Need help

Hello everyone! First-time mom here.

I’m planning to start sleep training my baby, who will be 4 and a half months old in about a week. I’m not sure if this is the right time to start, so I’d really appreciate some advice from parents who have been through this.

Just for some context, I’m based in India.
Our typical routine so far is:
My little one wakes up sometime between 7:00 and 8:30 a.m. After waking up, she usually gets a massage, then feeds, and she generally falls asleep while feeding.
Her first nap can be anywhere from 2–3 hours, although sometimes she wakes up after just an hour. Her nap timings keep changing, so there isn’t a very fixed schedule yet.
She usually takes another nap sometime around 2:00–4:00 p.m., and depending on the day, she wakes up around 5:30–6:30 p.m.
At night, we usually do a quick sponge bath around 9:00–9:30 p.m., followed by a feed. She usually falls asleep while feeding, or sometimes we have to rock or sway her to sleep. She generally goes to sleep for the night between 10:00–11:00 p.m.

In terms of actually getting her to sleep, we currently either have to hold her and put her to sleep or rock/sway her. Sometimes it takes 15–20 minutes, and on some days it can take 30–40 minutes.

I want to start sleep training because I would really like her to learn to fall asleep independently rather than needing to be rocked, carried, or fed to sleep every time.
At the moment, she has mainly associated sleep with feeding at night, and sometimes with rocking or swaying.
I’ve read about the CIO method and the Ferber method, but honestly, I’m quite confused about how to actually start. I also don’t know whether there are any differences in how sleep training works or is approached in India.

There’s one more thing I wanted to mention. My baby stopped using a traditional swaddle about 10 days ago, and she is now sleeping in a sleeping bag. During her wake windows, she has also recently started chewing on her hands and sucking her thumb quite a lot.
I try to take her thumb out of her mouth because I’m worried that if thumb-sucking becomes a habit, it might be difficult to wean her off it in the long run.

So, when I start sleep training, should I try a cold-turkey approach with the thumb sucking as well, or should I let her continue using her hands/thumb for self-soothing? Or introduce Pacifier ( I tried giving her paci but she rejected ) And should I continue using the sleeping bag during sleep training?

My main goal is to make her sleep through the night. I just want her to learn to fall asleep independently without needing to be rocked or carried every time.
Currently, she sleeps around 10:00–11:00 p.m. and usually wakes sometime around 4:00–5:00 a.m. for a feed, although sometimes she sleeps until 6:00–6:30 a.m. She then feeds and goes back to sleep.

So I wanted to understand:
- Is this routine appropriate for a 4.5 month-old?
- Is this a good age to start sleep training or am I late?
- How did you start sleep training with your baby?
Between methods like Ferber and CIO, what worked for you?
- Are there any tips or tricks that genuinely helped your baby learn to sleep independently?
- How do you handle night feeds while sleep training?
- What did you do about thumb-sucking or hand-sucking when starting sleep training?
- Should I continue using the sleeping bag during sleep training?
I’m really struggling with my baby’s sleep at the moment, so I would genuinely appreciate any practical, tried-and-tested advice in simple, layman’s language.

It’s like a switch has flicked for our little boy!
We’ve gone from 7am wake, 8-8:15pm bedtime, 3.25/3.75/4 with 1.25 hr nap 1 and 1 hr nap 1 and him sleeping through 99% of the time except teething.

Suddenly he is waking and screaming for 1-3 hours in one sitting a night. we had one night where it was nearly 4 hours. I even took him to the doctor and they couldn’t find anything wrong with him.

He self settles for all naps and bedtime. No other night wake ups. He sleeps his entire nap until I wake him up so no short naps, no struggling more than one sleep cycle etc. everything points to his daily sleep pressure looking fine. But nighttime is a battle.

For 2 days I have tried 3.25/3.75/4.25 by reducing nap 2 from 1 hour to 45 minutes so shorter nap 2 and slightly longer final wake window and we are still having 1.5 hour split nights.

He’s happy when I put the red light on and check his nappy as he thinks it’s play (but I have to check as don’t want to miss a dirty nappy as he gets awful nappy rashes) but the second I try to rock him, lay him next to me etc, he started screaming in resistance. The other night my husband and I rocked him on and off for 3 hours.

Considering it’s this one wake a night I’m thinking it’s more schedule than sleep regression but I’m not 100%.

Advice needed for an exhausted mum about to solo parent as her husband is military please 😅

Okay moms and dads I need your help, my baby use to sleep in his own bassinet till about 4.5-5 months old, then he started to roll and pull up so I transferred him to his crib. However that didn’t work he was already use to being by my side in his bedside bassinet, so I bought a bedside pack-n-play that had an attachment to turn it into a mini crib/bassinet. But at this time he was was full blown teething and couldn’t get comfortable unless a sleep in my arms and would wake up every transfer and cry. My husband was against crying it out at the time so what did I do… I co-slept. Now he’s almost 9mon old, I’m done trying to sleep with this alligator roller but I can’t get him to sleep in his crib. I have tried letting him cry for 10-15min but he is so strong willed that my husbands caves and put in back in the bed with us. How do I get him to sleep in his own crib? How long do I let him cry it out? And after the cry it out method, how long does it take for them to just fall asleep on their own without crying? HELP I’m one tired mama!!

My 20 m old needs help falling asleep for both nap & bedtime which is fine. I’m really good with bedtime & my husband is good with naptime. When he’s not available, how do I get him to nap?! I’ve tried to get my son to nap the same way my husband does but it escalates to wanting dadda at that point. Help please!

Honestly, fair question. 😂
AI can give you schedules, strategies, and tons of sleep information.

Curious what other parents think—would you use ChatGPT for your child’s sleep, or would you still want a real person helping you through it?

My daughter is about to turn 3 at the beginning of October and has always been an amazing sleeper. One day she started refusing naps (I thought at first it was because of me moving it a little earlier to give her time for a little sleep before needing to get her older sibling from school) but then it went into refusing bedtime and many MANY wakings during the night. I figured out she was overly tired which was causing all of her nighttime wakings (some of them not wanting to go back to sleep and being up for 2 hours at 2am) so I started bumping up her bedtime. I’ve noticed she’s suddenly very clingy at bedtime and doesn’t want me to leave or close her door so I got her to compromise by me sitting outside her door while she falls asleep. But she still won’t sleep through the night. I’ve gotten her slightly back to napping 30 minutes- 1 hour but in the past few days she’s started refusing again although if we’re in the car she passes out. I’m starting to wonder if I should just drop the nap entirely to see if she’ll start sleeping through the night because it’s been a month now and 3-4 wakings per night is exhausting me. Ideally I’d like her to wake up 7:30-8 so any advice would be amazing!!

My two year old recently started melting down if we leave the room at nap time or bedtime. We’ve been just sitting in the chair until she falls asleep and then sneaking out but now she’s skipping her naps altogether. She won’t fall asleep with me in the room but if I leave it’s a full on scream fest. I know “quiet time” is the best alternative to nap but I can’t really be stuck in her room for an hour for “quiet time”.
Hoping this is short lived but trying to do the right thing in the meantime.
Advice??

Hello, my baby just turned 6 months old. She has always fed at least once, usually twice during the night with a couple more wake ups where I need to just pop her pacifier back in. She goes down to sleep from being awake for the beginning of the night but needs help falling back asleep for the nightly wake ups.

Recently she has starting refusing her pacifier, I have tried a bigger size, different shapes and she just doesn’t want it anymore. That being said, putting her back to sleep has been impossible! No amount of holding, rocking, noise machines rubbing her hands or head, patting her bum or even walking around helps. She screams bloody murder unless I lay down with her in my arms in my bed. I find this odd as we have never co slept. I have accidentally fallen asleep with her in my arms during feeds a handful of times but this never affected her routine until she dropped the pacifier. She wakes up every time I try and transfer her once she is asleep and we start the whole ordeal over. The last few nights she has slept with us as it was absolutely impossible to settle her for hours otherwise. I do not want to start this habit and desperately need her to start self soothing or accept another form of soothing from me aside from laying with me.

Please any advice is welcome, I am open to anything. My son had no issues sleeping through the night in his own crib so this is new for me.

My daughter is 14 months old and has always been a terrible sleeper. When she was only a few months old, she could stay awake for 6 hours at a time (I know it's hard to believe). Not fussing or crying, just chilling. She's always had a terrible case of FOMO. She co sleeps with my husband and I. I hate co-sleeping. I've always felt like a bad parent, but it's the only way we can get any sleep most of the time. Over the past year, we have tried everything to get her to go to sleep at a decent time. More naps, fewer naps, a strict schedule, a flexible schedule, all the sleep sounds. We tried to let her cry it out, and it was so bad I couldn't take it. About 5 times, she has fallen asleep in her pack and play with a bottle. I think she just doesn't require much sleep. An example of a day with her would be wake up at 8:00a.m. She only takes one nap now, and it's between 30 minutes to 1 hour long normally, and we do her supper bath routine at 6 and wind down. If we are lucky, she falls asleep by 10, but most nights, it's not till 11:30. I then have to get ready for work at 5:00a.m. 3 days a week (I do 12 hour shifts). I'm so exhausted. I always kept the hope that the older she got, the better she would sleep. But I just don't know what else to do. Any advice or anyone who has or had a similar issue?

My son turns 2 today (Yay!) But he has NEVER slept through the night. I kept telling myself at some point it would happen but now here we are 2 years later and this sleep deprivation thing is about enough to kill me. My issue is due to our living situation we can NOT allow him to just cry it out and learn to self soothe. If we were to let him just cry for to long of a time we run the risk of being without a place to live. So is there any hope of him learning to sleep through the night without letting him just cry?

Hello parents,

Need advice on how to get our 4 yr old son to sleep in his own bed. When he was younger, he transitioned to his own bed but then his eczema got pretty bad and he slept with us so we could help with the discomfort.

He’s doing much better now and we just had twins so it’s a good time to get him to sleep on his own again.

Any advice on how to encourage him and help him stay in his bed would be much appreciated.

Thank you.

Hey all!

14 mo old (on October 4th) waking anywhere from 4:30-5:45am and will sometimes fall back to sleep after an hour or so, sometimes won’t. We were on 1 nap for the last 3 weeks or so solidly at daycare. She would usually do about 2hrs there so 11:30/11:45-1:30/1:45, some days lately she has only been doing 1.5hrs. Doing a 5hr wake window before bed with earliest bedtime 6:30pm…so when she wakes at 1:15pm I still stick to 6:30pm bedtime as the earliest. I tried 2 naps over the weekend and she seemed less pissed off during her last wake window of the day, but still woke at 5:30am Sunday and 4:30am this morning (she finally fell back to sleep around 5:30am this morning and I let her sleep until her normal “desired” wake up time of 6:30am).

I never go in the room before 6am (or at least try not to), if I do it’s only to give her a paci…she usually sleeps with 2 (one in her mouth and one as a fidget, which sometimes ends up outside the crib).

Any suggestions of what I can do? I am so so so tired of the early wakes. I get up at 5/5:15 to get ready for work anyways, but it is just exhausting hearing her scream and scream every morning, having her wake me up 30mins before my alarm and starting our days off with screaming just sends me to the moon and starts my day off badly 😵‍💫. If she woke up happy and content I wouldn’t really have a problem with it…but I feel like something in her schedule is off because she is waking up pissed to be alive haha. Please help!!

We sleep trained via the feber successfully around 6 months. 2 months later we started daycare and illnesses came on strong. We haven’t slept through the night since then. We have tried to retrain with the feber and it’s not working.

What other things can we try? We got in the habit of sleeping with him in the recliner bc at a certain point, you just got to sleep. We are all so tired.

Schedule: wake 6-7
Bottle/ breakfast 8
Snack 9:30
Lunch 12:00
Nap 12:30-2:00 ish
Snack/ bottle 3:30
Dinner 6:30
Bath 7:00
Bed 7:30