Sleep Training: Some Key Elements and Suggestions

(Originally posted over a year ago)

I wrote this up during work over the past few days. I've just been noticing lately how well Rachel goes to sleep, and felt it would be nice to share my process with other new moms so their children can learn to enjoy sleeping. Feel free to ask any questions or leave any comments you may have.

Sleep Training: Some key elements and suggestions.

This information is culled from several books and online sources, as well as from conversations with family and friends who have had similar success. I’m not trying to say I’m an expert, I just know that this method has worked very well for me (so far) and I want to pass the information along so that others can sleep as well as I have been for the past year or so.

First, the Keys. These are things you should remember throughout the process, which will help you understand your child and give him/her what he/she needs.

1. Babies need A LOT of sleep. Up until they are about 2, they should sleep about 14-16 hours. It is better to make sure your child is getting the right amount of sleep BEFORE attempting to sleep train them, and especially important during the training. If they take the training harder than expected, try to help them catch up during the day.

2. Babies will do better if they set the schedule. Let them sleep when they are tired, and adjust your routine accordingly.

3. Babies understand your contact with them. If you leave them in their crib while you watch them cry, they will only understand that you are nearby but not helping them. It’s better to leave the room entirely and let them figure things out on their own.

4. Babies thrive on routine. Make sure you do the same things AT THE SAME TIMES each day throughout the sleep-training process and beyond. They will adjust SO much better in this way.

5. Once you decide to let a scream fest ensue, you have to carry it out. If you let your child cry for 20 minutes before picking him/her up, he/she will learn that that’s what it takes to get you to pick him/her up. If you let it go for an hour before picking him/her up, you’ll have the same problem. This only teaches your child that he/she needs to scream longer to get you to pick him/her up, and this pattern will continue. If you wait longer than about 15 minutes to pick up your child, you need to wait it out.

Now for the steps to sleep training your child. I’m including my own experience for reference purposes. Keep the keys in mind as you go through these steps, and always keep in mind your child’s needs before your own.

1. Your child needs to learn to go back to sleep on their own. For this reason, it’s best to start sleep training with night weaning instead of bedtime. Your child will find it easier to go back to sleep if they wake up when they should be sleeping to find themselves in a dark room and feeling extremely sleepy to begin with. Once they get the hang of this concept, it will be easier for them to learn how to go to sleep from being wide awake in the evening.

Experience: At the time, my Rachel would go to bed at 7:30 and wake up at 1, 3, and 5 for mid-night feedings, before waking up at 6:30 for the day. We decided to start sleep training around 7 or 8 months mainly because I just wasn’t getting enough sleep due to waking up 3 times a night. We first took out the 3 am feeding, then the 1 am feeding, then the 5 am feeding (we did this one last because since the day she was born she woke up at 5 to eat, so we felt this would be the most difficult).

2. For night weaning, the best thing to do is just leave your child to go back to sleep on his/her own. This will be HARD! The first night it might take an hour, the second maybe half, but after a few days your baby will figure it out and thereon only grumble a little bit before rolling over to go to sleep. Remember that your child needs your love! For the first few nights it is fine to comfort your child, but try not to take him/her out of the crib. Pat his/her back, hum softly, declare your love, but whatever you do DO NOT FEED YOUR CHILD! This will defeat the purpose.

Experience: This was difficult for us as parents because we shared a room with our daughter, and listening to her cry for an hour some nights was not easy on our emotions or our sleep. One night in particular she just could not go back to sleep. After a while of her crying, we took turns rocking, cuddling, and singing to her. In this way we were able to get her back to sleep without feeding her, and she didn’t end up just crying all night, which at the time seemed inevitable. It’s important to use your parenting intuition in cases like this, and remember that YOU decide what your child needs and when. If a book tells you to let her scream for 2 hours, but you feel like that is just out of the question, then don’t do it. The most important thing is to love your child and give him/her what he/she needs.

3. Give your child time to adjust between the removal of feedings. Waiting a week AFTER your child has successfully skipped a feeding will help the next transition go more smoothly.

Experience: We first removed the 3 am feeding, because we felt she could still be hungry at 1 and 5 am. After a good solid week of her sleeping straight through from 1 to 5, we decided to remove the 1 am feeding. We chose this one for the reason mentioned above, that she was very accustomed to the 5 am feeding, and also because I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Give at least a full week of good sleep to your child before removing another feeding, and only do one at a time.

4. Once your child is sleeping through the night you can move on to bedtime. Many books will tell you to sleep-train for bedtime and that full-night sleeping will follow, but I found it easier to TEACH the child to go back to sleep at a time when she was fully tired rather than trying to convince her of something I couldn’t explain. It’s best to have a good set routine surrounding bedtime that is somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes long. If it’s longer than that your child will have an easier time prolonging bedtime, or wanting to. A quick routine teaches them that hey, it’s time to go to sleep, so let’s do our thing so we can get there. It is VERY important to put your child to sleep at the same time every day, so you’ll need to adjust the start of your chosen routine accordingly. If you are still feeding your child right before bed, be sure that this is the FIRST step, not the last, in the routine, so that your child will learn to GO to sleep, not to be FED to sleep. This goes for either breastfeeding or bottlefeeding. It is also important to make sure that all, or at least most, of your decided routine are always present, so that your child understands what happens leading up to bedtime. Later, after your child has the whole “going to sleep” thing down, you can add or remove pieces without too much trouble. Again with bedtime, you need to put your child in bed and let him/her figure out how to fall asleep on his/her own. Even though you’ve done the training for night weanings, it still may be hard for your baby, so you may be in for another night or two of an hour of screaming. It is EXTREMELY helpful if you leave the room for this part, and even better if you can get to a place where you can’t hear your baby.

Experience: Rachel’s bedtime routine currently starts between 8:30 and 8:45 so that she can be in bed by 9. Each night she gets into her jammies, brushes her teeth, and reads scriptures and prays with her parents. On bath nights we start earlier so she can take a bath first. Sometimes we don’t time it right and she ends up with some playtime in between jammies and scriptures, but since the routine was established and followed for so long she still knows what to do at bedtime. After scriptures and prayers she gives Daddy hugs, then I rock her and sing a lullaby. I have found this to be extremely important for two reasons: 1) When we were night weaning her, we sang to her instead of feeding her. She found this very comforting, and we’ve incorporated it ever since. 2) Sometimes with so much play during the day, I don’t get a chance to snuggle with my baby very much. The time I have to rock her is probably more therapeutic for me than for her :D

5. Next is naptime. This is a little bit more difficult, because your child is usually WIDE awake right before naptime. Another complication is that many mothers sleep with their babies while nursing them, and this makes it difficult for both parties. I’m not saying this is bad to do! I’m just saying you have to learn WITH your baby to not do it anymore. I read a lot of things while I was nursing telling me to not nurse my baby to sleep because of all the later complications that would arise from this practice. I also read things telling me not to give my child a bottle or a binky until she was 6 weeks old, but that doesn’t mean I followed either piece of advice, and my child has turned out just fine. I am firmly of the belief that children are SMART and can learn whatever you need to teach them. So go ahead and nurse your baby to sleep. Doing so was essential and wonderful for me. But you have to stop for sleep training to work. It’s as simple as feeding your child and THEN putting him/her down to sleep. One thing that will help in this practice is timing your feedings. Don’t let them go over 5 minutes, and once you can get them down to 3 your child will adjust to staying awake while eating. The same practice works well for naptime as for bedtime: Put your child in the crib and let him/her cry it out for a bit until they figure out to go to sleep. Like I said, this will be harder for them than night/bedtime sleep training, so be patient, and go into another room where you can’t hear them if you have to.

Experience: Naps were hard for Rachel. I had to check on her and reassure her more often than with bedtime, but she eventually got it. Being upset before naptime did disrupt her sleep habits. Instead of sleeping for 2 hours, she would sometimes only sleep for 45 minutes. I always made sure that I rewarded her for GOING to sleep by getting her quickly when she woke up. After a while she adjusted back to sleeping for 2 hours, then for 3 when she downsized to one nap a day. Sometimes she still thinks she wants to wake up after only an hour, but I employ the same practice of letting her figure it out on her own, and she goes back to sleep for the full 3 hours each day. This has been a real blessing for me. Now that she is 20 months old, she LOVES and awaits naptime each day. A routine is also helpful for naptime. She eats lunch, then gets a new diaper, and then it’s naptime. She knows this, and sometimes she points me where to go. She always puts her head on my shoulder and rubs her eyes on her way to bed, and she falls asleep in minutes. Through sleep training she has learned to enjoy her sleep time, and when she has to miss a nap or go to bed late she makes sure she lets us know how upset she is.

So there you have it. That is sleep training in a nutshell. I know that “sleep training” has received a lot of negative connotations in some circles, so please don’t get the wrong idea here. I am a nurturing mother, not a strict disciplinarian, and I just don’t know a better way to describe how I’ve taught my daughter to sleep without calling it “sleep training”. My number one rule is to give your child what YOU as the mother feel he/she needs, so ALWAYS keep that in mind. If this system doesn’t work for you, find something that you feel good about and go for it. Just remember, sometimes you have to do hard things to teach your children. Also please remember that raising children is more work than a lot of people realize, and not because your children make it difficult. It’s more about learning and adjusting as a parent, and it’s a continuous process for you just as much, if not more so, than for your children. You have to be willing to make sacrifices and changes so that your child can have the best learning experiences early on, before it will be truly painful for them.