Liz I work in the office 3 days a week and one day a week from home and DH is home with Flynn on the days I work. On the days I am home DH is doing his masters full time so is still pretty flexible. Flynn has always slept in his own cot but was in our room until 6-7 months. So I guess I am kind of in both camps then ?

Flynn wakes when he wants (anywhere between 6 and 7am) and has a morning and an afternoon sleep. But they can be anywhere from 1-2 hours (sometimes 3!) each and start when he's tired and end when he wakes up IYKWIM. He goes to bed (usually) around 8.30pm, but sometimes crashes earlier. The only thing that is super-routine is meal times. So DH and I pretty well both follow Flynn's lead and we can do that because we have the luxury of being at home with him.

We have ALWAYS done this with naps and he has always been easy to put to sleep - just tell him its bedtime/nap time and off he goes. But I gotta say we did go through a testing time with night waking. We tried patting him, rocking him, etc - all the gentle Pantley methods - but he would just get more worked up and we (I particularly, having to go to work) were getting really sleep deprived. So we tried the hard @rsed "controlled crying" method (for want of a better term) and literally within two nights it worked. He is just not a kid who likes you around when he is tired (I was actually reading his baby diary and I noted this characteristic in him when he was only 11 weeks old - while I never let him cry unattended as a little one he definately did NOT like me in there with him when he was trying to sleep and would actually cry until I left him alone).

So we have used a mix of gentle and hard @rsed approaches - probably because I am both SAHM and working mum