Sleeping through the night

[Anna]

Help! My son is over a year and still not sleeping through the night. He wakes up a couple of times still. We aren’t giving him bottles and he goes right back to sleep, but I want him to sleep straight through. Any tips from you experienced moms out there?

[Katherine]

From other boards I know this can be a sticky subject, but we did the Ferber Method of controlled crying/sleep training and it worked really well for us. Cry-it-out is not an accurate description. I checked out a book on it from the library. Basically we would go in to his room after 3 minutes of crying to lightly soothe (no picking up, no nursing or bottles, but saying gently to go back to sleep). Then wait 5 minutes and go back in and repeat. Then 10 minutes, then 15 minutes, etc. After an hour of no sleeping, we would accept that he was up for good, but that only happened for us on nap times, not in the middle of the night.

We started sleep training early, at 3 months, so I'm sure it's different with a one-year-old, but the principle is the same. Now when my son wakes up in the middle of the night (he's 18 months) he may cry briefly but he knows how to fall back asleep on his own. We don't go in EVER now in the middle of the night (except under extreme conditions, like an illness). My dad did once when he was babysitting and it threw my son off for a few days.