Help us help our toddler sleep better at night?

In My Humble Opinion
21

When we adopted our first child in Jamaica, several friends sent us childcare books from the US. I was going through them with a Jamaican neighbor and wondered aloud why all the pictures were of white babies. My neighbor looked at me and said, “probably because only white people need to read about how to raise kids.”

Most of the books made me feel guilty and worried that I would ever hurt my fragile child’s feelings, self-esteem, ego, security, bonding with us (his parents), etc. Interestingly enough, while Dr. Spock got a rep for being a bleeding-heart softie spoiler back in the day, I found his advice most practical and reassuring. He said that different methods work with different kids and you have to figure out some of it yourselves, as parents of your kid. As for helping kids learn to sleep through the night, Dr. Spock was of the Let-Em-Cry-It-Out a few nights if they’re past infancy. He suggested that we think of it as them needing to wind-down at the end of the day and to exercise their lungs (I liked that, for some reason). The most basic role of parents is not to teach kids that all security comes from mom and dad but to teach kids eventually to become independent. Learning to sleep through the night on your own is part of that.

22

Cry-it-out worked for us. Shayla is 13 months now – she goes to bed at 7:30 each night, it’s now 8:30 in the morning and she’s still snoozing away.

One of the biggest solutions to her waking at night was making sure she went to bed with a full stomach. One oz. of rice cereal powder with six oz. of milk mixed in a bottle generally gets her through the night. Occasionally she’ll awaken in the night, but she soothes herself back down within minutes. The only time we get up and soothe her is if she has a nightmare.

I don’t think you’re going to find an exact answer here Stainz. Some people don’t like cry-it-out, and that’s fine – it’s not going to work for every baby and to keep pushing it on them after it has proven ineffective is when it becomes cruel. But since you were able to get it to work before, I’d keep trying it out, at least for the time being. Here’s hoping you find something that works both for you and BabyStainz!

23

One thing about your OP that I disagree with - I think the consistency thing is a bunch of malarkey. Kids’ needs change from week to week and month to month, and they can’t tell time. I agree with putting them down to sleep at the first sign of sleepiness, but if it doesn’t work then let it go. Maybe that would help w/the night waking - maybe she’s spending too much time in bed?

When my kids were that age, I think I used to just give them a little bottle if they woke up overnight and fussed. We did a lot of co-sleeping, but mine never took that to be playtime. I also had a rocking chair in their room that I often used to get them back to sleep.

But then, too, there were just periods when their sleeping sucked and that was that. And then it passed. It’s normal for kids to go through spells where they wake up, and then other spells where they sleep through.

That’s one of my beefs with CIO - it doesn’t truly “fix” sleeping forever & ever, because problems WILL come up again. I think the fewer battles, the better. My parents tell me I was a real PITA to put to bed when I was 2, 3, 4 years old, and they fought with me every night. What’s the point of that? I don’t fight with my kids - if they’re not sleeping well, so be it. I do my best to give them exercise and attention during the day and give them a bedtime snack. We’ve always taken their cues for their nap and bedtime schedule, rather than trying to follow the clock and be consistent.

At this point (they’re almost 3) they’ll tell US that it’s time to go to bed, and they never scream and fight about it.
This is probably incoheren, sorry; my ds is eager to show me what he just built. Check mothering.com for more ideas, but beware the “crunchier-than-thou” culture, they have a high percentage of neurotic, competitive mothers in the mix.

24

Our 9 month old has slept through the night (7:30 pm - 6:30 am) since about 9 weeks (right when I went back to work–bless her heart!) and she will wake up occasionally at around 4:00, but all we do is get up and put the binky* back in her mouth and it soothes her back to sleep. Of course, this won’t work if you don’t want your baby to have a binky.

*We realize that the binky will have to go at some point, but it’s working right now and she doesn’t have it all day, just for fussy times, like when she needs a nap. I had mine until I was 3, but I told my mother that’s not going to be the case for Susie.

Like DtC, I’ve seen the method of staying in the room silently on Supernanny and it always looks awkward, but if it works and we get to that point, we’ll try it.

25

We use the method you used to get our boys to start sleeping through the night (going into the room in increasing time intervals, except we’d increase 1 minute at a time, ending at 8 minutes maximum). We call it the AAP method, because we got it from the American Academy of Pediatrics. You have to retrain them though, after they’ve been sick or their schedule has changed. My husband’s cousin, the pediatrician, says that you should expect 2 nights of hell whenever you’re trying to change your kid’s sleep pattern and then they’ll settle down. We’ve always found that to work. We’ve never had the problems go on longer than 2 nights.

One thing we’ve added, is to wait for 5 minutes when the our youngest wakes up during the night, to see if he can put himself back to sleep. If that doesn’t work, we go in, be reassuring, sing him a song and leave, and then come back in increasing time intervals until he goes to sleep.

We tried the quietly staying in the room thing, and it worked, but then it got to the point that he wouldn’t go to sleep without one of us being there, so we went back to the modified cry it out method we’d been using.

26

My experience with the quietly in the room thing is that at first you hang out in the room. Then you hang out in the room for a while, and when they are not quite asleep, you leave. Then you hang out in the room for a while and when they get sleepy, you leave, but not all the way - you sit outside the room - close enough that they know you are present. After that, you spend a few weeks hanging at the top of the stairs with a book for an hour…

However, it takes months to get your evenings back completely. And, if what the problem is is middle of the night waking, we didn’t have the stamina for it - hence the sleeping bag on the floor.

The good news is eventually they go to college and they don’t sleep there, either, but its their roommates problem, not yours.

27

Well, I’m not quite through with it, and I just left it in Virginia at my parents’ house accidentally :rolleyes: , so I’ll tell you what I remember - we’re just at the stage where I’m keeping sleep logs, and we JUST started trying to get him to nap better. My son’s a catnapper - he will sleep for 20-30 minutes max during naps, and that’s about it. So our goal is to get him to nap longer during the day in the hopes that it will help his night sleeping.

We’ve been putting him down for naps, and when we get to the point where he usually wakes up, one of us will sit outside of his door (it’s been easier since we’re both off until tomorrow - we both go back to work tomorrow, though), and as soon as he starts to wake up, we’ll go in and rub his back until he goes back to sleep. We’ve been rocking him back to sleep if we need to. Apparently, if we do this for a week or so, his naptime length will increase. We just started this, and it seems like it might be starting to work - he’s been down for 1 1/2 hours and counting this afternoon, which is a vast improvement over the 20 minute naps we were getting all weekend and last week.

She also mentions if they get up in the middle of the night, keep things as quiet and calm as possible. We’ve started doing that, and while he’s still been waking up at 4 AM or so, we’ve been able to get him down much faster. Before, one of us was taking him downstairs, changing his diaper, fixing a bottle, feeding him in front of the TV, etc - but my husband got up and fixed his bottle while I rocked him and kept him in a quiet bedroom (we were staying with my 'rents over the weekend), and he went back down within 10 minutes of finishing his bottle two nights in a row (last night was tricky because we were in a hotel, so there was no other room to take him into). I also wasn’t changing his diaper in the middle of the night because that was just waking him up even more.

I’ve been told by friends that it DOES work, but it’s about a month-long process and not to expect it to work immediately. But once it does work, you don’t have to constantly retrain the baby like you would with CIO. We’re not even sure why his sleep habits changed so drastically - he was taking decent naps and sleeping 12 hours at night consistently until 3 weeks ago or so. But if this works, even if he goes through a few rough nights in the future, we won’t have to constantly train him to sleep well.

(If it were up to me, we’d co-sleep, but my husband’s not comfortable with it, and our room is tiny - there’s room for a mini-cosleeper next to our bed, but even that’s a tight fit - and I think my little chunker may have already come close to the weight limit on the mini-cosleeper).

E.