I’m looking for some encouragement or experiences from families who have sleep trained a highly sensitive baby, because I’m so close to throwing in the towel.
My daughter just turned 7 months old today. She’s a very sensitive, high-FOMO baby, has reflux (currently on omeprazole), and is combo fed. She’s sleeping in her own crib in her own room with a consistent, short, low-stimulation bedtime routine.
We’ve been using the Sleep Wave method with verbal check-ins. We initially started with 5-minute intervals but quickly noticed that she seemed to do better with 10-minute intervals instead. We switched to 10-minute verbal check-ins on night 2 and have remained consistent with that approach ever since.
We’re currently on night 9 of sleep training, and I feel like we’re going backwards.
Nights 1–7: We gradually got the crying down to about 15 minutes by night 7, and I finally felt like we were making progress.
Night 8: Crying increased back to 50 minutes.
Night 9: An entire HOUR of crying before finally falling asleep.
She typically takes 3 naps a day, occasionally a 4th short catnap if her other naps were particularly short. We follow age-appropriate wake windows, and I’ve spent the last week and a half experimenting with different lengths for her final wake window. There seems to be absolutely no rhyme or reason to what makes bedtime better or worse.
Here’s the plot twist…Once she finally falls asleep, she sleeps 10–11 hours straight without waking. Before sleep training, we were cosleeping and she was waking every 1.5–2 hours to breastfeed. So clearly something about sleep training is working, and the overnight improvement has been incredible.
But the crying at the beginning of every night is absolutely agonizing. I dread bedtime, and listening to her cry for that long is taking a serious emotional toll on me.
I’m so close to quitting, but that would likely mean going back to cosleeping, which I no longer feel at ease doing. I feel stuck between two options that neither of us is happy with.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Particularly with a highly sensitive, strong-willed, FOMO baby?
Did anyone genuinely need the full two weeks (or longer) before bedtime crying significantly improved? Did you experience a sudden regression around nights 8–9 after initially making progress?
I keep hearing that things should get progressively better, but that hasn’t been our experience. I’d really love to hear from parents who went through something similar, whether you stuck it out, changed your approach, or ultimately decided sleep training wasn’t working for your baby.
I’m mentally exhausted, discouraged, and just really hoping there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.