Hellobee Boards

Sleep training in general is used to get you towards your ideal. The swing isn't a long term solution. I would recommend figuring out what you want sleep to look like 6+ months from now (location, routine, etc) and sleep training for that. They say to do nighttime because naps usually just follow suit without having to train once you establish those routines / cues. With that said, consistency is key and it sounds like his night and nap sleep environments are very different. My concern would be that you would go through the process of sleep training and in essence have to completely start over when you decide to stop co-sleeping or your child grows out of the swing. I sleep trained my son and while it was 100% worth it, it wasn't a delightful process. I would try to minimize the amount of different iterations I had to go through, personally.

I think it's a little confusing because when you say "sleep training," people generally take that to mean removing sleep crutches with the goal of getting your child to sleep independently. Nursing to sleep and a swing (and rocking to sleep, etc) are all essentially sleep crutches, so by switching to the swing you are just "trading down" sleep crutches. Once he grows out of the swing or it stops working, then you will have to re-train. When we sleep trained, the goal was to set up good sleep habits including falling asleep independently. The other things like longer naps and STTN will follow, but in my opinion/experience, when you get those things without good sleep habits in place first, they don't tend to last.

Re: the swing training method, I've heard of that used for kids who can't get to sleep at all without motion. If you aren't already there (that is, if he will fall asleep without motion) I wouldn't go down that road; just something else you will have to undo later.

Finally, I do think crap naps at this age are par for the course for many kids. We sleep trained my son at 4 months and his naps still didn't lengthen out until he was solidly on two naps -- but, we also weren't spending a ton of time trying to get him down so I was okay with it.

@MsBAM: I can get LO to sleep in his crib all night if I want to (in between feeds I mean). I think the theory is that however they start the night, they will be easier to settle that way for the rest of the night. So I guess it could potentially cause an issue later on depending on your LOs temperament but at least in my case I'm just usually too tired to get up for night feeds so I'm kind of leaving that problem for later