Sleep Training. What’s Your Take On It?
May it be like this every night.
If you ever want to spark a discussion in a group of moms, one thing you can bring up is how to sleep train your child. There are as many varying opinions on this matter as there are flavors of ice cream.
When Serophina was old enough to start sleeping in a crib, it was an almost nightly battle of her crying and fighting and calling out “mama!” reaching her little arms out from between the crib rails as if she was locked in a prison cell. It was heartbreaking!
I remember dreading putting her down for the night because she just didn’t want to go to sleep on her own. I went through agonizing feelings of guilt wondering if I was doing the right thing. I bought many books on the subject but didn’t agree with most of the methods of letting your baby “cry it out”. Eventually, we got to the point where she could go to sleep without the battle but any time she woke up during the night, it was the same thing all over again. She just didn’t know how to put herself back to sleep.
Saioa’s pediatrician suggested starting to sleep train at two months old. He explained that it’s important to put them down when they’re drowsy and let them fall asleep on their own before it’s ingrained in them be rocked or held in order to fall asleep.
When the idea was first presented to me, I thought it was a plain ole cruel thing to do, letting my sweet little baby cry herself to sleep! I already had a notion in my mind of how painful it would be. Turned out I was wrong and Dr. K. was right.
Allowing them to put themselves to sleep at a very young age is a really great thing that we can do for our babies and ourselves. When I first started trying it with Saioa at two and a half months, she didn’t really mind. If she got a little fussy, I would just give her back her pacifier, gently pat her and walk away. A few minutes later she’d be fast asleep, no crying whatsoever! No guilt whatsoever! It was so painless and now if she wakes up during the night, she goes back to sleep on her own like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Now, our nightly routine is to lay Saioa down in her bassinet after she’s been bathed and fed and she goes to sleep on her own with a smile on her face! In fact, when she’s tired and I wait too long to put her down, she actually gets cranky. She WANTS to be put down! It’s a truly ingenious concept! Thanks Dr. K!
What’s your opinion on sleep training?
I’m happy to hear that with Saioa it is is much easier to put her down that before with her big sister(: I was a wimp when it came to listening to Isaac cry, so I gave in quickly and he trained me. Luckily by 4 or 5 months he learned on his own to put himself back to sleep in the middle of the night, whew! He still likes to be snuggled to sleep, but will go down now with only a couple minutes of fussing without that snuggle.