Tips for night sleep "training"

My DS 7 months is not the best of night sleepers. I'm not stressed by this as his older brother was a terrible, terrible sleeper. He well and truly broke me in for his brother. With DS1 I just went with the flow as I knew that he would get there in his own time (and he eventually did, and then stopped, and then is hopefully on the road back!!).

But I think that DS2 is a bit different. He is a good sleeper in the day time (as opposed to his brother) and settles reasonably easily when I rock him to sleep.

DS2 has never slept through the night, waking anywhere from once to 4 times overnight. He's never upset, just roaming around his cot awake and up for a bit of a chat. However if he is awake then I'm awake! He is formula fed and has one or two bottles overnight. Quite often he's not really asking for one (particularly if it's a second bottle), but I'll give him one as it helps him to get back to sleep.

I think a bit of work on my behalf would really improve his sleeping at night time. However I'm not really sure where to start. We never bothered with DS1 as he was a lost cause!

I'm open to anything from the gentle end of parenting to CIO and controlled crying, as I know that different things work for different babies. I'm interested to hear if people have gone down this path and what methods they used. Also any success stories would be lovely but honesty is also good.

Fiona

Our decision was to try settling without feeding, so not taking them out of the cot at all but patting, shhhing and then leaving the room. I went to a sleep school and got a few ideas of what to do and it was around 8 mths that I was comfortable that they weren't hungry and didn't really need the feeds over night. With both it literally took one night before they were sleeping for longer stretches. With DS he was waking 1 -2 hourly (never longer than 2 hours) when I reached breaking point! Sounds like your DS is a good sleeper so it may not take much other than you going in, repeating whatever your night time routine is, rocking or patting etc. for a few minutes and leaving the room. We did let our kids cry for a bit -and they were never hysterical but that was our choice. For both kids it took about one hour for them to realise they were not going to get boob and they went back to sleep with DH and I going in to resettle every 5 mins or so. Sometimes we sat next to the cot other times we left.

After that both of mine slept for longer stretches and for us the aim was at least to get to a minimum of 4-5 hour blocks rather than a few hour which happened very very quickly. DS was still waking once for boob at around 4am at 17 mths but over that year he was sleeping for much longer stretches. Not sure if that really helps or not - it is a bit of a guess as to what might work - I don't know what we would have done if it took a week or 2 of them crying - it was literally one night. Good luck hun xoxo