Hellobee Boards

We never sleep trained DD; we just figured she'd do it on her own at some point, and we tried to be patient while she figured it out. Right around 1 year she suddenly "got it" and started putting herself to sleep and sleeping through the night without any help from us.

I'd like to do the same thing with DS. Right now, we're just concentrating on good sleep hygeine since he is nowehere close to sleeping through the night. We are not a CIO family, so I'd rather wait it out and let him progress on his own schedule than the push the issue.

I think there are toooons of babies that don't need to be sleep trained but I would consider their parents to be lucky :). Sleep training to me is teaching your child how to sleep independently. If your child needs your help to get to sleep, stay asleep, and get consolidated sleep, then you will probably end up with an overtired and cranky child...and exhausted parents!

@Mrsdaredevil: that's the main aspect of it. when babies require an external force in order to fall asleep and stay asleep (rocking, nursing, etc), they are likely to wake up more often because they don't know how to put themselves to sleep when they wake up from a sleep cycle (45 minutes).

when a baby is rocked to sleep for instance, they might wake up after one sleep cycle and wonder where the heck they are! last thing they remembered, they were in mama's arms. but when a baby puts himself to sleep, he knows he was in his crib when he fell asleep, and that's where he woke up.

if you practice good sleep hygiene at a young age, you may very well not have to sleep train! we did everything wrong with charlie. we did a lot of things right with olive but still needed to sleep train. still because of the things we did right, she never really cried and was the easiest baby ever to sleep train. it has been life changing.