If you have not already done so, please read Blog Posts 1 through 5 that describe how sleep is important and beneficial. I will post specific information for parents and children based on my book, “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.” Please do not be put off by my book’s length. This is a reference book. Read only the topic of interest to you.
Since birth, our son Max has been sleeping in a bedside crib next to our bed in our bedroom waking up once for a feed on most nights. He has been a decent sleeper up until 4-months. Since then he would wake up 2-4 times a night requiring rocking to sleep. This sometimes would take a couple of minutes and sometimes would be a 20-30 minute exercise. By the time Max turned 6 months we were already quite tired. But things just turned worse when he was 6.5 month old and started rolling actively in his sleep. He would wake himself up constantly: every 45 mins or so. I gave in and started co-sleeping with numerous snooze feeds to pacify him to sleep. I found co-sleeping very stressful as I was worried that he would fall off the bed. So I could not sleep properly myself even when he was asleep in between his numerous feeds. All of this felt like a major regression with the sleep situation getting worse than in early weeks of his life. At this time our approach was to be constantly increasing total awake time of Max to make him tired for the night. This resulted in a schedule whereby Max would have three daytime naps and bedtime that would start at 10.00 pm.
We read Dr. Weissbluth’s book and understood our mistake of (a) keeping Max constantly overtired with a late bedtime and (b) not giving him a chance to learn to self soothe by constantly providing comfort feeds or rocking him to sleep at all times. We decided to implement extinction method with early bedtime at 5:30 pm, 2 daytime naps and only one feed per night. At this time we were also ready to move him to his new cot bed in his own room as he just turned 7-months old . We were very anxious about the process as usually we would not let Max cry more than 20 seconds during day or night before attending to him.
My husband was incredibly supportive. We planned to start the training on Thursday night when he would be at home and be involved during the next 5 days as he was travelling next week. He took over bedtime routine of bath, pajamas, bottle, bedtime story, transfer to bed.
1st night Max cried 1hour 40 mins. After Max fell asleep, he didn’t cry and whimpered for food only between 4 and 5 am. This means he slept on his own for 9-10 hours of continued sleep (as opposed to 45-90 mins stretches of sleep before when I was co-sleeping with him out of exhaustion)! At 4-5 am my husband fed him and changed him and promptly left the room. Unbelievably our son fell asleep after the feed in matter of minutes! He would then sleep until 7-7.30 am and wake up a happy calm boy. Previously after restless nights he would always wake up crying on a morning.
Subsequently crying times during extinction method were:
2nd night: 1hour 31 mins,
3rd night: 1 hour 51 mins,
4th night: 1 hour,
5th night: 45 mins.
On all nights he would sleep through until early morning feed and would go back to sleep immediately after. We continued extinction method for the next couple of weeks and crying reduced to 10 minutes on a night with some nights even without any crying. Now we implement principle of many hands alternating who is in charge of bedtime routine and nighttime feeds between me and my husband. Hearing him cry was incredibly difficult for us but reminded ourselves that we were teaching Max valuable skill of good sleep. I would not be able to do this if my husband were not at home supporting me.
The improvement is just great not only in his sleep quantity and quality but also his overall demeanor: happy and content when he wakes up on a morning and also calm during the day. Our life is starting to improve significantly with us being able to sleep at night with only one feed at night and getting our evenings back. My only regret is that we have not done it earlier as our son is already 7 months old.
