Sleep Training 101

Let me preface by saying naps were by far the hardest thing I've dealt with as a parent! Just like we teach our children how to ride a bike, read, or even eat, we must also teach them how to sleep. I believe night sleep will fall into place once you have a routine, but naps just never came easy for my little chica. There are a lot of sleep masters (AKA: doctors who have studied babies and sleep) out there, and they have some amazing answers. The two books I used to help get me started on sleep training were:

• SOLVE YOUR CHILD’S SLEEP PROBLEMS by RICHARD FERBER
  (this guy is not as bad as you think, he just has a bad rap)
• HEALTHY SLEEP HABITS, HAPPY CHILD by MARC WEISSBLTUH

When do I start my training?

I've heard, read, researched, and asked around, and the answer can range from 3-6 months. Anything after 6 months is going to be a hell of a lot harder. I started at exactly 3 months.

Looking back, I would have waited a little longer. I really think I jumped the gun on this one, and I think all the hard work I did was for nothing. I think 3.5 or 4 months is a good time to start.

My little chick didn't master naps until 5 months. She was just very inconsistent. Some days she would give me a 2-hour nap; other days she would give me 45 minutes and then wake up.

The bottom line is this: 45 minutes is NOT a good nap. It's just not. Baby should be taking at least an hour-long nap each time they're put down. In the beginning, this is hard because little babies can only take 30-40 minute naps before they wake up. Before 3 months, your little one isn't really capable of falling back to sleep on their own, so you can't expect them to do so.

Keep this in mind: some babies don't master the nap thing until they're 6 months old. This is due to their biological nap rhythms maturing slowly. HOWEVER, the sooner you start, the easier it's going to be to get them to nap when their bodies are ready. That being said, if you wait until 6 months to sleep train, then your baby is going to have a much harder time working through it.

My Guy, Mr. Ferber

Okay, okay, so Ferber gets a really bad rap, but actually he's a pretty brilliant man. "Ferberizing" your child isn't as bad as you think. Here's his totally sensible theory about why we should put baby to sleep awake:

It's important to know that when we sleep, our bodies go through sleep cycles. We move from REM sleep to active sleep, yadda yadda... So when you lay your baby down for a nap, they're going to wake up somewhere between 35-50 minutes. Adults do it too, but our cycles are a little longer—between 90-110 minutes.

When you're sleeping, I'm sure you don't even realize that you're moving through these sleep cycles where you actually wake 4-6 times a night. Since we're pros at sleeping, we just wake, check our surroundings, and fall right back to sleep. Most times, if things are the way they were when we fell asleep, we don't even remember waking in the night. It might just be a quick adjustment of your pillow or a roll to your other side.

Now Ferber describes it like this: Imagine you go to sleep with your big fluffy pillow, and 90 minutes later you wake from your sleep cycle to find your pillow is gone. Of course, you're going to think, "Who the hell stole my pillow!" You check the floor and find that your husband has taken it. Back to sleep you go... 90 minutes later you wake again to find your special pillow gone again. Of course, you can't fall back to sleep. You need your pillow!

Now, let's take this fun analogy a little bit further. Let's say you fall asleep and wake after your first sleep cycle to find that you're no longer in your bed, but in your front yard! Do you really think you're going to fall back to sleep at that point? Of course not! "Call the police—someone has kidnapped me!"

So let's think about this from baby's perspective. You rock, cuddle, and shush your little one for 20 minutes until they fall asleep. You transfer them to the crib, fast asleep. What do you think that baby is going to do when they wake up? They're no longer being rocked in your arms, cuddled, or shushed. I can promise you, they're going to cry – A LOT! Just like you would if someone moved your ass to the front yard!

Your child wakes up a lot more than you do in the night. The scene they find when they wake up needs to be IDENTICAL to the one they saw when they fell asleep.

Why it’s Muy Importante to Put Baby Down Awake but Groggy.

The above analogy is why it's so important to put baby down awake. Then when baby moves to the next sleep cycle, things will be exactly as they were when they fell asleep. It's a lot easier moving from one cycle to the next if things are how they should be in baby's mind.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't have a routine before naps as well (it's a really good idea to have a nap routine), where you might rock baby a little or cuddle baby a little, but you should have baby down in that crib before they fall asleep.

When to Nap and Where to Nap

1-4 months: Baby will most likely take 4 naps a day at this time:

• Morning Nap
• Late Morning Nap
• Afternoon Nap
• Early Evening Cat Nap

4-6(7) months: Baby will take 3 naps a day, dropping the late morning nap:

• Morning Nap
• Afternoon Nap
• Evening Cat Nap

6(8)-15(18) months: Cat nap gets dropped and baby will have two naps:

• Morning Nap
• Afternoon Nap

The longer your kiddo naps, the easier it is to drop naps. I was able to drop the cat nap at 6 months because my baby was killing her first two naps. She would crank out a 2-hour nap in the morning, which would push her afternoon awake time longer.

So I would put her down for a later afternoon nap, where she would take another 2 hours. At this point there was no need for a catnap. She began rocking these naps because I TRAINED her to rock her naps.

The Training, Oh God, the Training

I'm sweating bullets thinking about the backlash that could come from me writing about the lengths I took to sleep train my baby for naps.

LET ME BE VERY CLEAR: If you don't want to follow these methods, then find what you're comfortable with. I tried SO many things, and now I have a REALLY well-rested, happy baby.

I needed it for my sanity, so I was willing to work at getting her to be a good sleeper. I cried a lot, and some days I quit and just picked her up and squeezed her. I don't judge (okay, maybe I judge a little), so please keep your judgments to yourself.

Possible Methods to Use during Training:

• Cry it out
• Check and Console
• Extinction
• Graduated Extinction (Pretty much the same as check and console)
• Pick Up/Put Down (This is just stupid if you ask me, but I want you to know about it)

Cry it out

This is where you go in and check on baby after increasing intervals. You can go in and put your hand on baby, shush baby, or use your voice to calm baby down, but you're only to stay for less than a minute. You're only going in to let baby know you haven't abandoned them.

You have to remain consistent when using CIO. If you're not willing to do this, then don't use this method. Its success is based on consistency. I promise you, if you don't follow it the correct way, then you'll be miserable a lot longer than you need to be. CIO does not mean putting your baby in the crib and leaving them until the nap is over.

• First Day: 3 min (1st wait); 5 min (2nd wait); 10 min (3rd wait); 10 min (subsequent waits)
• Second Day: 5 min; 10 min; 12 min; 12 min (subsequent waits)
• Third Day: 10 min; 12 min; 15 min; 15 min (subsequent waits)
• Fourth Day: 12 min; 15 min; 17 min; 17 min (subsequent waits)
• Fifth Day: 15 min; 17 min; 20 min; 20 min (subsequent waits)
• Sixth Day: 17 min; 20 min; 25 min; 25 min (subsequent waits)
• Seventh Day: 20 min; 25 min; 30 min; 30 min (subsequent waits)

**You can do a little tweak and start with 1 min, 3 min, 5 min, then 5 min subsequent waits on day 1. Then on Day 2, you would do 3, 5, 10, 10, etc. You'll be shocked at how long 3 minutes can feel when your baby is screaming at the top of their lungs.

I tried all of these methods, and this one was up there as one of the worst. Anyone who's going to judge someone for letting their baby cry it out is an asshole. This is NOT easy for any parent.

This method can be used for night sleep, but for naps you'll go ahead and call the nap a wash after 30 minutes of crying and try again at a later time.

The biggest issue with Ferber's method is that you have to do it the right way, or it will FAIL. Then you'll spend heartbreaking hours of your life to find that it doesn't work. I failed at this method because I wasn't consistent. Here's the problem: when I would go in after the wait time, I would stay too long because I couldn't stand seeing her trying to catch her breath as she cried. I would pick her up or stay too long to try and help her back to sleep. I even had a timer on my phone and would go in too early. I just didn't do it the way Mr. Ferber intended.

Pick Up/Put Down (the no-cry method)

This method comes from TRACEY HOGG, THE BABY WHISPERER. I cannot believe that I actually tried this method.

So, what you do is when baby cries, you go into their room right away, and you first try to put your hand on their belly or back to let them know you are there. You can shhh or pat them too. If baby stops crying then you can leave the room. If baby doesn’t stop crying, then you can pick them up, BUT as soon as baby stops you need to lay them down RIGHT AWAY.

If they cry again, even 30 seconds later, you are to pick them up again, and put them down as soon as they stop crying. You are not trying to get them to fall back to sleep on you, but you are just comforting them. Eventually baby falls asleep, and learns to sleep on his own.

I CAN’T BELIEVE I ACTUALLY DID THIS FOR A WEEK! Screw working out, I was lifting a 13 pound baby(my baby is large) every 30 seconds! I was actually sore after doing this method, because I was leaning over the crib to console, shhhh, pat. I was picking baby up and putting baby down!

Extinction

You put baby in the crib and you don’t come back.

For naps, you set the clock for 60 minutes, and baby is to stay in there for that long. If they wake up at 45 minutes, then they will cry for 15 min. If they wake up at 59 minutes then they will cry for 1 minute. You get the idea.

In some cases baby will cry for 45 minutes, then continue to cry for another 15, and then fall asleep for another hour. YAY! Baby just got an amazing hour and 45 minute nap, and only 15 minutes of crying.

I know, I know the thought of this sounds horrific! Seriously, if my baby had an issue with sleeping at night, I don’t think I could let her cry and not go in for over an hour. I did however use this for NAPS. It was my last resort, and I wish it hadn’t been. I put myself, my husband, and my little gal through hell, before finally trying this. THIS IS WHAT WORKED! I should have done this first starting at 4 months instead of 3 months.

I did this for 2 weeks, and some days she cried A LOT, but other days during those two weeks, she cried for a few minutes and then fell back to sleep. Now she is a rock star napper! She still wakes at times after 45 min (the first sleep cycle), and rolls around, sometimes whines or cries, but its always less than 5 minutes, and she falls right back to sleep.

Conclusion

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, nap training sucks while you're in the thick of it.

There were days I questioned everything and felt like the worst mom in the world. But looking back now, with a toddler who still takes amazing 2-hour naps, I can honestly say it was one of the best things I did for our family.

Not just because I got my sanity back (though that was huge), but because my daughter learned such an important life skill.

Good sleep habits don't just happen, they're taught. So if you're reading this at 2 AM after another failed nap attempt, know that you're not alone and you're not failing. Every parent who's been through this has felt exactly how you're feeling right now. Keep going, your breakthrough is probably closer than you think.

Related: Interview With A Sleep Consultant