p.15 Good Night, Sleep Tight
I could not agree more with this statement! If you want your child to learn how sleep through the night or during naps, you must be consistent. Develop a plan of action and stick to it! With Cooper we decided to use the Cry-It-Out (CIO) method that is laid out in the book Baby Wise. While in the beginning of the CIO, I felt weak at times. Cooper would sometimes cry for a full hour before falling asleep at night, but we were committed to our plan. Finally after a week, his crying had diminished to 5-10 minutes of crying. Sticking to our plan had worked!
But I have had weak moments, particularly in the middle of the night. When we were trying to eliminate the middle of the night feeding (which I knew he no longer needed, but was waking out of habit), we started to implement CIO. The first three nights were hard, he cried for 45 minute to an hour. By the fourth night, his crying had decreased to only 30 minutes. However the 5th night, I caved in and feed him after he cried for 20 minutes because I was tired and I hated to hear him cry. It took me twice as long to get rid of the middle of the night feeding because he now expected me to come in a feed him. I learned early on that be consistent with our plan was important! Otherwise, I was going to spend more time trying to obtain our goal and with more tears!
What ever sleep training method you chose to implement with your child, make sure you stick to it. Don’t do most of the time, do it all of the time. Children thrive off of consistency! They need to know how to behave, but if you keep changing it up, they will never learn what type of response or action you are looking for.
Here are steps for staying consistent when implementing sleep training:
- Write your method/ strategy down
- Work on one goal at a time. Whether that is eliminating the middle of the night feeding or waking early from a nap. Just choose one thing to tackle at a time.
- Have support. Make sure you have someone who will support you weather that is your spouse or a friend you can call. Just make sure you have someone who can encourage you to stick with your decision and plan!
We are currently trying to use sleep training CIO for our 2 month old. He is good during the night, but the naps are a problem, he never sleeps longer than 45 minutes and he will cry for another 45 minutes and be more than happy when he sees me. I was wondering when you’re sleep training throughout the daily naps, if your son cried for 45 minutes without going back to sleep, when would you put him down again? Or would you just let him cry for even longer than 45 minutes after he has woken from a 45 min nap? I can’t seem to wrap my head around it. Thanks!
Your blog is great! So much information
In the beginning Cooper would cry for 45 minutes until the end of the nap, but soon he learned to put himself back to sleep after 15 or 20 minutes of crying. it does get better! You could always try putting your baby in a swing if they wake up and will not go back to sleep. As for waketime, if he would cry for the rest of the nap I would just go off his sleep cues and put him down once he show signs of being tired. HTH!