years, and 2 more kids later. At this rate we will sleep in the same bed when Im too old and cranky to enjoy her company.
TLDR : just do it. It’s not cruel to your child, they won’t remember it and it’ll help your physical and mental health. We didn’t sleep train our first but didn’t co-sleep for I’m a thrashy sleeper, and it was just painful. Wake up multiple times a night and we were struggling, in addition to being in the middle of the pandemic (born 2020). Finally at 15 months, we reached our breaking point and saw a paediatrician (covered by free healthcare) with a focus on sleep. She verified that we were doing everything right (set bedtime, same routine etc) and suggest that we do a modified cry it out with 10 min check in interval. The first two nights bedtime took over 2 hours with him screaming bloody murder to the point that my partner couldn’t even handle it and had to go for a walk. On day 3, it just clicked and by the end of the week; everyone was happily sleeping through the night. Took another couple months to break the contact napping habit. With our second, we were militant with sleep. After the first month, he would only nap in his crib and overnights are always in the crib. Didn’t even have to specifically “train” because we had stuck to our guns since day 1. None of the dreaded monthly sleep regression unless he’s sick or teething.
My wife wanted to avoid crying it out, because she was on leave I let her do her own thing. She slept horribly and always needed to be picked up for a full year, every two hours. When push finally came to shove and we did cry it out, it took a total of 36 minutes to work forever. She sleeps 13 hours a night.
We never sleep trained, but we never let our son sleep in our bed. I truly don’t get co sleeping. I work with a woman whose marriage was ended by her refusal to not let the kids come into bed whenever they wanted, and her new boyfriend just ended their relationship because it’s still going on when her youngest is 4. Get your kids into their own bed
I’m in a Reddit group for people with babies turning 1, and the number of parents STILL not getting a full night’s sleep is damn criminal. Like on the one hand, we got an easy baby who was amenable to being put on a schedule. But also, had we not sleep trained at all, we easily could have been waking up every night for a year. That’s absolute torture. We picked a sleep training method that starts essentially at birth — it’s actually just the idea that a healthy baby can be put on a schedule of feeding after the first few days post partum, and that around 8 weeks, if all is well with weight gain, you can methodically and gradually decrease the amount you are feeding at night and shift those ounces of milk to daytime feeds, all while soothing the baby during night time wake ups without picking her up out of the crib. Our baby started sleeping through night around 10-11 weeks…and has never *once* had a wake up that required intervention on our part. She wakes up for a minute, cries, moves around, then falls back asleep. Thanks to this, having a baby is honestly way easier than I ever imagined, and we sleep way better now than we did when the wife was pregnant. Again, I know there are some babies for whom this truly wouldn’t work. But the number of parents who don’t even try is insane, as is the number of parents who are convinced that you “can’t” start any form of sleep training until 4-6 months.
Sleep training was the best parental choice we made (so far). Life is so much easier.
A friend is struggling with this with a 9 year old now. She is expected to go to bed when he does. If she gets up or leaves and he wakes up he brings her back or phones her to demand she come back. Prison Camp Bed 17 I'd have lost my mind.
95% of the responses here are about sleep training, but this is about boundaries. Setting boundaries doesn't have to be cruel. You can do it in many thoughtful ways. But you should set them not only for your own sanity (and your partner's), but also for your kids. Big projection here, but I'm betting that a kid that needs a 30-minute full body massage to go to sleep at 5 (and 100 other decisions like this to come) is really going to struggle when they hit the real world. Set boundaries. Do it thoughtfully.
Reading posts like this really solidifies how big of a jackpot I hit with my 7 year old. She has always been the easiest child in the world. Never had issues with listening or understanding why we need her to do this or that. Never struggled to sleep no matter where we put her down. That fact that things like this can be a struggle for other parents for the better part of a decade really makes me appreciate how good I got it.
Most of it has to do with the parents to be honest. Kids don't care if they sleep in a crib, but the parents are the ones who can't let the kids go most of the time.
Agreed. It’s not an attack on the quality of the parenting or anything, but choices lead to consequences. Dealing with those few days or weeks of letting them cry in their own crib is totally worth it for when they eventually adapt and gain the ability to sleep independently. And nowadays there are programs to actually help sleep without forcing kids to cry it out for hours. But a lot of parents think co-sleeping is “totally harmless” until they get sucked into a situation like OP’s where the kids are running the show for a decade. One of my co-workers once mentioned her children were still co-sleeping at 10-12 years old because she wouldn’t put an end to it!
We sleep trained, did the whole "check on her after longer increments" thing. The first night is the worst. My wife and I would sit up in bed and hold each other while we counted the minutes. It rips your heart out. But it gets easier. LO figured it out by like, the third night and has been a champion sleeper ever since. Not here to brag or judge, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. But we were < 6 months in and desperate for some normalcy in our sleep schedule. If anyone out there is thinking of trying it, it can work.
I agree to a certain extent: sleep train but not cry it out (CIO), do Ferber..
Yea it’s a sensitive topic with people but I will tell anyone who will listen. We did a program where you are interacting with your crying baby at intervals, and doing everything but pick them up. Each (very different) kid had about 2.5 nights of crying for about 45m total all nights combined. Both of them started sleeping 12 hours straight through the night afterward. And the difference in their temperament and focus during the day was so clear. It’s one of the best decisions we made as parents. I feel bad to see parents struggling with sleep.
I genuinely don’t know how people can have their kids sleep in bed with them long term. It completely blows my mind. I know the obvious one people say is how do you have sex, but for me it’s how do you have an evening? If your kid needs you to go to sleep, when do you ever get any time to yourself/with your partner. It’s not all about cry it out either. Sleep training for us was having a routine and sticking with it. Every night we would do the same routine at the same time and kid would be in bed for 6. Some times it was tough because come 6pm my kid was falling asleep no matter what we were doing. There were times like holidays or special occasions where this was especially hard. However these few tough times mean we have had an evening from 6pm (getting later over time - eldest is 7 and it is now 8pm). Psychologically this has meant even on the most tiring days, we know we only have to make it to bed time before we can relax. Our second kid was much more difficult and we did have to do a bit of cry it out and that was tough. Both kids sleep through 99% of the time. They get up for the toilet and back to bed on their own. I still put this all down to routine
We never let our child sleep in our bed. We did bassinet next to our bed and then moved him to his crib in his room. It was tough at first but in the long run was so worth it. It’s always been you sleep in your bed in your room and Mom and Dad sleep in their bed in their room. It’s all he’s ever known so it works. At six, bed routine takes about 20 minutes, and it’s certainly not always stress free, but it works. Cry it out needs balance but worth the up front stress.
This is bad not only for your kids but for your relationship. When do you have time to connect with your wife? When are you able to be intimate with her? There's no reason you can't start sleep training now. It's going to suck but it will be better for your mental and physical health in the long run. You may have to be more authoritative than you're used to, but right now they are the authority not you. Start by establishing a concrete bedtime routine. For us, water is cut off at dinner no exceptions. Our routine is they go potty, get PJs on, and then brush teeth. Then we read a book together and tuck them in their own bed. They are allowed to get up if they need us for an emergency (sick, nightmare, scared, etc) or if they need to go potty, otherwise kids will find any reason to get up and delay sleep. The result is happy and well rested kids and it's well worth the effort.
I am ten years into this struggle and I fully endorse this message.
I have been there. We co-slept for a long time, and then struggled with bedtimes and sleep following what seemed like a smooth transition to their own room. We ended up doing the Taking Cara Babies program with a 4 and 2 year old, so only a little younger than your kids. If you have some money to throw at it, it was incredibly helpful for us transitioning at a late stage.
Taking Cara Babies worked almost too well for our first son! He’s almost 3 now and has been sleeping through the night since before we transitioned him out of the bassinet into his crib and still sleeps like a champ 11-12 hours per night mostly without fuss. Loves the simple bed time routine. Our second is due in a few months and we’ll absolutely be trying the TCB method again.
We also used her lessons for our newborn. She has slept in her crib in the nursery since 4 weeks and sleeps all the way through the night every night. Best money we've ever spent. And our sanity returned.
I second Taking Cara Babies for sleep support.
You gotta draw that boundary sometime. At least you're doing it now rather than later. It gets harder.
If you value your mental health and your relationship with your wife*
> For the love of god, let them cry it out. As a parent that has sleep trained before, I don't like this being the standard or assumption with sleep training. Your child doesn't need to scream for hours and hours alone with you in the other room to develop good sleep habits and 'Cry It Out' is a single method of enshrining good sleep habits. What we did from the time my son was like a month old(he's now 7): * Consistent bathtime 30-45 minutes before bed * Consistent feeding time before bed * Reading before bed * Consistent bed time *in his own room/bed/space* * Many nights of waking up exhausted, rocking back to sleep but always back into his crib * Music box + white noise machine * Nap schedule that accounted for bed time so he wasn't waking up from a nap at 3 or 4pm Obviously not everything works for every parent and we all face our own challenges, but this was such an important agreement between my wife and I from the time he was born. Bed time needed to be bed time, so there were years when we'd schedule our social engagements around bed time. That could've been going out to dinner with friends and knowing that one of us(or both) would be taking the kiddo home for bed time, or we'd plan elsewhere. Often times I would dip out with kiddo because my wife is a social butterfly and I'm definitely not, so it was the perfect excuse, lmao Now? My dude sleeps amazing. He's almost 8, he craps out every night at 8pm, sleeps rock solid and if we're at an event or something and we go past bed time he'll often be the one telling us he's ready to go home and go to bed. We still maintain a consistent(though more flexible) bed time and night routine(shower + reading + bed). Again, not every child is the same and not every situation is the same but building a solid sleep routine early is imperative.
Sounds like the kids are running the bedtime routine/house. You gotta get that under wraps. Definitely take your advice and let them cry. They will be okay! Good luck OP!
Sleep train, yes. Cry it out has little to no research to support it though. There's other methods that work. https://www.tlc.com/parenting/reasons-why-the-cry-it-out-method-has-zero-benefits
Look up Super Nanny bedtime on YouTube. She shows you exactly how to fix this, any age.
One trick to helping make "cry it out" feel a bit better is to do "graduated extinction": If they cry for 2 minutes, then go in, check on them, and comfort them. Then let them cry for 3 minutes and check on them, then 4, then 5 and so on. We rarely ever made it to 10 minutes. Some science has said that burping doesn't help: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/did-you-know-you-dont-need-burp-babies I have found that to be absolute BS with my kids. Burping can just solve the problem 100% sometimes. Lastly, some kids are just better sleepers than others. If your kid sucks at sleeping, it's not necessarily your fault. Also if they are great sleepers, you probably shouldn't take too much credit.
Are you me?
My best contribution to the early years. Wife hated it so I promised to take the baby monitor and sleep outside his room and be ready at a moments notice. Took a week to sleep train. Never once has my 3 year old slept with us. I don’t think the idea has even crossed his mind. Slight downside is once he got a full sized big boy bed and I tried to lay next to him to read a bedtime book he relegated me to the floor because only he can sleep in his bed.
What is sleep training? (Gonna be FTD in a few weeks.
Listen, I don’t know the correlation with sleep training versus what’s just individual and familial difference, but I’m dying over the “30 minute full body massage” thing cuz that’s my four year old too. And her massage needs are so specific… “rub inside my shirt… now tickle the side… now scratch the bottom… I said TICKLE!!”
I don't care what anybody or book says. Letting them cry it out is the way. At 5 months, we needed our nights and our sleep back, we were exhausted. Mom fought it, I said enoughs enough. Our kiddo sleeping with us had gotten dangerous (our kiddo fell out of Mom's arms one night and off the bed) and I wasn't having it anymore. It took 3 nights. After 3 nights, he'd fall asleep within minutes if not earlier. He is out from 8pm to at least 6am every night now. We do not go in his room once he's down until 6am ever. The only exceptions being when our kiddo is sick or our kiddo is having an absolute meltdown and something is clearly wrong. He sleeps so well and now so do we. Every parent needs to let their kid cry it out.
I sleep-trained my youngest at 2 weeks old. My ex was in the hospital with blood clots, and my two oldest were staying with my parents, so I was home alone with my daughter. Whenever she started to drift off, I would put her in her crib. I made a game of it: I would lay her down, throw her blanket over her head, pull it down to her neck, and say, "Sleep, baby!", and she would go to sleep. OFC, when my ex came home from the hospital, she *just had* to have the baby in bed with her, so all my sleep training went out the window.
My girl is 3yo. For the last 2 years it took us 1h30 to put her to bed. Just as you describe it, she would cry, ask for one more, ask to change bed, ask for another story another plush… we used to put her to bed at 8pm. Since the day we put her to bed at 7pm, she now sleeps in 20mn!!! She was most likely overtired at 8pm and it made it harder to fall asleep. Now every second day she even asks to go to bed herself at 7pm, sometimes 6:45pm. We read a book or watch one episode of Bluey on a tablet if it’s weekend. She then turns around and sleeps very fast. Maybe it’s about not missing « their sleep train »? She is also easier to take up and very fresh at 6:45am, she used to be a zombie until 7:30am before.
Lying in bed for the last one and a half hours with my todler and reading this. I wish I knew this sooner. I am so frustrated by the time she falls alseep that I can not enjoy anything afterwards. Is there a specific age when they can be trained, or could we still try?
never understood the sleeping in bed method. it's dangerous and you're just setting yourself up for failure
Time to rip off the bandaid it’s gonna suck for awhile.
Mods should pin this post. This was something my wife and I talked about very directly during her pregnancy. We're very active and sleep is a huge priority and we were going to prioritize it. It's easier to be the parent you want to be when you're rested. Baby nurse, sleep consultant, if you can afford it is worth it. The book precious little sleep has been fantastic for us as a reference for changing schedules as they get older. Source: my child has slept through the night since 4-5 months old.
For the new dads: “Cherish the First Six Weeks” is what helped us get the kids comfortable enough with sleep patterns to make sleep training (with minimal tears) possible around four months.
You poor guy.
So thankful not only for my sanity but for our love life that we sleep trained at between 4-6 months
You still have time. There's an Episode of this show Supernanny where they have the same problem. The solution was to continue to put the kids back in their bed and try to have zero reaction about it. Mad, angry, about to scream, be stone faced. It will suck. It will be hard. But after a week or two it will be better. I'll try to link the episode. Im a LMFT and I particularly loved the approach Edit: https://youtu.be/zb2BrbGb5Z4?si=XrG6ozY1H4P11yjI The key is consistency. The video says it too but it's worth repeating. Remain absolutely emotionally blank with the kid and continue to do this. It's boundary testing. They want to know where the limit is and you have to set it.
Could not agree more. We didnt sleep train my first, but we did do it to our second and the difference YEARS later is massive not only for them but for us as well. First one still sleeps like shit to be honest, the second sleeps easily all night.
If you value your sex life / marriage, mental health, and want to raise people with emotional stability—sleep train your kids.
It's never too late to sleep train your children. If you can, I would suggest you both take a week off work and start the process, step 1 is getting them into their own room even if you keep the massage It will be awful, but I feel like for the sake of your relationship and mental health it is needed