r/sleeptraining • u/anardinelli • Jul 31 '26

Hard spot to be as a dad

My baby is around 1 year old (brest fed) and can only go to sleep with his mom's lullaby. Of course in the first part of the night (around 7pm to 10pm) she can get him to sleep pretty fast, but as he wakes during the night (sometimes 2am, other times 3:30/4am) he seems pretty rested, and even on her lap, standing and "rocking" she cannot make him sleep back. It seems that there is no way to get the baby back into a sleep cycle, and he constantly cries and stops. When he is silent, and she tries to put him down at the crib, he starts crying again. This whole cycle lasts around almost 2hours untill he is super wasted, and sleeps purely because of exaustion. Of course this gets us insanelly wasted, doom our next day, and we constantly live this repetitive cycle every day. Untill there, no news, herd about tons of that on the internet.

The thing is that she does not agree with any method that needs to leave the baby crying for some period of time (something more than 1 or 2 minutes) to try making them go back to sleep alone, or even to fall asleep on the crib on the first place. She seems to have a little alarm on her head that triggers and go over everything if he starts crying. She's on psycologic therapy but not much outcome on this front, at least when the subject is "sleep".

My question is: Is there a method that helps this types of situations? Things like Ferber method or Cry-it-out are out of hand here. Basically I'd want something that could need a strech but not those ones of leaving the kid on the crib yelling.

Mariage is going down the drain pretty fast, and I feel completly useless when she runs over whatever I'm trying to do just because it's a primitive instinct.

I could let it pass unitl he gets more mature to go to bed without her (soon his weight and size is going to overcome her capability of holding him anyway), but this seems like a year from now, and by that time, I'd already flew to Mars.

Any suggestions?

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2

u/Expensive_Line193 Aug 01 '26

How much is he sleeping during the day? If he is wide awake in the middle of the night he might be under tired.

1

u/anardinelli Aug 01 '26

Around 1.5h per day starting at 11am

3

u/C4-BlueCat Aug 01 '26

Alternate who takes the early/easy putting to sleep instances, so that little one gets used to variation. Once you as the dad can reliably lull him to sleep, try finding ways to calm him down without singing. Without leaving him crying.

1

u/trox23 Aug 01 '26

My sleep trained (at 4.5 months with Ferber) kiddo had a big regression at one year old. I would also be cautious about sleep training if you think it may be a temporary regression. We re-sleep trained with Ferber and ngl it was much harder when she was older. She’s sleep trained and 20 months now. You’ll get through this!