My girl still wakes a couple of times a night and needs a boob plug to go back to sleep. She's nearly nine months now, and I don't think an unbroken night is in my near future. I used to feel worried about this and like you thought I might be doing her a disservice by not teaching her to 'self-settle' but I am now very much of the 'do what works, worry about so-called bad habits later'.

As long as my baby is happy, healthy and developing well I'm not going to try and change the way she sleeps. We have a wonderful bond, and she is a social, secure little girl and I wouldn't want to do anything that might interrupt this.

I went to a talk by Pinky McKay the other week and she is totally against controlled crying and has done a lot of research into it. She was talking about a recent large scale study on children's sleep habits which looked at three groups - babies who's parents did CC, babies left to cry themselves to sleep and babies who were comforted back to sleep. All these babies were over six months and woke at night. What they found was that although there was an initial difference made to the babies' sleeping, by 8 weeks after the study began, there was no difference in the sleeping habits between the three groups. So the CC and CIO group had gone back to waking up and the comforted group were still waking/sleeping the same amount.

So even if you do do CC you will have to keep doing it at intervals when your baby changes. Or after they get a cold or teeth start coming through or you move house...etc etc. I really don't see why cuddling to sleep is such a huge deal these days. It's natural, it's what babies like and it works.