Can I ask a stupid sleep training question?

[karinothing]

Okay, I feel stupid for asking this BUT

SO DS goes down drowsy but awake. He knows how to put himself to sleep, but still wakes up to eat 1-2 times.

I keep hearing all these people say their kid STTN after sleep training but isn't the point of sleep training to get your kid to go to sleep on their own? If your kid already knows how to do that then how would sleep training work? Would you just not go in when they wake up at night? Or night wean in hopes that if they don't eat they will STTN?

I don't really have a desire to change how things are, but I am just curious.

[ijack]

No, for us sleep training was to help her go back to sleep without our help when she woke in the middle of night.

[madringal]

Hold old is your DS? And do you BF or FF?

In my experience babies usually are only waking to eat until about 4 or 5 months, after that they are waking for any number of other reasons and need to soothed. Eating (or nursing) typically soothes them, so they fall back asleep. So I think moms fall into a trap of thinking their kid is actually hungry, so they keep feeding them. And then the baby associates soothing to eating and it is just a vicious circle.

[karinothing]

I BF and he is almost 8 months.

I see him wake up at night (or during naps) and fall back asleep w/out me. He actually seems to wake up a lot! But he only actually gets upset twice and both of those times he really nurses, so I think he is hungry. I have no desire to night wean him.

ETA: I was really just curious, since I know he knows how to put himself to sleep sans boob.

[ijack]

and what we did is just went in and give her a paci instead of feeding her and she went back to sleep so I knew she wasn't really hungry. I don't believe in trying to get kids to "skip" a feeding if they're really hungry.

[oregonpachey]

I am glad you asked this! We are going to start sleep training soon. Our little guy goes down to sleep fine but wakes up multiple times a night to eat. Not just 1 or 2.

I am exhausted.

I am glad others have been successful at getting the night wakings down!

[Ashley&Scott]

OregonPachey-

DS has been waking every 2-3 hours lately, he used to go 4-5, sometimes 6 hour stretches. I blame teething. :@

[Deleted]

Also, some babies are just easier to train. I had a good friend with a baby the exact same age as mine. As soon as she got him to go to sleep on his own, he textbook started sttn.

Mine, not so much. We did a bit of training to get him to go to sleep, but it hasn't helped at all on the staying asleep problem. We might tackle things for serious once DH is off work for the summer. For now, we're all functional and it's hard to choose a good time to be miserable on purpose.

[8675309]

They key to sleep training is consistency. If you are going to change up how you react to his wakings then you are not helping him self soothe and fall back asleep.

Both my kids slept thru the night at 12 weeks. Maybe they are just super easy babies, but I'd like to believe its because we were consistent. We read a book called 12hrs in 12wks and had success both times. It wasn't easy but the book helped tremendously. I highly recommend it.

[sewpinkgal]

We initially did sleep training to get him to fall asleep on his own for bedtime and then eventually for naps. He was waking 3-5x/night until 6.5 months and I was thisclose to starting night weaning, when he dropped to 1 feeding a night on his own. For the past few weeks, we're getting more and more nights where he'll go 11ish straight hours, for which I'm so grateful, but if he wakes up crying, he is hungry and I still go in and feed him.

[Deleted]

Jun 20, 2012 15:49:45 GMT -5 8675309 said:

They key to sleep training is consistency. If you are going to change up how you react to his wakings then you are not helping him self soothe and fall back asleep.

Both my kids slept thru the night at 12 weeks. Maybe they are just super easy babies, but I'd like to believe its because we were consistent. We read a book called 12hrs in 12wks and had success both times. It wasn't easy but the book helped tremendously. I highly recommend it.

Were you breastfeeding?

This book is notoriously bad if you're breastfeeding. And not something I could do no matter what. I'd rather have a terrible sleeper at a year than schedule my newborn.

[8675309]

Jun 20, 2012 15:58:05 GMT -5 @tokenhoser said:

Jun 20, 2012 15:49:45 GMT -5 8675309 said:

They key to sleep training is consistency. If you are going to change up how you react to his wakings then you are not helping him self soothe and fall back asleep.

Both my kids slept thru the night at 12 weeks. Maybe they are just super easy babies, but I'd like to believe its because we were consistent. We read a book called 12hrs in 12wks and had success both times. It wasn't easy but the book helped tremendously. I highly recommend it.

Were you breastfeeding?

This book is notoriously bad if you're breastfeeding. And not something I could do no matter what. I'd rather have a terrible sleeper at a year than schedule my newborn.

No I was not, and you are right, it is practically impossible at that age to sleep train when they are not bottle fed. HOWEVER, the same rules apply when they are the OP's baby's age. You dont have to start sleep training as early as I did. (I started at 11 weeks and they were sleeping 10-11 hrs a night) and they are 100% healthy and fine.

I'm talking more about the self soothing training that I learned from the book. There were ALOT of great tips in the book.

[hannamarin]

I think it is hard to distinguish between hunger and habit.
Layla was waking every night at 1am to eat. Then we cut her off and let her cry through it. After 3 nights (we would go in and turn the sleep sheep back on) she stopped waking. So she probably wasnt hungry.
She also gets up at 5am to eat. Probably also a habit. I am not ready to cut that one out yet because sometimes she eats early in the evening

[DarcyLongfellow]

To be honest, I never understood that either. Those were two completely separate issues for us. We sleep trained her so she would fall asleep on her own around 6 or 7 months. But she didn't sleep through the night until she was 18 months old.

For us, sleep training was still helpful for middle of the night wakings because even though I would go in and nurse her at night wakings, if she didn't fall back asleep nursing I could just put her in her crib and she'd go back to sleep.

[keh2oblue]

My DD was like this under a year, too. She could put herself to sleep, but would still wake up at least 1x/night.

I created my own arbitrary sleep training...she was allowed one wake up feed/night up until age 1 when we weaned. Everything after that 1x (or after a year), we let her cio or put herself back to sleep. It actually worked well, and she's been a great sleeper since.

[oukapu]

Emily put herself to sleep before one month. She would wake up to eat, or I thought to eat. She really wasn't hungry. It was habit to wake up at that time and would expect me to come to her. I did my own version of sleep training at seven months and let her cry for a bit. If she got hysterical, I would get her to calm her down. She sleeps really well now.

[froggy76]

My DD night-weaned herself around 2 months, so any sleep training we did (which wasn't much) was just to get her to go down at night. If she ever did wake again during the night, I'd try to calm her down without feeding her instead of just nursing her back to sleep right away, so we never got back in the habit of night feedings. But I didn't do anything special to drop the night feedings.

[hopecounts]

At 6.5 months I night weaned DD. her weight was good (in fact she had jumped from her usual 10% to the 25%) after talking to her Ped at her 6 month appt. we went for it.
I shortened her nursing times at each feeding every other night until she stopped waking up for it when we were down to 4 minutes. Then we ferbered to get her to go to sleep on her own.

In our situation it was clear she was nursing as a paci to get back to sleep not out of hunger and she was waking 2-3 times a night.
She never got upset and it was really easy and made ferbering much easier.

[brit1017]

Jun 20, 2012 14:49:58 GMT -5 ijack said:

No, for us sleep training was to help her go back to sleep without our help when she woke in the middle of night.

This. We ended up doing dreamfeeds with DS b/c we didn't want to stop the night feeds yet, but he was waking up every half hour to eat, and then only eating an oz or 2 at most feeds. Within a week of starting sleep training, he was down to 2 dreamfeeds per night of 5 or 6 ozs and was STTN, which for us meant that when he woke in the middle of the night, he was able to fall back asleep without us intervening.