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Teaching a baby to sleep by himself
By ella | April 12, 2007
Controlled crying. Two words that strike fear into my already overly-emotional heart.
Last night my fifteen month old’s screams of abandonment and indignation filled the monitor airwaves for nearly an hour leaving me shaken and feeling rotten to the core.
For I have a secret: in order to move Ben out of my bed and into his cot at Christmas time - which was becoming pressing for fear of him falling off the bed before we could get to him when he woke - I couldn’t bring myself to do it properly. So I would lay next to him, sometimes holding his hand, sometimes not as he drifted off. If he woke during the night I simply stretched my arm through the cot bars and he would return blissfully to sleep, often caressing my arm as if there was nothing more perfect on this Earth. This worked fine for several months until recently when bedtime has become playtime and I was lying in bed for fifteen minutes one week, thirty the next waiting for him to finish whatever play he had decided to perform for me each evening.
So last night I steeled myself, put him down, kissed him softly and left the room. Then I came straight back in again, lay him down, stroked his back and left again. Then I came straight back in, lay him down, stroked his back and - well you get the picture. I repeated this for an hour until he fell asleep. He might as well have written a sign and put it at the end of his cot ‘ASLEEP UNDER PROTEST’ the way he was lying, limbs at every angle, the least angelic pose he could muster as his body gave way to sleep.
At naptime today I steeled myself for worse crying as he anticipated the misery to come. It took two minutes of half-arsed crying before he fell into his daily afternoon coma.
This evening he cried as I laid him down and then stopped - clearly too much trouble. As I left the room he started chatting. Chat, chat, chat. He’s not asleep and I’m sure there’ll be some crying in a minute but he’s up there getting himself to sleep and I’m down here doing something else.
I cannot tell you how much I was dreading doing this. His failure to thrive, his eating and his sleeping have been so difficult to deal with - as much in my head as in any practical sense - that I felt there was no way I could have another baby. Absolutely no way I could cope with anything like this again. And that felt devastating.
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Read More:
- Sleep training: Part Two
- And God said, “Let there be crying”; and there was crying
- Baby sleep and sleep training: Part One
- I don’t WANT to go to bed
- Sleep Training
7 Comments
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Just two days ago, I read about a study that showed that parent-child attachment levels improve decisively after the “controlled crying” approach. I don’t know why that is, but it was true for us - Bub was noticeably happier (he was seven months old at the time), virtually a changed baby. But it’s so, so hard.
I can definitely point to sleep problems with my daughter (didn’t sleep thru till she was 1 year, and still screams in protest before naps and bedtime several times a week), as the reason I’m reluctant to have a second child.
bubandpie - that study doesn’t surprise me at all when you consider that both parent and baby are better rested and the parent is possibly less resentful after the baby learns to sleep. Fortunately I didn’t have a tired baby this time (he was already a good sleeper, just wasn’t falling asleep without me) but I was certainly happier when my eldest eventually learnt, after two goes at controlled crying, to sleep when he was a baby.
Congratulations on this milestone! I hope you really get to enjoy at least a few months of good sleep.
Controlled crying worked for our first, but ouch, it’s difficult. Interestingly, number 2 girlie wouldn’t sleep through until we put her in her own room at 6 months. Well done for tackling this, even though it can’t be easy.
Now with our two eldest we’re able to get them down easily enough, but they like to sneak into our bed in the wee hours of the morning and we don’t realize they’re there until we get up. Let’s hope they outgrow this by the time they’re teenagers!
Does this mean number four might be a possibility now then?!!!!
Well done on the sleep thing. Babies are tricky little buggers.